Owen Pallett @ Botanique, Brussels 23/03

Besides the evil removal of my blog I also experienced something wonderful yesterday.
I had the honour to see the a concert of the Canadian genius Owen Pallett.
You might know Owen Pallett as Final Fantasy. And If you don't know him from FF you may know him as the guy who arranged the magnificent strings of Arcade Fire.
If you don't know Arcade Fire, please leave my blog,...no please stay and read on I mean.

Anyhow Since he transformed in Owen Pallett, he released his masterpiece/album Heartland in January 2010. So this concert was part of his Heartland-tour.

But as the tradition wants, there was a warm-up act. And as the tradition requests, the warm-up act sucked BIG TIME. (However, when I went to Beach House, the warm-up was Lawrence Arabia, a great musician!)
Anyhow this time it was a Norwegian "progressive and super-violent" heavy-electronic/metal band called Next Life.
It was certainly one of the worst performances I've ever seen. Thank God I had those ear protectors with me!
The keyboard-player had very long hair, which were hanging before his eyes while he was freaking out and the guitarist was a kind of Azian kid. He looked a bit like the freak who shot all those students at Virginia Tech some years ago.
Anyhow, this was probably the worst combination of all times, cause Owen's music is not violent at all!


So when that horrible noise (calling it music would be an insult) was over, it was Fantasy-time!

He came on the stage before his gig started, to make sure his violin and keyboard were ready, but strangely, nobody clapped their hands or freaked out. It was as if no one knew how Owen really looked like.

Anyhow when everything was ready, the lights went down and he went on the stage encouraged by the enthusiastic public.
Unlike most of the concert's I've seen this year he went solo (in the beginning). He, his violin, a keyboard and a sampler.
And my dear readers, it is absolutely unbelievable how Owen handles his sampler. If you're not familiar with it => wikipedia definition
He didn't need the National Czech Orchestra to support him on stage (they delivered the music on Heartland) but we can crown Owen as the king of sampling!

Besides the sampling there are two things he can do even better: playing his violin,
not only with his bow, but also with his hands, pulling and bouncing on the snares and also on the wood of his violin. And of course singing!
A true virtuoso.

So he played a few of his songs of Heartland and his last (and best) album as Final Fantasy, He Poos Clouds.
I really must apologize, cause I love all the songs on Heartland and the other albums but I just can't remember the name of the songs. They confuse me! I taught I heard like ten times Keep the Dog Quiet, but it was always a different song!

Anyhow after some songs his companion Thomas came on stage, a cool guy who played the bass guitar, sang a little bit and played the drums. He and Owen formed a nice duo. The funny dancing of Thomas was also quite amusing, but couldn't really distract me of Owen's amazing voice and violin.

One of my friends went to see him, Sunday in Lille, a city in the north of France, close to Belgium. He told me that the public there was quite rude and someone even threw a piece of paper against Owen's head.
So he was very happy with an enthusiastic public as we were. He even told us we were 'so sweet!' and that it has been way too long since he was in Belgium last time.
The public rewarded him with even more applause.
He also wasn't afraid to make some little jokes on the stage, I can only remember one, he was comparing the start of a song with the start of water skiing (ok, it was funny when he told it...).

Then it was time to create some intimacy, as mister Pallet said himself. So Thomas left the stage and our hero gave us some beautiful and out-of-the-world versions of some sings with extraordinary violin solos.

And the show wasn't yet at it's climax! It had to wait till Thomas came back.
They played a magnificent version of Many Lives -> 49 MP. To generate the weird sound of him screaming from far, he jelled in the micro on his violin, it looked as if he was screaming through his instrument, nice!
The song led us to an orgasm of sound, which gave about everyone goosebumps.

They ended the concert with my favourite song, Lewis takes off his shirt, also a brilliant performance.

The public went mad so Owen and Thomas, sweet as they are, came back for two more songs! The last one was a cover but I didn't recognize it.
After a deep bow and a long applause, their amazing gig finished.

I was totally overwhelmed by his talent and music-power and I returned home with a gigantic smile. Which was destroyed by Blogger an hour later...(When I discovered Blogger deleted by blog).