With all the sad entertainment news today, I felt more positive when I saw the BBC news tonight and some good news.







Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2022-05-28 12:39 by crawdaddy.

I'm really curious how the Abbatars will look on stage in the ABBA-Arena.

It's amazing and groundbreaking although I hope our boys never choose this path...

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Irix

I'm really curious how the Abbatars will look on stage in the ABBA-Arena.

It would be nice if it looks like this:


[www.DW.com] , Large picture


[Variety.com]



[www.Instagram.com]


ABBA-Arena, London:






(Pictures from TV-Report)



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2022-05-27 14:15 by Irix.

The world needs more ABBA.

_____________________________________________________________
Rip this joint, gonna save your soul, round and round and round we go......

I hope the virtual concert is a success, and it's nice to see them all together again.

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Hairball
The world needs more ABBA.

AMEN

I wanna see some decidedly lo-fi phone footage in order to determine what we're dealing with here

ABBA! Sorry, folks, I didn't like their music in the 70ies (mostly heard at a fair where you couldn't run away because then you missed all the girls standing at the bumper car) and I don't care about them now.

I know they are a big cult and an even bigger business. But to me, it's just POP, the bubble machine...

==> BUT!! I have NOTHING against them and if you enjoy them and their music, I'm happy to know you're happy.

You know, in the 70ies, if you had to decide between Cream and The Sweet or ABBA and The Rolling Stones, I didn't have trouble to decide, hehehe ...

[www.YouTube.com]

It looks truly fascinating. The theater looks very cool outside at night. The limited footage of the performance looks really good too. I'm guessing the lights in the performance video and the theater itself are synced so the theater really appears much larger than it is, also selling the illusion of 3D people on the stage. I'd go see it.

I'll also be curious as to the setlist. I wonder how many songs from Voyage made the show. I also wonder if the live band is illuminated during the show or only for the curtain call.

Even though they didn't perform, it was still strange to see all of the real members of Abba on stage together. I remember hearing that they once turned down a billion dollars for a reunion. Now they can do a virtual concert night after night indefinitely and never get tired or older!

I'm hearing that this is the setlist:

The Visitors
Hole In Your Soul
SOS
Knowing Me, Knowing You
Chiquitita
Fernando
Mamma Mia
Does Your Mother Know?
Eagle
Lay All Your Love On Me
Summer Night City
Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)
Voulez-Vous
When All Is Said And Done
Don't Shut Me Down
I Still Have Faith In You
Waterloo
Dancing Queen
Thank You For The Music
The Winner Takes It All

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jahisnotdead

I'm hearing that this is the setlist:

Yep, an 20-songs setlist - [www.NME.com] .



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2022-05-27 16:45 by Irix.

From the German Edition of Rolling Stone Magazine:


Criticism: "Abba: Voyage" in London: What the Abbatars Can Do, What They Can't

The ILM concert of the Abba Avatars shows possibilities for the future - and limits that may not be crossed for a long time.

By Sassan Niasseri · 27.05.2022

The eyes don't look alive, that clouds the impression. It is usually the eyes, no, always the eyes, when digital people are supposed to appear lifelike but something is wrong with the face. This is called the "Uncanny Valley" effect. If human-like creatures do not appear completely photorealistic, we often feel alienated. Perhaps because we notice deviations of the art figures from ourselves particularly clearly when they are minimal. Frida sings "Fernando", she looks like Frida, but she is not Frida. Her eyes lack lustre. The "Uncanny Valley" problem is not exclusive to Abba, it's something the whole of Hollywood has been grappling with for almost 20 years, since Robert Zemeckis' "Polar Express" in 2004. The George Lucas company Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), commissioned by Abba, has at least, it can be said after the premiere of the "Voyage" show in London (26 May), taken a step forward. This event shows the possibilities of such representations - and their limits.

The digital avatars, alias "abbatars", are not recognisable as 3D characters from a distance, apart from the facial expressions to be judged on screens. They seem real. That's good, of course. They are projections, but appear three-dimensional and move with a dancing suppleness that Agnetha, Frida, Benny and Björn lacked even in their best days. After all, the real Frida was not necessarily famous for her pirouettes.

Under the eyes of King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia, who perhaps did not experience Abba during their active concert era until 1980, the Swedes are now celebrating their live comeback. A royal visit, because Abba are considered the country's most important export. The audience also includes hipsters like Jarvis Cocker, Abba fangirl Kylie Minogue, actress Keira Knightley and film director Paul Greengrass ("The Bourne Conspiracy"), an auteur of handheld cameras and jump cuts who might want to copy one or two visual tricks from the Abba team.

Benny Andersson has also smuggled himself into the audience, into one of the upper blocks with a panoramic view. He forms the word "Wow" with his mouth when he hears Frida on "Fernando", gives a thumbs up to the audience cheering on "S.O.S.", and when everyone jumps up from their seats on "Voulez Vous", he jumps up too and cheers on his own avatar. This reads stranger than it is. He still seems to be gripped by the show even after countless rehearsals. I looked at his hands because I was sitting behind him: during the beautiful piano outro of "Chiquitita", Andersson moved his fingers along.

Abba's first world hit was called "Waterloo", and the line "I feel like I win when I lose" is certainly not a credo for the four musicians, because they are not losers, they are the second most important pop band of all time, after the Beatles. But this show, booked for London at least until May 2023, reveals some weaknesses that cannot be applauded away even by the euphoric premiere audience.

Already in the run-up, Andersson announced that a setlist of 20 songs cannot make everyone happy. The omission of "Super Trouper" is sad, the omission of "Take a Chance on Me", their most complicated and at the same time most trusting song, unforgivable. Instead of the West Coast song "The Name of the Game" they play the worse West Coast song "Eagle", but not with canyon film in the background, but transplanted into a fantasy world (more on that in a moment). Abba also bring the swaying "Hole in my Soul", which is not on anyone's wish list for no reason. "When All Is Said And Done" from the 1981 album "The Visitors" is important for the band's biography, a document of divorce, an internal highlight, they want to work off of it, but just like "The Visitors", which is based on "Tomorrow Never Knows", it fulfils more of a fan service: Abba did their last tour in 1979, and tracks like this have never been heard live. Well, you have to look at it sportingly as a fan and think of the Beatles: If the Fab Four were still around and they played a concert with 20 songs, quite a few important ones would be missing. My suggestion would have been: "Abba Gold", the best-of of 19 songs, plus two of the new ones. The diplomatic solution, no one would be disappointed.

What makes a good performance, one done by tireless Abba musicians, tireless because they come from the computer? For one thing, that they don't make mistakes in their singing or with their instruments; after all, they are never exhausted. On the other hand, that they play through 100 minutes. "Voyage" has considerable dramaturgical inconsistencies here. Already during the fourth song, "Knowing Me, Knowing You", the Abbatars disappear and can be seen instead as a video clip on the screens. That's exactly what shouldn't be happening. Digital figures in music videos are fine to watch on TV - but digital figures transported from a real stage to a digital music video studio make no sense. The pattern repeats itself. Halfway through the set, there is a stretch of songs, "Eagle" and "Lay All Your Love On Me", where Abba "disappear" again, meaning they are no longer projected onto the stage. Instead, a cartoon film is played, which at least I didn't understand. In it, a boy runs through an "Avatar - The Last Airbender" jungle world in search of a coin that seems to have been taken from the "Playmobil" treasure island. In the end, he ends up in a cave where he sees four stone heads of the four Abba musicians, in a scary setting like the temple of the idol from "Raiders of the Lost Ark". A short film about an animated protagonist about whom no one from the Abba team has ever spoken before, set to "Eagle", a song about a non-mystical flying animal.

Then comes another on-screen video, this time with the Abba Tron figures in neon colours that the Swedes have been using to advertise since last September's "Voyage" album. Now imagine what it would be like to see "Eagle" and "Lay All Your Love On Me" as a performance by the Abbatare instead of the Little Indiana Jones show shown on the screens. And that's what makes a good concert: Tireless musicians who you can watch working non-stop. The adventure sequence with the little boys is reminiscent of the "Inception"-bond from "Don't Shut Me Down", in which Agnetha sings: "I'm like a dream within a dream that's been decoded". So no sooner have the digital musicians been saved as realistic than there is a moderately animated adventure short with a boy no one can place. Is he supposed to be a dream of the avatars? Is it necessary to know the boy and the mythology in which he moves? Should one decode it?

The ten-piece backing band, at least, is flesh and blood. Björn Ulvaeus was never a good singer, he knows that, which is why he hands over the lead vocals on "Does Your Mother Know" to the three female choir singers. It is remarkable with what content the four Abba heads fill their four individualised stage speeches. Each of them had 40 years to think about it. Björn does the Playboy, chats about how he received offers from girls that didn't belong. Benny, musical head of the band and driver in the "Voyage" project, philosophises about the meaning of life extension into the digital ego: "To be or not to be, that has no meaning now." Agnetha doesn't reveal herself, stays in the life worlds of the songs, uses her announcement before "Don't Shut Me Down" for a non-committal hint that she too has often been disappointed by the person who loves her. Frida says the most important thing - the highlight of the show has less to do with music than with the spoken word: she was born in 1945 and tells how hard it was for her and her grandmother to build a new life after the Second World War; her mother died when she was two, her father, a Wehrmacht soldier (who remains unmentioned at the concert), she only met decades later. The most formative thing in the life of this Abba musician was not fame, it was her first few years. So it is digital effigies, abbatars, governors who articulate the confessions of their human creators. They speak out what Frida, Agnetha, Björn and Benny might not say in interviews today. The interaction of the talking computer beings with the audience can possibly be improved. An experienced stage speaker only continues his punch line when the applause dies down. Benny and Björn sometimes continue talking while the audience is still raving.

However, the distribution of computer beings (Abba) and real musicians on stage seems arguably territorial. Abba stand alone in the very wide centre, the ten-member troupe was squeezed to the left edge of the stage. The model for "Voyage" are the Abba concerts of 1979, but there the accompanying musicians were very close to the quartet, everyone merged into each other. In 2022, this kind of amorphous mixture is certainly not (yet) technically feasible, if only because the avatars are holograms projected onto a screen. No real person is allowed to prance around in front of them.

So everything that works is presented, everything that doesn't work is left out. For this very reason, the stage design is clumsily constructed. A three-tiered stage leads up to the Abbatars. Three-tiered stages, however, are there to ascend and descend on. Stage one, two, three. The projections can't do that, they remain at the back, on level three. But one is used to musicians coming forward sometimes, right up to the first row of the audience. The Abbatare, who only act horizontally, can't do that. No problem. Technique. But that makes "Voyage" a static concert, unlike Benny and Björn, who praised the dynamics in interviews. It would have been interesting to focus exclusively on the facial expressions of one of the avatars while watching the concert, to determine whether Björn, for example, shows variable facial expressions for a period of 100 minutes, whether effort is visible; perhaps only the audience from the front rows can judge that.

There will be many feuilleton debates about whether concerts of this kind are "the future", in case the stars eventually run out of steam because they are ageing. Hologram shows have so far only been given by dead musicians, Tupac, Whitney and Ronnie (James Dio). Apart from Genesis, Abba are the only 1970s mega band that could still perform with the original line-up. But they don't want to, they don't want to see themselves on stage in their old age. The "Voyage" show offers the technically best possible in digital representation of people making music. Abba did not disappoint us in this. But real people still look better.

Maybe Kiss did everything right without knowing it at the beginning of their career. Paul Stanley recently said that as soon as he and Gene Simmons are dead, other musicians could perform as Kiss and keep the brand alive - with the right make-up on the right features, no one would notice the difference. The Kiss make-up-makes the people underneath ageless. Their voices would come as playback, like now with Abba.

Would it be better to replace the human being right away instead of feeding his biometrics into a computer so that it would emit a younger, more perfect, digital self? A scary idea.


[www.RollingStone.de] · (Translation done by DeepL.com)

I don't know about the avatar thing but that is one hell of a setlist for a pop group. Few pop groups can match a string of hits like that. Regardless if you like them or not.

Large picture - (5906x3389px) - Credit: Johan Persson.


Large picture - (5906x3794px) - Credit: Johan Persson.

what looks most artificial clearly is... the crowd

In an interview the choreographer of Voyage implied that ABBA motion captured their entire catalog during their five weeks of motion capture work. It certainly seems they did more songs than are currently in the show.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2022-05-28 00:24 by jahisnotdead.

I personally think as someone who lives in Kingston/Epsom area in South West London, that this is the best entertainment news since the announcement of the Rolling Stones Europe Tour gigs.

So much bad news recently with the passing of too many entertainers in music, acting......... and far too early for some of them.

I for one in the next few months looking forward to, is going to a Rolling Stones gig,Going to visit the Matt Lee exhibition in London.............. and to see The Abba Voyage show, which is in my opinion excellent after seeing the news coverage.
Bring it all on for all of us who love our music.

Instead of putting all the time and planning and money into this project, why not spend 6 months rehearsing and go on one final world tour? They probably have more fans than ever. I’d rather see the senior citizen originals than avatars. So many other groups from that era are touring, why not ABBA?

"The show could run for five years..."


I can see the Stones doing this eventually...

_____________________________________________________________
Rip this joint, gonna save your soul, round and round and round we go......

Yes!
I can see Mick thinking, 'Will have to have a chat to Benny and Bjorn about all the in's and outs of how it was to get it all together.'
Let's face it.............this is probably the last Rolling Stones Tour as a live band.
It's gonna come sometime and I for one will go to a virtual gig in London area if it's the same high standard as the Abba virtual gig.

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Hairball
"The show could run for five years..."


I can see the Stones doing this eventually...

Oh yeah - that might be why the shows from 1972 have been held back... Now we can attend all the shows most of us were too young too see. The sixties will back - and the seventies. We will have El Mocambo in 3D - and lots of beer to the critic section.

No 'Take a chance on me'? Disgusted.

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DaveG
Instead of putting all the time and planning and money into this project, why not spend 6 months rehearsing and go on one final world tour? They probably have more fans than ever. I’d rather see the senior citizen originals than avatars. So many other groups from that era are touring, why not ABBA?

Pretty simple. They have had no desire to do so for 40 years (especially Agnetha) and they're hardly going to start now in their mid 70's.

The German Rolling Stone article describes it as "Holograms projected".

The UK High Court ruled some years back that it's legal to describe something as a load of old bollocks.

It. Is. Not. A. Hologram.

It's stupendously well executed, brilliantly organised, superbly managed. But it's not a Hologram.

--
Captain Corella
60 Years a Fan

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Gazza

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DaveG
Instead of putting all the time and planning and money into this project, why not spend 6 months rehearsing and go on one final world tour? They probably have more fans than ever. I’d rather see the senior citizen originals than avatars. So many other groups from that era are touring, why not ABBA?

Pretty simple. They have had no desire to do so for 40 years (especially Agnetha) and they're hardly going to start now in their mid 70's.

Yeah, I hear you Gazza. It’s been well documented for years that especially Agnetha did not want to perform anymore. But, given the excitement surrounding this project, can you imagine the global response if they had decided to push themselves one last time for their fans?
Also, I know there could very well be health issues at play beside the reluctance to do a tour.
Just thinking out loud . . .

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DaveG
Instead of putting all the time and planning and money into this project, why not spend 6 months rehearsing and go on one final world tour? They probably have more fans than ever. I’d rather see the senior citizen originals than avatars. So many other groups from that era are touring, why not ABBA?

I believe the stress of touring is what made them quit in the first place. These versions can perform night after night and never get tired or sick or have an off night. And theoretically they could perform for decades, never needing a break or getting older. You just can't do that with the real people. They don't want to tour anyway.

I don't have a problem with the show. The members of ABBA all are alive, they all approve of the project, and are all deeply involved. I can't judge the other hologram performers, but I think they're all dead. I think it makes a difference knowing that the performers approve.

I have been reading about the show and the only major criticism I have read so far is the inclusion of two animated films that play during two songs in lieu of the avatars. I actually think that is a brilliant idea, because it allows the audience to take a break and refill their drinks while not feeling they're missing the "performance." Super smart move in my opinion.