"Hey, check out the crazy acoustic of this place, threatening to swamp us in a mire of mushy bass - there's the challange that Paulo Bastardos needs must answer immediately! And it's gonna take a bit of experimentation to get a fix on the best approach to address this mischievous gauntlet... Accordingly, Nadege must please accept my apologies for not getting their sound right for the first couple of tracks. I'd been informed - about a million times by the Circle Centre's happy hippies over the past few weeks - that 85db was the ceiling sound limit - and I see Dave (Nadege's top drummer) hitting 82db on his own! That left a measly couple of db's for everything else! Clearly we're gonna have to forget about these ridiculously unworkable and typically arbitrary petit-bourgeois 'rules'... there's great talent and a ever-growing crowd to attend to! The solution?: Much swift EQing - pushing mids/highs whilst cutting 400hz & < 100hz to stop bass boom & db swell - made it possible to have the artists appear louder than they actually were, and though we often peaked over 100db it just wasn't a problem (no complaints about noise polution were to be made at all that night). Nadege are cool and unfazable - best I've ever seen them play in fact - delivering a fiercely fine set of aching, haunted songs - both punkily immediate and automatically unique. Someone in the audience came up to me afterward and told me they thought they were absolutely the best band he'd seen & heard in years! Yes indeed..."
Pi Music live event review