Linkin Park look forward to their first concert in Macau

The Grammy-award winning band, Linkin Park, promises to rock Macau this month. bc chats with Mike Shinoda about his expectations, the band’s future and Britney Spears.

What is the most exciting part about performing in Asia, or Macau in particular?
We really love to play and travel to new places. We love to play live! We also love to do these tours. It’s also always nice to have some new material to play. So having a song, New Divide, out in the Transformers soundtrack right now, will be [something new] to put into the set.

Do you have any expectations?
I have no idea what to expect! Our schedule right now is kind of tight and involves a lot of movement from place to place. So we’ll only probably be there for a few hours. But we intend to give the fans a good show.

How did Linkin Park reinvent itself as a band in the latest album, Minutes to Midnight?
I think that we evolved from Hybrid Theory, when we were trying to give people a taste of what we do at a time when a lot of bands were doing rap rock and nu metal. Hybrid Theory was the introduction to what the band does and I think fans absorbed that. We got to move on to Meteora, which was like the new and improved version of that. After that we wanted to travel to some unchartered territory and do something different. So Minutes to Midnight is a collection of many different sounds. The intention is to give people a lot of variety. Currently, we are moving to the next record, which will probably be out next year, and intend to create a new sound, which is still Linkin Park, but, hopefully, is cutting edge and unique and exciting for the fans.

Do you always choose a new sound for each album?
If it goes right and if it happens as we hope it will happen, then people should be able to listen to the next album and say, ‘That sounds like Linkin Park but it also sounds very new and it’s something different.’

What do you really dig listening to?
I listen to so much music that it’ll be really difficult for me to name any one thing. If you were to turn on my iTunes and play every song, it will play for, I think, 32 days, without repeating a song. So, I have lots of music in there, mostly because I listen to songs depending on my mood.

What is in your iPod right now?
Right now, let’s start at P. I have Passion, Pitt, Prodigy, RAC, Radio Head, Santogold, Ting Tings, U2, Wu Tang Clan… so lots of stuff.
All different.

Do you have Britney Spears?
I have one song, Toxic. That’s the only Britney Spears song out of 32 days of music. But then again, I also have the Muppets Theme, so I don’t know what that says about Britney (chuckles).

How do you feel about Linkin Park’s success after being together for more than 10 years?
We would have never guessed that the band would have this kind of success and that we would be doing it after so much time. And it’s a blessing to be able to do it. So we are trying to stay with appreciating that we are allowed to do what we love to do for a living. We try to do a good job when we make an album or put together a tour and hopefully the fans like what’s going on. We get a lot of good feedback on Linkinpark.com and Mikeshinoda.com and we try to keep in touch with the fans to see what they think. It has become like a community, where some people come to the sites every day and give suggestions. We appreciate any kind of involvement from the fans and we try to do stuff for the fans.

What kind of experience do you want your fans to get out of the Macau concert?
If you haven’t seen a Linkin Park show, which is likely, there will be times in the show when we are attempting to bring a song you’ve heard on an album alive in front of you and there are times when we make a song you’ve heard a million times into something new. So, in either case I hope people will hear their favourite Linkin Park songs done in a way that’s surprising and exciting.

Linkin Park - 7:30pm August 16, CotaiArena, tickets are MOP$880, MOP$580, MOP$380 www.cotaiticketing.com

23rd Macao International Music Festival

This year’s Macau International Music Festival, the 23rd, celebrates two special occasions - the 10th anniversary of the Macau SAR and the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China.

Among the international invitees to the festival, which runs from 9 October - 8 November, the biggest according the festival’s director Warren Mok, will be the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Australia’s flagship orchestra performs more than 180 concerts a year with some of the world’s most illustrious conductors and soloists. In Macau its chief conductor and artistic director Vladimir Ashkenazy will lead the orchestra in a programme that includes Rachmaninov’s Vocalise and Prokofiev’s Symphony No 5 in B-flat Major. Other highlights include the Macau Orchestra’s Butterfly Lovers, the Harlem Blues and Jazz Band and the San Francisco Opera.

The Vienna Boys Choir perhaps the most famous of all choirs is not actually one choir but a collection of four touring groups. The largest of which, the Shubertchor, will performing Chinese folk songs under their choirmaster Andy Icochea Icochea - a fascinating blend of East meets West.

Fusion music is a feature of this year’s festival - variations in rhythm, tempo and so on can be divided into smaller parts, each with their own dynamics and style. American group Flexible Music and Berlin-based contemporary jazz ensemble Link Together will create a musical symbiosis in the Dom Pedro V Theatre. The two groups will bring jazz, classical music and a synthesis of non-European rhythms into this cooperation.

This year marks the 200th birthday of Joseph Haydn and, in commemoration, the festival has invited one of the world’s great orchestras of original instruments, the Academy of Ancient Music, and its conductor Richard Egarr to perform Haydn’s Lord Nelson Mass. Haydn named this work Missa in Angustiis or Mass for Troubled Times, for the armies of Napoleon had crossed the Alps and were threatening Haydn’s home town, Vienna. However, as the mass was first performed, news came that Nelson had defeated Napoleon at the Battle of the Nile and so the work has come to be known as the Lord Nelson Mass. It will be performed in a programme that also includes works by Handel, Purcell and Gibbons.

Tickets are available from 10am, 2 August. Telephone and online bookings will be available from 2pm, www.macauticket.net.
Festival website: www.icm.gov.mo/fimm