Röyksopp @ 9:30 Club, 3/23/2011
It started raining about twenty or thirty minutes before the doors were supposed to open, so they let us in ten minutes early and then herded us downstairs to the basement bar, like so many cattle. Let's just say the crowd crammed in there was, uh, definitely over the maximum posted capacity... Fortunately I was with winterspel, which automatically makes any experience ten times more appealing. :D
Crowd: diverse and enthusiastic! I was subconsciously expecting a bunch of monodemographical hipsters, so that was nice.
Opening act: Jon Hopkins. Opened the set with Light Through The Veins which drove me crazy for the rest of the set because I knew it but couldn't place it - thought maybe he was sampling Röyksopp, given the circumstances. But no, the song itself was sampled by... Coldplay. Anyway, the set was good but the sound wasn't great - bass so strong as to be almost distorted, and this coming from someone up on the balcony.
Röyksopp themselves: just as good a live act as good live as everyone says <-- this is an understatement. Setlist including both encores was roughly 1/4 Melody A.M., 1/4 Junior, 1/4 The Understanding, 1/4 unreleased/remix/cover/etc. (In other words, they aren't touring Senior, which I would've known if I'd bothered to read, say, the interviews with Svein Berge talking about how they didn't think it was live material either. aha.)
Anneli Drecker was there for vocals and she was a-ma-zing. Came out for What Else Is There in a black jumpsuit and this, like... Nite Owl helmet outlined in electric lights, and did a quasi- modern dance routine as well. Then Svein Berge put on his own robot helmet complete with built-in projector headlight and they dueted The Girl And The Robot. Then she did a Kate Bush cover. I wasn't kidding when I said amazing, see.
Meanwhile their tour bassist was... Torsten Frings, basically. Cut-off shorts, check, bare feet, check, wavy shoulder-length hair, check. He and tour guitarist started out the show with burlap bags over their heads à la Scarecrow; bassist took his off after the first number but guitarist kept his on until the end, whereupon he traded it in first for a Speed Racer helmet and then for a spacesuit with light-up collar.
Speaking of, the note for one of the above Flickr links said something along the lines of, I've never seen so many costume changes for a show at 9:30 Club. Thanks to the steady diet of Jpop I barely even noted the frequency, aha. It was the type that got me. robots and all. I'm forgetting some: both halves of Röyksopp had at one point helmets with giant electric blue insect eyes; Torbjørn Brundtland stole one of the burlap Scarecrow bags for himself; Anneli came up for the encore dressed as, like, a giant brain??? I don't even know.
Setlist:
Eple
So Easy
Remind Me
Sparks
Steve Reich - Electric Counterpoint: III. Fast (Röyksopp's Milde Salve)
Happy Up Here
Kings of Leon - The Immortals (Röyksopp Remix)
What Else Is There?
The Girl And The Robot
Have Another Cherry
Wuthering Heights (Kate Bush cover)
Alpha Male
Poor Leno <-- with actual cowbell
Fat Burner
Encore 1: Only This Moment
Encore 2: Tricky Tricky
Bonus video: Wuthering Heights from the Montreal show, because it was fabulous
Crowd: diverse and enthusiastic! I was subconsciously expecting a bunch of monodemographical hipsters, so that was nice.
Opening act: Jon Hopkins. Opened the set with Light Through The Veins which drove me crazy for the rest of the set because I knew it but couldn't place it - thought maybe he was sampling Röyksopp, given the circumstances. But no, the song itself was sampled by... Coldplay. Anyway, the set was good but the sound wasn't great - bass so strong as to be almost distorted, and this coming from someone up on the balcony.
Röyksopp themselves: just as good a live act as good live as everyone says <-- this is an understatement. Setlist including both encores was roughly 1/4 Melody A.M., 1/4 Junior, 1/4 The Understanding, 1/4 unreleased/remix/cover/etc. (In other words, they aren't touring Senior, which I would've known if I'd bothered to read, say, the interviews with Svein Berge talking about how they didn't think it was live material either. aha.)
Anneli Drecker was there for vocals and she was a-ma-zing. Came out for What Else Is There in a black jumpsuit and this, like... Nite Owl helmet outlined in electric lights, and did a quasi- modern dance routine as well. Then Svein Berge put on his own robot helmet complete with built-in projector headlight and they dueted The Girl And The Robot. Then she did a Kate Bush cover. I wasn't kidding when I said amazing, see.
Meanwhile their tour bassist was... Torsten Frings, basically. Cut-off shorts, check, bare feet, check, wavy shoulder-length hair, check. He and tour guitarist started out the show with burlap bags over their heads à la Scarecrow; bassist took his off after the first number but guitarist kept his on until the end, whereupon he traded it in first for a Speed Racer helmet and then for a spacesuit with light-up collar.
Speaking of, the note for one of the above Flickr links said something along the lines of, I've never seen so many costume changes for a show at 9:30 Club. Thanks to the steady diet of Jpop I barely even noted the frequency, aha. It was the type that got me. robots and all. I'm forgetting some: both halves of Röyksopp had at one point helmets with giant electric blue insect eyes; Torbjørn Brundtland stole one of the burlap Scarecrow bags for himself; Anneli came up for the encore dressed as, like, a giant brain??? I don't even know.
Setlist:
Eple
So Easy
Remind Me
Sparks
Steve Reich - Electric Counterpoint: III. Fast (Röyksopp's Milde Salve)
Happy Up Here
Kings of Leon - The Immortals (Röyksopp Remix)
What Else Is There?
The Girl And The Robot
Have Another Cherry
Wuthering Heights (Kate Bush cover)
Alpha Male
Poor Leno <-- with actual cowbell
Fat Burner
Encore 1: Only This Moment
Encore 2: Tricky Tricky
Bonus video: Wuthering Heights from the Montreal show, because it was fabulous