Her Morning Elegance is a fabulous stop motion music video by Oren Lavie. The storyboard for the entire video was first created using computer generated 3d characters in place of its actors. Roughly 3225 still photos were shot for the video using one camera hanging from the ceiling for the main body of the movie. It took 2 days of shooting with live actors to create the 3.5 minute music video frame by frame. Overall, its a wonderful song.

After having listened to the likes of Satriani and Vai for over five years, it was a refreshing change to hear Erik Mongrain (hat tip – Tariq). Erik has a rather unique style of strumming and tapping his original compositions on a guitar laid flat down, a technique believed to have been inspired by Michael Hedges. Erik draws his inspirations from the likes of Hendrix, Cobain and even Bach which motivated him to learn classical acoustics. Watch the following videos on YouTube, which I’m sure will speak volumes about him -

• AirTap
• PercusienFa
• Fusions

Last evening was sort of special. After having heard Joe Satriani for over 5 years now, it was exciting to watch him in the flesh, performing right in front of you! A few of us got together and watched him play continuosly for over 3 hours, belting out all the numbers that I’ve heard over a zillion times. There were moments during his performance when I felt goosebumps, bringing back memories from my college days, where we would listen to the likes of Satriani, Vai, Sting etc. during our trips to college and back. My close pal RK, a budding musician and an excellent guitarist, was the first to introduce Sat to the rest of us.

The show started off with the highly energetic “Raspberry Jam Delta V” and went on to include “Flying in a Blue Dream”, “Moroccon Sunset”, “Psycho Monkey”, etc. “Love Thing” saw the crowd cheering to the max, which goes to prove that slower melodic numbers reach wider audience.

The crowd wasn’t much; I’d estimate about 1300-1500 max. But, given the poor show put up by the organizers and lack of quality adverts, it was sort of expected.

Snaps and video of the concert will be posted in the coming week. So, you know what…

Fast forward to post competition – the first performance was by Shibani Kashyap (of ‘Hogayi Hain Mohabbat’ fame. Frankly I dont remember her in anything else after that). The track ‘Sajna’ was quite good actually. “Track”. Yes, it was a case of pure lip-syncing. The song had too much computer generated vocal (voice processing) and instrumental assistance put into it, that its not possible to do a live version unless, ofcourse, she renders it differently. But thats the whole point of a live performance. Music is meant to be played by artists who have the talent to replay what they’ve played before. It isn’t realistic to expect an artist to sound exactly as in the studios where they have all sorts of equipment and can massage the sound into anything desired. If that was what I wanted, I would have been better off buying the CD. The remaining 3 songs saw her crooning with the aid of backing tracks.

The final and much awaited performance was by KK. This guy is fantastic. Unlike Shibani, KK had a band and they sounded real tight. My favourite was when he fused the tamil and hindi version of A.R. Rahman’s ‘Strawberry kanne/ankhein’ and did the Dappaankuthu. The crowd went ballistic and everyone started doing the same. The instrumental rendition of ‘Tadap Tadap’, the song that got him noticed for his navigation of complex emotions with relative ease, was simply superb. Ballads like ‘Yaaron’ and the uber popular ‘Pal’ was well recieved and had the crowd singing in chorus. All in all, it was a good show and Nitin Arora (the MC) did a good job of keeping the mood high.

Wondering what tomorrows newspapers might read!