Tag Archive: Verona


SIGUR RÓS: HOT UNDER THE STARS

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July 27, 2013

SIGUR RÓS live at Castello Estense – Ferrara Sotto le Stelle – July 26th 2013

Jonsì may not have been anticipating a heatwave but he is a man who is prepared for all weather conditions.

Jónsi may not have been anticipating a heatwave but he is a man who is prepared for all weather conditions.

On the drive to this show my dashboard display showed the temperatures on the motorway  to be around 35°C.  It was just as sweltering in the city centre for the closing concert of the Ferrara Sotto Le Stelle season.

Italians are usually in their element in hot weather but being packed into the outdoor concert venue in such conditions, even they looked sweaty and uncomfortable.  The impressive Castello Estense  makes for a magical setting for this most magical of groups but there is no escaping the fact that tonight it is fucking hot!

Jónsi and band were not brought up playing in heatwaves. On stage, sprays of cool mist help them survive the climatic challenge while we punters have to literally sweat it out for two hours. It is more than worth the minor discomfort for the privilege of seeing and hearing music as majestic and entrancing as theirs. Continue reading →

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HOOKED ON ALT-J

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September 8, 2012
Triangles are my favourite shapes

Alt-J’s triangular logo

I arrived at the venue too late to catch Alt-J‘s appearance at Verona for the A Perfect Day Festival last week but my daughter saw them and has been playing their stuff ever since. She’s got me hooked.

Theirs is a curious hybrid sound that sounds like a lot of vaguely familiar things but is also quite original.

The four man band met at Leeds University and, according to their Facebook profile, currently concoct what they call ‘folk-step’ from a basement flat somewhere in Cambridge. Continue reading →

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THE BLUES HAD A BABY …..

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September 4, 2012
baby rock

A new generation of rock?

Two bands who supported Sigur Rós at A Perfect Day Festival in Verona were prime examples of Rock and Roll as :

(a) an outmoded genre that survives only as a parody of itself.

(b) a vibrant musical force which still has the power to excite and inspire.

In the (a) corner were dEUS, a Belgian Indie band who were almost big in the 1990s and who are still plugging away trying to sound edgy by mixing in some rap and disco into the standard R’n’R formula.

On stage there is plenty of what The Fall’s Mark E Smith witheringly labelled as “false histrionics” and cries of “let’s do this”. Continue reading →

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SIGUR RÓS FACE THE FESTIVAL CIRCUS

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September 3, 2012
Sigur Ros Brooklyn

Sigur Ros as seen at Brooklyn July 31, 2012.

Sigur Rós were the headline band on the third and final day of A Perfect Day festival in the picturesque setting of Castello Scaligero, in Villafranca on the outskirts of Verona.

The forecast was for rain and possible thunderstorms but, miraculously, it stayed dry for us punters packed inside a fortress where a full moon seemed to have been specially ordered to add to the atmosphere.

It was the first time I’d seen the band live, although from twenty years of consuming recordings + DVDs and ,after seeing Jónsi during his solo tour, I felt I had a fair idea of what to expect.

It was good to be among an audience to pay collective tribute to this unique group who have produced some of the most astounding and moving music over the past two decades.  There’s no substitute for being at a concert and sharing the experience with other fans even if, nowadays, this means having to peer past a veritable sea of mobile phones and cameras held aloft as an obsessive digital-capture ritual.

Continue reading →

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A PERFECT DAY IN VERONA

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September 2, 2012

Sigur RosToday I am in Verona for the third and final day of A Perfect Day Festival at Castello Scaligero, Villafranca headlined by Sigur Rós.

To get in the mood I have been rewatching the specially commissioned videos as part of  ‘the Valtari mystery film experiment‘

Number 8 in this sequence is for the song Daudalogn. It was directed by Henry Jun Wah Lee and filmed in Yakushima, a remote island in southern Japan.

It contains stunning images drawn from the natural world. This is a more conventional visualisation of the Icelandic band’s spiritually uplifting music than most of the others in the series but no less memorable for all that.

The director writes :  “I chose this location both for its unique beauty and because the story of Yakushima was representative of the often fragile relationship between humans and nature. the giant trees on the island were once revered as sacred by locals. they lived for thousands of years but for the past 5 centuries they were logged to near extinction. the scarred landscape coupled with the dramatic way in which the forest has recovered made for a picturesque and magical atmosphere”.

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