Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto - Insen Tour Part 3

Second Insen Tour - Barcelona Sonar Concert

The second Insen Tour started at Casa da Musica in Porto continuing with eleven concerts throughout Europe. The final concert will be at the Roskilde Festival.

As i didn’t have a chance to make recordings of my work for documentary reasons on the first tour i asked my friend and office partner Martin Bott to join me on a trip to the Sonar Festival in Barcelona.

The concert in the evening was quite good. Actually there were two concerts and we went to the second one. I saw that some parts of the visuals had been altered. Instead of the warm red background color in “Berlin” they had cyan now. I don’t like cyan - it’s so 90s! The typography in “Uoon” had been changed to some shapes that reminded me of pigeons. I have been told the japanese symbols, that i had used before instead, had a random meaning which Ryuichi Sakamoto thought wasn’t appropriate. And they had different LED screens than on the first tour which behaved differently. The abstract keys in “Trioon” for example faded away much to fast now.

After the concert Martin and i went backstage where they filmed for the Insen DVD. People like Toshio Iwai handshaking and congratulating Ryuichi and Carsten. I stood three meters away just watching. (On the DVD you can see me (the one with the cap) in just two frames of the film drinking a beer in the background, Martin standing next to me :). I made a screenshot of it which can be seen in the photogallery at the top. It’s image no. 12.

When i was back in Frankfurt Carsten, Forma and i came to the agreement, that my name would be mentioned on all future publications and that i get some money for the second and the third tour. Except that Carsten insisted on having done the “visual concept” (it was rather stage design - i didn’t get any instructions on the visuals), i was content with the contract.

The label said i couldn’t get any money for the upcoming Insen DVD, because the production costs would be too high. After i was allowed to have a look at the calculation i was able to negotiate to get a small percentage of the artist fee.

The documentation of the concert is fine, but as the LEDs have a low resolution it would have been nice if people could see what the original videos looked like, that some of the concert visuals were derived from. Therefore Olaf Bender asked me if i would like to contribute both of my music videos, Trioon and Berlin, for the Insen DVD as bonus tracks, which i agreed upon. Unfortunately Carsten and Olaf changed their mind and decided against it, since i didn’t want to delegate the rights for the videos to the label completely.

Tour dates of the second Insen Tour

11 Jun 06 | Casa da Musica, Porto, PT
13 Jun 06 | Coliseum, Lisboa, PT
15 Jun 06 | Sonar | Barcelona, ES
17 Jun 06 | Centro Cultural de la Villa de Madrid, Madrid, ES
18 Jun 06 | Auditorio de Zaragoza, Zaragoza, ES
20 Jun 06 | Holland Festival | Amsterdam, NL
23 Jun 06 | Villa Celimontana Jazz Festival | Roma, IT
24 Jun 06 | Neapolis Festival | Arena Flegrea, Napoli , IT
26 Jun 06 | Le Ciminiere Amphitheatre, Catania, IT
29 Jun 06 | Wien Jazz Festival, Wien, AT
02 Jul 06 | Roskilde Festival, Roskilde, DK

(The photos taken from the gallery at the concert were taken from mureena’s flickr photostream)

16 June 2006 | Concert | Comments