Rufus Wainwright (Special Solo Show)
Casa das Artes de V.N. Famalicão
Vila Nova de Famalicão, Portugal
June 28, 2008 (Saturday)

*16bit*

Taper: j.mart (Stutter [at] sapo [dot] pt)
Source: DPA4061's > Church Audio ST-9100 (~+16dB, no HPF) > M-Audio Microtrack 24/96 (1/4'' TRS, L, WAV 24bit/48kHz)
Location: 8th Row. LOS, HRTF.
Lineage: USB 2.0 > Adobe Audition 3.0 (EQ'ing, hard-limiting and compression in clapping sections, normalize, fades) > Steinberg Wavelab v5.01b (dither/resample with Apogee UV22HR to 16bit/44.1kHz) > CDWav 1.95 > Foobar 2000 (FLAC 8)


Tracklist:
------ CD-A ------
01- Grey Gardens
02- The Maker Makes
03- Beauty Mark
04- Nobody's Off The Hook
05- Sansoucci
06- Beautiful Child
07- I'm Not Ready To Love
08- Going To A Town
09- Who Are You, New York? *
10- A Woman's Face With Nature's Own Hand Painted (Spoken)
11- A Woman's Face With Nature's Own Hand Painted $
12- California
13- Greek Song
14- Little Sister
15- Zebulon
16- Cigarettes And Chocolate Milk / Encore 1
17- The Art Teacher
18- Leaving for Paris No. 2
19- Hallelujah / Encore 2
20- Foolish Love
21- La Complainte De La Butte

* new song
$ new song - 20th Sonnet, by William Shakespeare / world premiere

TRT: 01h:38m:38s


Notes: This is the first of Rufus's two night run in Vila Nova de Famalicão. These were billed as "special solo shows" and having seen Rufus with his band before, where he plays for nearly three hours, this was something completely different. Some nice surprises on the setlist, including two new songs. The first one is "Who are you, New York?", which Rufus rightfully complains it's very difficult to play. It sounds very melancholic, and it sure is a very complex piano piece. The second is the 20th sonnet by William Shakespeare, which Rufus adapted into a song, envisioning a theatre project he's been working on, and this was the first time he ever performed it. This show features a lot of Rufus banter, which are so characteristic of a Rufus solo show. You could tell Rufus was trying to explore the rivalry between Portugal and Spain. This was the eve of the final of the european football/soccer championship, so there are some spanish references throughout the show (Famalicão is pretty close to Galiza, and there were surely some spanish fans in the midst of the crowd). I wasn't able to attend night two, as ticket prices were pretty high and I had no guarantee he would fool around with the setlist enough to justify the investment. To top that, I didn't really have a place to stay for the night. This was my first time visiting V.N.Famalicão, and as any Portuguese northern city, it's very beautiful. The venue was really nice looking too, and has been attracting quite a few renowned artist recently. As for the recording, this was a tough one to work on. I didn't really like the house EQ'ing, Rufus's voice was a bit too bright, and proceeded to add some lower vocal range presence with EQ. I should have set the preamp levels to the max, as in between crowd cheering is *way* higher than the music program, so this involved quite an effort on dynamic processing, including something I would call "multipass hard limiting" to prevent compression artifacts on the recording. The crowd was very polite during the songs, and that's all it matters. Incidentally, this is the first Rufus recording of 2008 to be put in circulation, as far as I'm concerned (and quite a nice one, I might add).


###########
-Zero tolerance for selling. Be 100% sure that this will be the last recording i will ever put in circulation from this band if this request is disregarded.
-No public lossy distribution.
-Please pass this info file along as you distribute the show.
-Share it freely.
###########


-j.mart (http://liveiswherewelive.blogspot.com/)
2008/07/25