2023-12-02 17:00:10
Etienne Daho, in April 2023. STUDIO L’ÉTIQUETTE
“For several years, my producer, Thierry Suc, has been pestering me to play again in large venues, confides Etienne Daho to us, thirty minutes after having triumphed in front of more than 4,000 people, Saturday November 25, in the vast modernity of the Arena du Pays d’Aix, on the outskirts of Aix-en-Provence (Bouches-du- Rhône). I didn’t want to, but I ended up saying, “OK, as long as it’s very spectacular.” »
At the sight of the almost bare stage, a few minutes before the start of the concert, it is difficult to understand why this new tour of the arenas and other Zénith de France, which will pass on Friday December 22 at the Accor Arena in Paris, requires eight semi- -equipment trailers and around fifty people for more than seven hours of installation. Two tables, four chairs, intended for a string quartet, furnish the center of the stage, while guitars, keyboards, bass and drums quietly await the singer’s group. No visible decor betrays the ambition of the scenography. Until the first notes of L’Invitation.
Against a backdrop of Spanishade, Daho invites us to the banquet of life – “Oh I’m burning, I’m burning to taste all these maddening nectars now” – by revealing the artifact that will transform each song into a brilliant array of images and lights. From one end of the stage to the other emerges a colorful explosion of geometric graphs whose relief and perspectives give the impression that the musicians are inserted in a magic box.
Designed with engineers from Mathematic Studio, a French company specializing in visual effects (VFX) and 3D animation for cinema, video games or the music industry (Ariana Grande, Ed Sheeran, Travis Scott, Starmania…), an immense wall of light-emitting diodes (LED) will illustrate forty years of pop career in twenty-three song-episodes. “It’s been six months of creative ping-pong between me and Mathematicexplains the singer. I gave them keywords for each song and lots of images, photos, paintings that I spend my time retrieving. A show, like an album, is first and foremost a vision. There is not a cymbal hit that escapes me. »
Darkly glittery jacket
In the early 2000s, Daho remembers preferring gigantism “the comfortable velvet of theaters and rooms like that of the Olympia”. No doubt because his repertoire was evolving at the time towards more intimate songs or more radical experiences, like psychedelic Blitz (2017), his previous album, the only one of his records (with his first attempt Mythomaniacpublished in 1981) from which this time it does not take any title.
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