Cynic were, as they said themselves, too late to book for many summer festivals, so they ended up doing 9 gigs in Europe in a month’s time and took the rest of the days of travelling. They did one gig in the Netherlands though and this took place in Amstelveen in the club P60. A place I had never been before, probably they don’t program much metal. But it was only a 40 minutes drive away.

The first band was about to start when I entered the hall and so I was right on time, which was 15.30. I had never heard of this band Dosa Jhana so I hardly knew what to expect, and there was little to find on the web outside their myspace. It turned that this Dutch band plays some kind of progressive metal I guess. Not all that interesting really, but not too bad either except the clean vocals which were at times awful. Anyway, they played four songs in half an hour as the singer said that was all the songs they had.

It took nearly half an hour to clear the stage for main act Cynic. All the stage monitors were gone as they apparently use an in-ear monitoring system. So the stage appeared pretty empty. Paul and Sein were helped out by two Dutch guys on bass and second guitar/vocals, both of Exivious. They started with Nunc Fluens followed by The Space For This. And I think they played all of the new album Traced in Air, with additional tracks from Focus, including Veil of Maya, Textures, and set closer How Could I. In between the songs Paul spoke sometimes, but mostly this was filled by spoken passages from some philosopher or whatever. A big screen behind them continuously displayed weird artistry much alike the pictures in the album booklets. Somehow most of this music works much better live than on disc where it sounds quite tame, live it all sounds much stronger and vivid. Not that there was audience activity really, which Paul noticed as well. I guess that had much to do with the timing, a Sunday afternoon gig; this must have been the earliest ending of a gig I ever went to, slightly passed 17.30 it was all over.