Dead Can Dance 2012 Tour

5 more days and will be seeing DcD in Budapest Hungary. Really, I wish I was up to snuff on the music, but it is not the first time I actually became a bigger fan post concert (ie...Mastadon...). Let you all know how it goes.

DcD, well I saw them. Beautiful music, no doubt but was not overly impressed. Not saying they did not put on great performance, but it seemed like the He vs She show. One song him, than one song her. 4 encores, really? I dont know, just ok in my books.

It’s just passed 11.00pm Sunday night Feb 3rd 2013 and I have returned home from seeing Dead Can Dance performing Anastasis at the Sydney Opera House in front of 2600 people.

The concert began on time without introduction or small talk….with six performers on stage including one drummer and another percussionist as well as two synthesisers.
During the evening, sometimes three synthesisers were employed.
Two banks of speakers hung from the ceiling whilst another two banks of speakers sat on either side of the stage, facing the performers and not the audience.
These were not the standard floor-box speakers often required for the performers to ‘hear’ themselves……but were twelve foot high ‘monsters’ capable of filling the hall with sound?

I was centre stage in the tenth row of stalls and initially I was transfixed at how identical the sound mix matched what I heard on the vinyl release in my living room?
Every nuance was exactly as I knew it….the balance was identical…the ‘mix’ was identical…..the re-verb on the voices….the shimmer of the cymbals…..the depth of the synth-created bass notes.
But what really shook me was the ‘timing’?
The ‘timing’ of every track from Anastasis was a ‘clone’ of the album.
This is normally just not possible in my experience….as small ‘timing’ variations are simply a fact of life from performance to performance.

I was rolling my head and tapping my feet in exact syncopation with (and anticipation of) the musical ‘beat’….just as I do from my listening chair at home.

“How good is my system”….I thought to myself?
This is the closest I have ever come to accepting that I was finally re-creating the ‘live’ sound in my own home?
Strangely though….when they performed a track from their earlier album ‘Into The Labyrinth’….the mix, the balance and the timing were entirely different…and poorer than….the recording I have?

By the first encore….I was becoming uneasy.
Lisa Gerrard was singing back-up into a mike at stage front and then stepping back whilst Brendan Perry sang the lead. Strangely…..as she played the zills (finger cymbals)…..there was no mike when she stepped back, yet they sounded crystal clear and floated effortlessly over the dense instrumental melange filling the hall?
I then watched the drummer and percussionist…and couldn’t really hear their contribution apart from the shimmering cymbals. Yet the shimmering cymbals began either before the percussionist brushed them…or after?….and the under 30 Hz dominant throb was certainly not being produced by the drum?

For the final of three encores….a solo from Lisa….I carefully watched only her lips….and gasped at the subtle (yet visible) slip betwixt sight and sound?

As I walked from the Concert Hall amongst the adoring throng….I felt sickened at the realisation that we had all just paid to gather together to listen to a ‘recording’?

I would have thought DCD would have attracted more than just 2600. Maybe Lisa had laryngitis....??

:-)

Argh, your report leaves me queasy and disgruntled. The accelerating dissolution of the divide between performance reality and fiction continues to erode musical culture. I've seen a number of polls lately asking the public how they feel about this lip-sync phenomenon and ever larger numbers seem to feel it makes no difference. As a culture, we first lost the ability to tolerate physical imperfections in the appearance of media stars, expecting every image to be Photoshop perfection. Now, the same hyper-real expectations seem to be poisoning our ability to tolerate the glitches of live musical performance.