Vikram Shankar here, just wanted to come in real quick and thank everyone for their kind words re: the Pain of Salvation gigs last year. It was beyond surreal to play with the guys for a month, including the historic Perfect Element set.
He's awesome but there are moments when I feel like he's overplaying a bit in the TPE gig and throwing in flashy stuff that was never really part of the PoS vocabulary. If he became full time I'd wanna see that reigned in a bit personally. But, super nice guy bringing tons of energy for sure. Maybe they could keep him and have D2 fill the empty bass position...
Appreciate the honesty! When prepping for the TPE gig I asked Daniel what his approach to that side of things was, as well as freedom to improv and be creative, and he was open to a degree of creative freedom, and so for certain parts of the set, like some of the "jammy" parts of In The Flesh, I did let loose a little bit. Perhaps a bit much, in hindsight. I tend to get fully immersed in the energy and spirit of the songs and in the spirit of that, sometimes things happen that you don't foresee. I guess that's the joy of true live performance.

For the vast majority of the TPE gig I did try to view it as a sort of "historical" event and be as faithful to the original recording as possible, spending time researching the original equipment and patches used, and trying to use splits and layers and patch programming to execute live things that ordinarily would have either been ignored or relegated to back track, like the string quartet parts. I apologize if anything I did in that set was a bit much, but it was out of love, I promise
