Two gigs and a lecture

As it turned out, we had quite a few evening engagements while Steph's aunts were staying, so we had to leave them to their own devices on some evenings.

Firstly, we saw Elbow play at St. Andrew's-Wesley Church in Downtown. We missed it when Sufjan Stevens played there, and we were determined to catch another gig at such an interesting venue. They made us stand outside in a huge line for a good hour, which was annoying. Technical problems apparently. The church was lovely inside, and everyone sat on the pews to watch the music - a strange atmosphere for sure. I expected the acoustics of a church to be great, but to be honest they tended to over-exaggerate the low-end and make it hard to make out voices and such. The support band that came on first - Air Traffic - had this problem in spades. Their sound mix was all bass and no vocals, so it was impossible to hear any lyrics apart from on the occasional quiet track. They weren't bad though. Elbow themselves had much better sound balance, and performed a great set. They were pretty chuffed to be playing in a church, and mentioned it several times. The lead singer was quite chatty, and had a bunch of interesting little stories to tell between songs. He also got us singing along to a couple of songs too. I enjoyed it very much (I am the Elbow fan really) but Steph also liked it a lot.

The night after the Elbow gig, we went to see a guy called Syd Mead talk about his work. He calls himself a "visual futurist" and worked as a concept artist on a bunch of big movies such as Blade Runner, Aliens and TRON. The lecture was a weird format - he launched into a series of slides showing pictures he had created, and then talked about the background for each one. For a couple of hours - that was it. He was very confident and full of himself, but interesting to listen to all the same. The thing I liked best was how he often thought up elaborate scenarios behind each of his pictures, so that it all made some sort of logical sense to him. He mentioned several times that good fantasy was all about taking something that people know and recognize, and then combining it with something strange and unfamiliar. As a science-fiction fan, I really enjoyed hearing about the crazy worlds he invented in his head for each picture.

Lastly, we saw another gig at the Commodore Ballroom - KT Tunstall was playing again. Last time, we saw her at Richards on Richards which is a really small, intimate venue and it was great. This time the venue was larger, and so was the band - five of them this time. The extra band members meant more elaborate versions of the songs with extra vocals and so on which were different from the album versions and interesting to hear. She also has two albums of music to draw from now for her gigs, so there was more variety. She was chatty between songs, and the whole band seemed to be enjoying themselves which is always nice to see. Her singing was awesome as ever - she really does have a knockout voice. I liked the quiet numbers best of course, especially "Paper Aeroplane" which was beautiful, and an epic version of "Beauty of Uncertainty". Lovely.