On last Sunday evening, I went to see Skydyed perform at Brooklyn Bowl in New York. The last-minute booking on an odd day for a concert in a bowling alley reduced the actual attendance to just me.
I discovered Skydyed on October 2016 when my Spotify Weekly Discover playlist included High Enough:
The self-described progressive electronic rock with live drums immediately caught my ear, and I went on to listen to the rest of the discography of the trio hailing from Fort Collins, Colorado. I fell in musical love with their whole repertoire, and I immediately looked for eventual concert dates in New York.
Alas, they had never set foot near my home, only touring in Colorado and around. Until the evening of Sunday September 9th 2018, when I learned through their Twitter feed that they were appearing at Brooklyn Bowl, a hipster bowling alley with an adjoined concert hall. The crowd was pretty thin for the first act, LDF, a funk band with a full brass section, but it got even thinner for Skydyed.
By the middle of the set, the audience was only comprised of the bass player’s sister taking pictures, their tour driver and me, which means that I was the only one they were interacting with between songs. The set itself was great, with a mix of classics and new production, with extended live performances for most of them.
Now the sound mix wasn’t ideal, I barely recognized some songs because some backdrop audio tracks simply weren’t audible, covered by the amplified sound of the instruments. And I’m not always a fan of their most recent softer music productions.
But at this point it didn’t really matter anymore, this band that I had wanted to see in concert for almost two years were now playing on stage just for me.
Bonus: Here’s the set list of their show:
- High Enough (Extended)
- Human Nature
- Morning Ritual
- Soundflower (Extended)
- Memory Meditation (Extended)
- Soundflower (Return)
- Simplify
- Peace by Piece
- Endless Space (Extended)
- The Long Way Back (Extended)
- Endless Space (Return)
- Tidal Surge
- Grow
- To Give It All
- Flicker Switch
I also created the concert’s playlist of Spotify based on their released tracks.