Paraphrasing Victoria Nuland, fuck the Euro. Last night, for our 'nuit en famille' we spent one million and two hundred thousand old Italian lire for 4 tickets (142€ each) not to miss the Belgian date of the “Peter Gabriel I/O tour.” (Audience analysis at the venue? Age 30-75, median I would say 50. “Mature” audience, in short, but not senior-only like the one seen the month before with Roger Waters.)

 

At the end of the day, the million and two did not buy us a seat in the central stalls. Those who paid 400€ each to be there described me quite a very different experience. In our loggione, on the steps, our sonic world was mainly composed of Katché’s bass drum and tom toms, Levin’s bass followed at a distance by Gabriel’s voice. Awful.

 

Frankly, I was unable to pick up the other surrounding frequencies clearly, at least during the loud and (frequent) forte parts. Part of it is due to the amount of stuff the band generated; an octet (announced as a nonet, but Marina Moore's violin was missing.) The rhythm section was Manu Katché (in great shape) + Tony Levin + DonE (multi-keyboardist recommended to Gabriel by Brian Eno), two guitars (including the trusted David Rhodes: shaved head and his silhouette a bit resembling the leader's), finally a trumpet/keyboardist (Josh Shpak, a wild dancer who sometimes pulled out very powerful high notes from the trumpet, but on the steps we could only hear the faintest hint of those notes.) And first amongst peers, the angel Pietro Gabriele, as usual, occasionally juggling the keyboards.

 

I shall forget the vocalist/cellist/keyboardist Ayanna Witter-Johnson. Maybe because her version of Don't Give Up made me miss any other interpreters of that memorable Kate Bush part. Or maybe because of the difficult task to sing the part of the Senegalese Yossou N’Dour at the end of In Your Eyes.

 

Compared to thirty years ago, the band expresses more violence, while the choreography makes them appear mechanical rather than enthusiastic. The fists raised to the sky or banged against the temples (a Sledgehammer trademark) and even the Gabriel/Levin/Rhodes psycho-military pas-de-trois dance (from Big Time) smell like dust from the past: impressive shadows on the ceiling of the cave of our memories.

 

On the other hand, over half of the titles are dedicated to the 20th century. Some (like I/O or Panoktikon) are unreleased or almost unreleased, as the eponymous LP that the tour should be promoting has not yet been released. From the scraps heard of this production “Gabriel with Eno,” the album is likely to become a success

 

The idea of dressing musicians in black and crew (to whom Gabriel addresses a final and  ritualistic “without them none of this could have happened”) in orange, slightly clumsy outfits, similar to outdoor road construction workers, disturbed me. My unconscious's been trained to read orange as violently divisive  chromatic association. Like in those revolting pseudo or real decapitations shorts, in the ASD, the Awful Second Decade of the XXI C. - masters (musicians?) and victims (roadies?) 

 

The light show was more substantial. Extremely synchronised bet. spotlights and video. Very ‘technological’, it creates theatrical settings, like that section in which the wall at the back of the stage seems covered in precious worked fabrics. Themes mostly artworks, or macro accelerations of organisms in development (flowers, mushrooms.) The result in the end is a celebration good taste and no visible winks to video-AI.

 

Gabriel, in an aside spoken in English on the topic of AI, quotes from his web statement:

 

“I believe that the changes coming with AI are unstoppable, but we can clearly influence them.”

 

Ah! And how? Well, it is explained in the letter he co-signed with Max Tegmark, Steve Wozniak and Elon Musk (among others)

 

“to suspend the release of a new AI for six months while we try to figure out what we should do [!], but if we don’t use this time to play and learn (…) how can we hope to figure it out?”

 

And to “play and learn” what better than #DiffuseTogether, a competition ($10k prize) of AI Animation sponsored by Gabriel (who offered six of his own songs for the animations) and Stability AI, an Artificial Intelligence start-up that (with the Stable Diffusion platform) is THE open-source competitor of the very famous OpenAI.

 

Stability has raised $100M in a flash, it would now be worth $1Bn and is sailing towards an (estimated) $4Bn and the much talked about leader, Emad Mostaque, according to Raoul Pal's interview, seems to have done everything, including... government-level consultancy on counter-extremism. In a 2-hour ceremony on Youtube ("DiffuseTogether live winner stream"), those who understand English and have a fair amount of patience will be able to go and see in the awarded videos the "brave new world" that - they promise us - will revolutionize the globe.

 

(...)