Muse - Ziggo Dome, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (ianmacd)
 
Album info
 
Recording Date  : 17-12-2012
     
Length  : 114:00
Format  : FLAC
Track List
 
01 The 2nd Law: Unsustainable 03:54
02 Supremacy 05:09
03 Hysteria 04:39
04 Panic Station 03:59
05 Resistance 05:24
06 Supermassive Black Hole 04:19
07 Animals 04:25
08 [drum and bass solo] 02:07
09 Explorers 05:51
10 Sunburn 04:11
11 Time Is Running Out 04:33
12 Liquid State 03:53
13 Madness 04:56
14 Follow Me 04:08
15 Undisclosed Desires 04:07
16 Plug In Baby 04:31
17 [roulette video moment] 00:38
18 New Born 08:15
19 [encore break] 01:16
20 The 2nd Law: Isolated System 04:29
21 Uprising 06:11
22 Knights Of Cydonia 08:37
23 [encore break] 03:28
24 [band introduction] 00:28
25 Starlight 04:34
26 Survival 05:58

Notes
Recorded at the Ziggo Dome, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Great audience recording.


From the info file:

Muse

Ziggo Dome
Amsterdam
The Netherlands

17th December 2012 (2012-12-17)


RECORDING:

Type: Audience master, recorded from first ring, section 106, row 7, seat 185.
The distance from the PA was too far to accurately estimate, but must
have been in the region of 50 metres.

Source: Factory-matched pair of Schoeps CCM 41V microphones (DINa mounted) ->
Marantz PMD661 recorder with Oade Concert Mod
(-18 dB gain/44.1 kHz/24 bit WAV)

Lineage: Audacity 2.0.2
* applied variable amplification for consistency across recording
* attenuation of sound of audience
* added fades
* split tracks
* converted to 16 bit
-> FLAC (compression level 8) [libFLAC 1.2.1 20070917]

Taper: Ian Macdonald (ianmacd)


SET LIST:

01. [03:54] The 2nd Law: Unsustainable
02. [05:09] Supremacy
03. [04:39] Hysteria
04. [03:59] Panic Station
05. [05:24] Resistance
06. [04:19] Supermassive Black Hole
07. [04:25] Animals
08. [02:07] [drum and bass solo]
09. [05:51] Explorers
10. [04:11] Sunburn
11. [04:33] Time Is Running Out
12. [03:53] Liquid State
13. [04:56] Madness
14. [04:08] Follow Me
15. [04:07] Undisclosed Desires
16. [04:31] Plug In Baby
17. [00:38] [roulette video moment]
18. [08:15] New Born
19. [01:16] [encore break]
20. [04:29] The 2nd Law: Isolated System
21. [06:11] Uprising
22. [08:37] Knights Of Cydonia
23. [03:28] [encore break]
24. [00:28] [band introduction]
25. [04:34] Starlight
26. [05:58] Survival

Total running time: 114:00


MD5 CHECKSUMS:

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e4d6559b34923730dbfc5537a210d56e flac/checksums.ffp


NOTES:

I'm not a huge fan of Muse, so I decided to have a sit-down at this one.
Actually, my seated ticket also happened to be the only one I could manage to
scrape off Marktplaats for face value. Tickets for this long sold-out gig were
going for twice face value months ahead of the show and anything listed for
even close to the official asking price was being snapped up within minutes of
being advertised on-line.

Having previously been to the Ziggo Dome on only three occasions and having
taped from the floor each time, I decided this would be a good opportunity to
try recording from the first ring to see what kind of results that would
yield. If it worked well, it would be an option for future shows.

I actually have a very good seat tonight, at the back of the auditorium,
slightly off to the right, but directly facing the stage. On my previous
visits to the venue, I was down in the pit, much closer to the PA lengthwise,
but also far below it. This time, although I'm further away, I have a much
better line to the source of the sound.

Another advantage of having a seat at a gig attended by 17,499 other people is
that you can turn up whenever you like, secure in the knowledge that you will
still have the same spot you would have had if you'd been standing outside at
18:30, waiting for the doors to open.

I pitch up a little too late to catch the start of Andy Burrows' support set,
which is a pity, because I would have liked to record it. Instead, I use it as
an approximate mic and input level check for Muse. I then relax and enjoy the
rest of Burrows' mellow set.

Muse come on just after 20:45. The place is packed to the rafters and I can't
see an empty seat anywhere in the rings or a square metre of unused space down
below. Even those dud seats behind the stage, which are usually conspicuously
empty even at sold-out shows, are occupied tonight.

The seating is quite comfortable and steeply staggered, which, I must say, is
great. No matter how huge the bloke in front of you, there's no way your view
can be obstructed.

But whilst this sitting-on-your-arse lark is ideal for an unhindered view of
the stage, I'm much too far away from the action. It may as well be a flea
circus up there.

The light show and video screens provide welcome, dare I say necessary
augmentation of the three -- nay, four: there's a keyboard player, too --
diminutive insects performing on stage. Quite apart from the issue of my
distance from the band, there's the inescapable fact that the huge stage
provides a lot of ground for three -- no, damn it, four -- people to cover.
Without all of the window-dressing, they could end up looking a little lost.

It takes a lot of stage presence to fill a void like that, but you know what?
I reckon Muse could pull it off even without the attention-grabbing frills.

The sound is surprisingly good up here, but not nearly loud enough. The Ziggo
Dome is cavernous and it takes a lot of sound to fill it. On the other hand,
the volume is sufficient for me to tell that the sound must be fantastic down
there on the floor, closer to the stage.

My first inkling of how lame I am for sitting down at a rock gig is in the
bank. There will be many more this evening.

Another disadvantage of sitting up here is that my fellow arse-sitters are
more your apathetic, wishy-washy cinema-going crowd than your dedicated music
fan. Whilst I am at a gig, but THEY are having having a night out with friends
against the backdrop of some pretty aural wallpaper.

They think nothing, for instance, of getting up to go and buy a round of
drinks; and not just mid-gig, but mid-song, too; and we're packed in tightly
enough that anyone seated between them and the aisle must also get up to let
them out. Thankfully, that doesn't include me, or I would get pissed off very
quickly indeed.

Down below us, hundreds of pit-dwellers hold a mobile phone aloft, a sight
that, from a distance, recalls the cheesy lighter-swaying audiences of all
those rock ballad bands you'd rather die than have to see.

In the kingdom of the smart-phone, everyone's a cameraman.

Muse are an interesting beast. Equal parts progressive and hard rock, with
elements of pop and classical thrown in, the paperwork says they should be an
anachronism, a commercial non-starter, dead before they've even got out of the
starting blocks. At best, one can see them carving out a niche as a diversion
for people who think that Steven Wilson is the new messiah, but how on earth
did they manage to procure cool status for themselves and rise to this level
of popularity?

I don't begrudge them a thing, mind you. What they've done is very clever and
the musicianship is top notch. How on earth they've managed to market it to
the unwashed masses, on the other hand, is anybody's guess. Of course, we'd
all like to believe that marketing has nothing to do with it, that the music
sells on its own merit, but none of us really believes that any more.
Everyone's got an angle nowadays.

Matt Bellamy's overwrought falsetto and sustained vibrato add to the pomposity
of it all. Muse court danger by flirting with taking themselves too seriously,
conjuring the frightful spectre of a latter-day Queen (e.g. 'Resistance'),
even if Bellamy himself doesn't quite possess the self-assured, hyperbolic
swagger of Freddie Mercury.

Bellamy is, however, the axis around which Muse revolve. He's a decent enough
singer, but it's notable how many songs are performed live in a different key
this evening, presumably to make the going easier for him.

It's as a musician and songwriter that Bellamy comes into his own, however.
With skills as a guitarist and pianist strong enough to cause envy in many a
single instrument practitioner, he is the creative powerhouse of the band.

Some of those chunky guitar riffs are so good that one has to fight the urge
to rise to one's feet and show some bodily appreciation for the way Bellamy's
licks cut through the air like fireworks, ably assisted by Chris
Wolstenholme's bulldozing bass lines.

Yes, not for the first time this evening, I'm feeling lame for having chosen
to sit on my arse at a rock gig.

The set contains a couple of clangers, too.

'Explorers', for example, sounds like Thom Yorke in the shower. Perhaps it's
no coincidence that the bloke two seats to my left chooses precisely this song
to enquire of his friend 'Wil je wat drinken?' at 02:17. It's still
unforgivable in the world according to ianmacd, but if you must fetch
refreshments, now is indeed the time to do it.

'Madness' is similarly pallid, starting out life as something that sounds as
if it may rip off its false beard at any moment and reveal itself to be George
Michael's 'Faith'. It does get better as it progresses, but runs out of steam
before it can pull itself clear of its own melodramatic mire.

Well, let's hope that the lame seated wanker experience was worth it. I
certainly enjoyed myself, but how does the recording measure up?

The recording is good, but suffers somewhat from my distance to the PA. The
vocals are a little low in the mix sometimes, but the guitar comes screaming
through with a vengeance.

The supercardioid microphones do their work well, cutting through the ambient
noise to cleave the meat from the bone. The end result is entirely listenable,
but not amongst my best work.

A couple of notes on the tracking:

It wasn't always obvious how to split this recording. The use of intros absent
from the studio versions of the songs they herald, plus new interludes and the
difficulty sometimes in distinguishing an interlude from an intro, made
tracking the recording a less than straightforward task.

In deciding how to go about the job, I consulted band set-lists and looked at
how past Muse concerts have typically been tracked by others. I also consulted
the band's Web discussion forum.

Some people have rendered the intro to 'Hysteria' as its own track, in which
case it is typically titled 'Interlude'. The intro tonight is only 45 seconds,
however, and does not appear as a separate entity on Muse's own paper
set-list, so I have treated it as integral to 'Hysteria'.

Track 8 has become known on the Internet during this tour as the 'Montpellier
Jam' or, more recently, 'Monty Jam' (after the French city where it was first
performed), but this title was coined by a fan and is therefore bogus.

I was tempted to leave the piece as an integral part of 'Explorers', since it
forms the intro to that song, but due to its length (it's a couple of minutes
long) and the fact that it appears on Muse's own set-lists as 'drum and bass
solo', I have split it off and used Muse's own description as the title.

Similarly, track 17 has been separated, because it features no live music. It
is the soundtrack to a video clip of a spinning roulette wheel and is
presumably intended to occupy the audience while the band prepare for the next
song. It appears on Muse's set-list as 'roulette video moment', so that is the
title used here.

As always, samples are provided to help you decide whether this is worth the
share ratio depletion for you.

Muse's return to Amsterdam has already been scheduled. They'll be playing the
huge ArenA football stadium on 4th June 2013. That venue seats 50,000 people
and it remains to be seen whether even the mighty Muse can fill it.