KORAI ÖRÖM and Pluto - Stengade 30, København, Denmark May 17, 2001
From Aural Innovations #16 (June 2001)
This was the first show in years that my wife (Lani) would attend with me. It was great to finally get to see and meet this fantastic Hungarian band. I met up with Emil, the keyboard player, whom I had corresponded with via the email and had interviewed for Aural Innovations as well. Nice guy, as were the rest of the band. Pluto were some really boring Danish lo fi band. A lot of the crowd, perhaps, 50% were clearly here to see them though and I am quite sure they were happily surprised when Korai hit the stage. They opened with 2 of the new songs off the Sound and Vision CD and sounded excellent but the drums were mixed extremely loud. The band consisted of guitar, bass, drums, drums-percussion, synthesizer, singer-drums-percussion and a guy (Miklos) who played Jews harp, flute, clarinet, garden hose, digeridoo, and other wind instruments as well as throat singing. Wow. All the music was very rhythmic and percussive with an excellent groove and drive. I would have liked to hear the guitar a bit louder as he did some very nice spaced out guitar soloing. One of the highlights was the first two tracks of the 1997 CD. This was great! The crowd really got into the music a lot and was dancing and some were mesmerized by the excellent light and video projections. It was a great show and I can't wait for them to come back to Denmark again.
The Set list was: Bêla Ba, Szitaros, Honed Glalas, 7/8, Goya, Arab, Ricsi, Western, Dub and Taf. There was another song as well. Strange that none of their CDs have song titles but they do give them titles here for the concerts.
Reviewed by Scott Heller