Kraftwerk at Asiaworld December 5th. Their first time to play HK and my first time to see them live.
Basically the show they did was pretty much the same as found on their Minimum-Maximum CD/DVD set – the four of them dressed identically, each standing in front of a podium with a laptop computer and a single keyboard, a screen behind them showing computer animation. It’s next to impossible to figure out which guy is playing what part. They barely move on stage and barely register any expression on their faces, feet tapping in time to the music is about it. As they unleashed hit after hit (Man Machine, Tour de France, Vitamin, Autobahn, The Model, Neon Lights, Radioactivity, Trans Europe Express, Computer World, The Robots and more), the effect was mesmerizing. The music is gorgeous as ever, huge sweeping melodies, gigantic dance beats, lyrics that are seemingly an afterthought.
The place was pretty full and the audience basically stood there (the concert was “free standing”), some people yelled that people should dance – at one point during The Model a woman jumped on stage and started dancing until the guards carried her off. Several encores and The Robots was “performed” by robots, about two hours altogether.
As I said, this was pretty much exactly the same show that I’ve watched on DVD, the only thing different being the song order. But maybe it was standing there in the dark, surrounded by a thousand people, it was a different experience from lying in bed and watching it on TV. I seriously enjoyed it, but don’t ask me to pin down the reasons.
My gf said she enjoyed it more than the Billy Joel concert.
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I’m less than thrilled with the results from my Sanyo Xacti HD 1010 camera. It had a hard time maintaining focus with the ever changing lights and backgrounds, though some of the video came out relatively okay – picture and sound are nice for sequences where the lighting and backgrounds were relatively static. Noting to myself that only Quicktime is doing an acceptable job of playing back the MP4 video. The picture keeps breaking up and freezing with VLC and the audio sync is seriously off with Picasa.
The still photos are all almost unusable, the one posted above about the best of a sorry batch. Since I got a pretty good deal on the camera to being with and since I’ve had it just a couple of weeks, think I’m gonna sell it off.
