Forget ORBITAL at LONDON DOCKLANDS, MOBY at EDINBURGH CASTLE or 60,000 raving Los Angeleans under the spell of ARMAND VAN HELDEN at the city’s COLISEUM on New Year’s Eve.
The oddest Hogmanay shebang is ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, inspired by sci-fi doyen Arthur C. Clarke’s novel of the same name.
The multi-media show is a three-way intergalactic meeting of minds between arch-electronic epic-noodler Jean Michel Jarre, the set designer behind Pink Floyd’s The Wall and the Millennium Dome’s stage show designer, Mark Fisher, and Japan’s leading composer, TK (aka Tetsuya Komuro).
The trio, going under the name The ViZitors, are reportedly viewing the project as “a multi-dimensional experiment” and say they want to “take entertainment in an exciting new direction”.
Set on a beach on the island of Okinawa in south west Japan, the event is free, but the island, situated three and a half-hour flight from Tokyo, can only hold 20,000 people. A spokesperson told NME.COM: “Jean Michel Jarre will play for 45 minutes, then TK, who is as big in Japan as Michael Jackson, followed by an all-night dance event with DJs.”
Clarke is working closely with Jarre to transform the beach with a series of images of space, from various artforms, projected on to a giant screen. It will be broadcast on Channel 10 satellite TV channel and beamed around the globe, as well as being webcast at a later date.
It will be the first in a series of ‘2001 RendeZvous In Space’ events to be held around the world throughout the year, and the soundtrack will be released later in 2001. A spokesperson for the event told NME.COM that the organisers were beginning to work out details for these, but said it was “very likely” that there would be some in Europe.