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1999 - Showbiz 2001 - Origin of Symmetry 2003 - Absolution 2006 - Black Holes And Revelations 2009 - The Resistance 2012 - The 2nd Law 2015 - Drones
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The Greatest show on Earth: on tour with the band Muse Matt Bellamy jokingly calls his group "global ambassadors of fear and paranoia".
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Chaotic symmetry Muse: The history of the creation of "Origin Of Symmetry" 17-07-2015
It was 2001, and humanity was entering the new millennium with hope and fears.
Behind us is a century of scientific and technological progress, bloody world wars, space exploration, postmodernism and the formation of popular music.
Hundreds of musical genres and trends were born, strengthened, evolved, captured the world, crawled to the sidelines, went into oblivion and resurrected in just a few decades.
In the late 90s, rock bands increasingly began to turn their eyes to the past.
Americans The Strokes and The White Stripes and Australians The Vines, inspired by the aesthetics and sound of the 60s and 80s, breathed life into garage rock and paved the way for countless indie bands of the 2000s.
In Britain, the popularity of britpop was gradually declining, and Thom Yorke and his colleagues hit electronic experiments, upsetting part of the army of their fans.
A virus called "nu metal" was rapidly spreading in the world...
"Origin of Symmetry" did not fit into everything that was happening.
It sounded bold and strange, breaking boundaries and rushing into the future.
Welcome to the beautiful nightmarish world of one of the most surreal, to the caricature of ridiculous baroque and roll bands ever born by Albion. (Roger Morton, NME)
In 1999, the popular presenter of BBC Radio 1, Steve Lamak, put the song Muse on the radio for the first time.
This one was "Muscle Museum", which charmed the listeners and reached the third position in the indie chart of the United Kingdom.
In the same year, the band's debut album "Showbiz" was released, several laudatory reviews of their concert performances appeared, and the famous NME journalist Mark Beaumont interviewed ordinary Devon guys, in which he persistently compared them to Radiohead.
Thus began the public life of Muse and their difficult ascent to fame.
From the very beginning, the band divided music lovers and critics into two camps: those who admired its crazy energy, amazing concert performances and eccentric antics of the frontman, and those who considered Muse another pale copy of Radiohead, a pretentious dummy with a Freddie Mercury complex, shamelessly trampling on the classical heritage.
The stumbling block for many was the unusual, nervous vocals of Matthew Bellamy.
Some described the sounds he made as "the screams of a harpy being burned at the stake" and "the hum of a vacuum cleaner pumped up with drugs."
Others admired the "vocal pirouettes of the British Gelsomino" and the "ear splitting falsetto of the opera diva on cocaine", which did not fit into the charts.
There were also those who, refraining from any epithets, simply pressed the "stop"button.
For two years since the release of the debut record, the band has been touring continuously.
In the States, they warmed up the rock giants Foo Fighters and Red Hot Chili Peppers, gaining experience for their future grand stadium shows.
Matt selflessly destroyed equipment at concerts and increasingly confided in journalists about government conspiracies, seances, alien invasions, magic mushrooms, psychological wars and Berlioz, gradually turning into a real, incredibly strange and very charming rock star.
In 2000, the band won in the category "Best New Band" at the NME Awards ceremony.
All this paved the way for the second album, which strengthened the positions of both fans and opponents of the band.
With the release of this record, the following geniuses turned over in their coffins at the same time: Johann Sebastian Bach, Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninov, Richard Wagner and some others. (Fuzz № 11, 2001)
Despite half a million copies of the debut record sold and a growing army of fans, Muse still remained in the shadows.
Released in March 2001, the single "Plug In Baby", a radio hit with a recognizable neoclassical riff, quickly broke into the 11th line of the chart and changed the situation.
The subsequent "New Born" reached the 12th place in June and set up fans of the Devon trio for an album full of well tailored rock fighters.
But the group is not used to meeting anyone's expectations.
"Origin of Symmetry" was recorded much faster than the rest of the albums – in a few short studio sessions, squeezed into a busy tour schedule.
The record label "Taste Media" planned to re entrust the production to John Leckie, who worked on the first longplay, but since he was in Africa, it was decided to record several songs with Dave Bottrill, known for his collaborations with Tool, King Crimson, Dream Theater and Peter Gabriel.
The songs "New Born", "Plug In Baby", "Bliss" and " Darkshines "were recorded at Rich Farm Studios (Surrey) at the end of 2000 – in between performances in Scandinavia and Australia.
The band created an atmosphere in the studio that was close to a live performance, trying to sound like the three of them were playing on stage when recording.
"It was a great time, we were fooling around, eating mushrooms and all that, being cut off from the world in the Surrey wilderness," Dominic said.
"There were a lot of hallucinogenic mushrooms growing not far from the studio where we worked, so we ate everything we could find, and then everything was like in a fog.
Everything we did seemed brilliant to me.
I thought: "Oh, this bass drum sound is the most beautiful thing I've heard in my life."
In the first couple of days, we managed to record quite a lot, and then mushrooms and other things started to come into play, and we stopped understanding what was happening – " Matt recalled.
– I remember how I tried to use my voice in the introduction to "New Born" instead of the piano, and it sounded idiotic.
It was only when we were at home a month later that we realized that everything we had recorded was complete garbage.
No, it's definitely not Dave's fault, the recordings of the main parts were excellent, but the mixed versions of the songs were far from ideal.
So, although the use of hallucinogens really expands consciousness and all that, you need to give everything a final form on a sober head."
The band had to turn to John Kornfield, a recording engineer from the Sawmills studio, and together with him they had to redo the recorded tracks for several days.
The songs recorded with Botrill best reflected the spirit of concert performances.
(Interestingly, "Plug In Baby" and "New Born" are still among the three most frequently played things).
They were considered by the band as the backbone of the new album, around which it was possible to experiment.
John Leckie, like no one else, was suitable for working on more strange, sometimes invading the territory of art rock compositions that reveal various facets of Matthew Bellamy's unbridled imagination.
"Origin of Symmetry" is a minor, heavy and infinitely inventive album, an unimaginable synthesis of human thought and developing technologies. (Henry Yates, Total Guitar)
"From the very beginning, the idea was that Dave Botrill would work with the band on potential hits, and I would do more unusual songs.
We went to the Real World Studios in Wiltshire and recorded in the Great Hall, then spent some time at the Astoria, a floating studio on the Thames owned by David Gilmour.
Then there was a week of work at Abbey Road, after which the band went to the Sawmills studio to finish tracks with John Cornfield, " John Leckie recalled.
Matt: "When recording the album, we tried to reflect those aspects of our creativity that have not yet been fully manifested.
These are progressive, hard rock elements and our eccentricity.
When we were working on the album "Showbiz", we selected songs for it that have a more or less traditional structure.
When we started working on the second album, we did the opposite, focusing on material that goes beyond the usual framework."
Inspired by the performances of Tom Waits in New York, Matt decided to use the strangest instruments imaginable in the recording process to achieve an organic sound and a dark psychedelic atmosphere.
He suggested that Lecky use a human skull as percussion, but had to settle for animal ribs bought at a nearby butcher shop.
In search of original sounds, Lecky forced the guys to hang llama claws around their necks before recording each song, walk on packaging film and rustle newspapers.
When recording the ending of the song "Space Dementia", the band members tried shakers, salt and pepper shakers, but as a result they decided to use the zipper on Matt's pants, passing the sound through the microphone.
Chris: "This is the first time we started recording an album from scratch.
I think that for most bands, the first record is a collection of songs written since the formation of the band.
The second studio album was recorded in a completely different atmosphere.
We needed to write an album united by a certain idea.
I think it gives you complete freedom of action, because there is a blank canvas in front of you, and you can draw anything you want on it, and experiment as you like."
When Darwin titled his book "The Origin of Species", he went beyond a simple classification, providing a logical explanation for the diversity of living beings that we observe in nature.
In physics, we need our own equivalent of this work, which could be called "The Origin of Symmetry".
This book would explain the reason for the existence of symmetrical forms in nature. (Michio Kaku, "Hyperspace")
Matt has repeatedly confessed his love for science.
In the period following the release of the debut book, he was fond of popular literature about the structure of the universe and its laws.
"At that time, I was reading Hyperspace, one of those books that talks about superstring theory, which combines quantum mechanics with Einstein's general theory of relativity and claims to be a comprehensive universal theory that explains everything.
This is a kind of Holy Grail of physicists.
These ideas fascinated me, as well as a number of other things.
The book raises questions about why everything in the universe is in such an amazing balance, which is the source of symmetry.
This is a more scientific statement of the question of the meaning of our existence.
I thought that in the process of creating crappy riffs, experimenting with the synthesizer and mocking the piano, I would be able to get closer to the answer."
Dom: "The title is taken from a book that Matt was reading at the time.
This is some kind of abstruse thing about physics, and he pretended that he liked it.
The meaning of the name is whether it is possible, by studying the universe, to determine what we all exist for."
"Origin of Symmetry" is not the case when you can make an impression about the album already by the first chords.
The tight, strong, metallic sound of the first songs roaring from the speakers, and the ultra modern intuitive production of Bottrill and Lecky created the impression that the authors of "Showbiz" broke straight into the 25th century. (Mark Beaumont)
Thinking over the visual component of the release, the group asked 12 artists to fantasize on the topic "The Origin (beginning, source, root cause) of symmetry".
As a result, the album cover was the work of William Iger, depicting a flat white surface on which giant tuning forks or antennas are arranged in a certain order, resembling a rugby goal.
In an interview, Matt said that the antennas symbolize a civilization destroyed by technology.
During headlining performances at festivals in Reading and Leeds in 2011, dedicated to the tenth anniversary of the album, a video was shown on the screen to the sounds of "New Born", in which mysterious forks and tuning forks transmitted messages to aliens.
Some of the works included in the booklet were also used for singles.
Adam Cruickshank's drawing became the cover of the single "New Born".
Leo Marcantonio's abstraction seemed to be the best solution for the artistic design of "Bliss" , and Tim Berry's picture decorated CD 2 in the double single "Hyper Music/Feeling Good".
We finished mixing "Origin", and the next day we went on tour again.
Everything happened in a hurry.
It seems to me that for this reason the album turned out exactly like this…There is something inconsistent, chaotic about it.
It seems that the general idea is present, but it is not fully disclosed.
But maybe that's the attraction of it. (Chris Wolstenholme)
Some facts 1.
In the UK chart, "Origin of Symmetry" reached the third place.
The album went platinum in the UK and Australia.
2. The label "Maverick", on which Muse was signed, refused to release the album in the United States due to fears that Matt's extraordinary vocals would hinder the rotation of songs on the radio and successful sales.
The group refused to change anything and preferred to say goodbye to the company.
Serj Tankian from System Of Down offered to license the album on his label "Serjical Strike", but the attempt failed.
In the United States, the album debuted on the chart only in 2005.
3. The inspiration for the guitar riff in " Plug In Baby "was" Toccata and Fugue in D Minor "by Johann Sebastian Bach and the track" Organ Donor " by DJ Shadow.
The riff from "Plug In Baby" appeared during the jams during the tour with the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
It was named the best riff of the noughties by the results of a survey of readers of the magazine "Total Guitar" in 2010.
4. During the first performance, the ending of the song "Citizen Erased" was played on the guitar.
The piano version has been used since April 2001.
"Citizen Erased" was the only song that Matt played on the seven string "Manson".
In a 2010 interview, Matt said that this was the first guitar he bought from Hugh Manson's store.
5. For the song "Megalomania" Muse had to record the part on the organ.
After being rejected by the Welsh Cathedral, they looked into the Church of St. Mary in the town of Bathwick, Somerset.
The priest, before giving consent, wanted to see the lyrics of the song and make sure that there was nothing vicious or anti Christian in it.
Matt sketched out a text that had nothing to do with the album version, and the band got permission.
In an interview, Matt says that he had to pay the priest 350 pounds.
Chris once asked Matt what the song was about.
Matt gave an unintelligible answer, and Chris never asked about it again.
6. The cover version of the song "Feeling Good", written by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley for the musical "The Roar Of The Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd", reached such a level of popularity that the company "Nescafé" decided to use it for its TV advertising without the band's knowledge.
However, lawyers hired by the group claimed copyright to the Muse version and forced the company to remove it from the video.
Nescafé attracted session musicians who performed the song, imitating the manner of Muse, and the band received compensation from the company for the unauthorized use of their cover and gave the money to the charity organization Oxfam.
"Feeling Good" in the interpretation of Muse took the fifth place in the list of the best covers according to the magazine "Total Guitar" in 2008.
This version is heard in the movie "Seven Lives", as well as in an advertisement for Virgin Atlantic.
7. Matt said that one of his favorite songs is "Bliss", as it reminds him of a children's music program that he watched at the age of five.
"I took the loss from there.
This song takes me to a time when I looked at the world easier and it was more pleasant to live."
In fact, Matt is referring to the first "Top Gear" game for Super Nintendo.
8. Matt about " Space Dementia": "In this song, you can hear a Rachmaninoff motif – a piece of melody taken from his Second Piano Concerto and played on a synthesizer.
This is such a conscious wink to Rachmaninoff.
Of course, I will never reach his level of skill, but, nevertheless, I decided to use this fragment and I think that people understand where the inspiration came from.
At that time, I was interested in the music of the romantic period and tried to cross the piano with rock in this song" In September 2001, Muse came to Russia for the first time to participate in the presentation of the Russian version of the British edition of "New Musical Express".
The concert was held at the Luzhniki Sports Palace.
The band played 15 songs from the first two albums, and they opened with Nike Borzov, Semantic Hallucinations, Night Snipers and Total.
10. In the Russian animated series "Masyanya", a rock band consisting of Masyanya, Shaggy and Hryundel performs a cover of the song " New Born "(episode"Russian Punk Rock").
To be continued…
Tori Emmett BritishWave.ru
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