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Sigur Ros – Performances by Icelandic superstars captured by Strong Hire

Sigur Ros - Alexander Palace

With the temperatures outside Alexandra Palace approaching freezing, Sigur Ros must have felt right at home for their two massive indoor shows in November 2008. The band was to perform to an audience of nearly 10,000, and Strong Hire was there to record the evening’s events for a surround DVD release on Warp films.

As well as giving us a huge track list to record, the band were adamant that maximum effort be put into capturing the sound in the room. We use the term ‘room’ loosely here; Alexandra Palace is 50m wide,100m long and 30m high, and so the acoustic presented an enormous

Pendulum

challenge. Still, it was decided that we should try our hardest to make sure that what the crowd heard, we recorded. As well as recording multitracks and putting up the usual mics for crowd and ambience, we were to try and ‘mic up’ the front of house PA system, in an almost ‘classical’ recording style.

After a long session of clambering about in the roof and riding around in ‘cherry picker’ cranes lifters 20m (!) from the ground, Strong Hire had slung an impressive array of microphones around the venue, and after fading up the results in the sound check we were relieved to hear that our efforts had not been in vain. In fact the sound from the mics capturing the front of house mix was so good, Sigur Ros’s mix engineer proclaimed he’d hardly have to delve in to the multi track sound at all.

"Sigur Ros wanted to capture how it really was to be at the concerts in Alexandra Palace. Strong Hire went the extra mile and were very comprehensive in their ambient mic setup, in what is a very challenging acoustic... and it sounded really amazing!" - Birgir Jón "Biggi" Birgisson - Engineer - Sigur Ros.

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