The Naima Train & Band - live at the "Capitol"

On February 6th, 2015 The Naima Train appeared for the first time with a full-blown band around her. The event at the Capitol Cinema in Gothenburg was at the same time release party for  the EP "Afternoon Glow", accessible through Spotify and available at iTunes.
Maria, the talented young woman who up to now was the solo musical artist The Naima Train, is an old family friend. More than once I have listened to her performances and marvelled at her special technique to work with sound loops. These are not a kind of pre-recorded safety blanket, they are created right there and then in front of the audience. Maria has the ability to build up a complex web of sounds, layer by layer, mostly in the early stages of a song. Then she controls the appearance or absence of these loops throughout her self-written songs. It is stimulating to just think about how such a technique can be combined with the sound from a band. It certainly demands more than the usual leeway for the vocalist/soloist, who is actually able to command everything up to a multi-facetted barrage of sound from the loop(s) at hand (or foot, as it seems). A fair amount of rehearsel and good communication is definitely called for.

The live premiere at the Capitol was cheerfully received by a near-capacity audience and probably kindled reflections on further musical evolution in the future. As an image person I was fond of the image show in the background. It takes quite a bit to put a show like this together and to make it fully functional during a performance. To me good visuals can contribute much to an atmosphere where the audience's experience of the music rises to its best.




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Some stills from the Capitol performance:

On a technical note: My little Lumix LX7 compact camera used for the filming doesn't give me any control of the recording volume of sound. The automatic recording process inevitably boosts the quieter parts and restrains the louder ones. The volume is levelled out, the dynamics of the music is compressed, which can be disturbing. And more often than not, automatic volume recording cannot handle loud sounds at all and will distort it beyond the tolerable (an example of that further down). I had never used this camera in a concert before and was pleasantly surprised by the relatively low distortion, considering the at times heavy drum attacks.
The Lumix allows a little more control over the video image. Selecting the video mode immediately gives you the option to go into manual, which means you can lock image brightness at a desired level. This avoids the automatic pumping of brightness whenever the lighting of a scene changes or the camera sweeps over differently lit areas. Should you want to change image brightness during recording, the LX7 gives you good control over this. The camera sports aperture control on a handy control ring around the lens, just like many cameras of the analogue era. So no unnerving excursion deep into a menu system are necessary. Great.

Concert Visuals
Inspired by The Naima Train, a previous strong visual experience came to mind, from a concert with Brian Ferry at the Liseberg Amusement Park in 2011. A Swedish female designer (name???) had created a phantastic background show that really lifted the entire performance. When Ferry returned to Gothenburg in fall 2014 he had only lighting effects to offer. They were ok, but fell far short by comparison. Maybe one expects a little extra from Ferry, who is known to be a visual artist in his own right, with art school training to boot.
Here is a little glimpse from Ferry's 2011 outdoor performance in Gothenburg. You cannot fail to notice the heavy distortion of the sound which another camera left me with...

Besides the graphics and amazing animations I was also impressed with how the graphics were mixed with live close-ups of the performers. A little bit can be seen in two of the pictures below...