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, a million and two hundred liras did not buy us seats in the central stalls, instead we sat on a lateral balcony. I know someone who paid 400€ for each ticket to be in the center of the hall, and she described me quite a very different experience. Ours, on the steps of our loggione, was mainly Katché’s bass drum and tom toms. At a distance Levin’s bass followed, and then - very far down the Decibel's scale -  here came 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 shaved head of David Rhodes, with a rounded silhouette a bit resembling the leader's), finally a trumpet/keyboardist (a wild dancing Josh Shpak, who sometimes pulled out strong high notes from his trumpet, of which we could only hear faint hints up un our balcony.)

 

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, age kicked in. Although the band expresses more violence, the choreography makes the players 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 qualified entry in Gabriel's discography.

 

I didn't like the idea of dressing musicians in black and all the roadies (to whom Gabriel addresses the ritual: “without them none of this could have happened”) in orange, with clumsily fitting outfits, similar to outdoor road construction workers. My unconscious's been trained to read black and orange as a violently divisive chromatic association. Like in those revolting pseudo or real decapitations shorts, during the ASD, the Awful Second Decade of the XXI C. Black masters (musicians?) and POW slaves (roadies?) 

 

The light show was more substantial. Extremely synchronised bet. spotlights and video. Very ‘technological’ creations of theatrical settings; in one case the backwall of the stage appears as if it were covered in precious worked fabrics. Themes gear mostly around graphic artworks, or macro accelerations of organisms in development (flowers, mushrooms.) The result in the end is a celebration good taste with 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 (using the Stable Diffusion platform) has become THE open-source competitor of the very famous OpenAI.

 

Stability has raised $100M in a flash, it is now worth $1Bn and it's stock 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.

 

(...)