MetalSymphony.com has pisted a photo gallery from EPICA's October 29th show Barcelona, Spain at Sala Salamandra, which took place without vocalist Simone Simons, who was sidelined due to illness. Pictures of support acts SONS OF SEASONS and AMBERIAN DAWN are also available. Check out the galleries and a review in Spanish here.

Epica’s setlist was as follows:

'Samadhi'

'Resign To Surrender'

'Menace Of Vanity'

'Quietus'

'Crystal Mountain' (DEATH cover)

'Martyr Of the Free World'

'Kingdom of Heaven'

'The Obssessive Devotion'

'Star Wars' (cover)

- drum solo-

'Seif Al Din'

'Incentive'

'The Phantom Agony'

The following two shows, in Madrid and Lisbon, were cancelled due to Simons having lost her voice. According to an update from the band, they will perform in Toulouse, France tonight (November 3rd) as planned.

Remaining dates on Epica's European tour are as follows:

November

3 - Bikini - Toulouse, France
4 - Transbordeur - Lyon, France
5 - Z7 - Pratteln, Switzerland
6 - Elysee Montmartre - Paris, France
7 - Elysee Montmartre - Paris, France

As previously reported, Epica guitarist / founder Mark Jansen recently spoke with BW&BK; scribe Carl Begai about the band's new album, Design Your Universe. An excerpt from the story is available below:

Design Your Universe doesn’t start on an inspirational note. If anything the orchestral intro is downright boring, a predictable soundbyte that could have been cut and pasted from any of Epica’s previous records.

“I actually got the same reaction from Sander Gommans,” laughs Jansen, referring to his old After Forever bandmate. “I played him Design Your Universe and after the first song he asked me ‘Aren’t you able to do something new? I’m a bit disappointed that you’re still on the same track.’ I just told him to keep on listening (laughs). It’s a lot heavier than he and a lot of people expected. You really have to listen to the whole album before judging it. That’s why I asked Sander to listen to the other stuff before coming to any conclusions. From that point he kept giving me the thumbs up as the album progressed.”
“We tried to do some things that we’ve never done before,” Jansen continues. “The guitar solos, for example, Ad (Sluijter / ex-guitarist) was a solo guitarist but he didn’t want to play any, and you can’t force someone to do something they don’t want to do. So this is really the first Epica album with real guitar solos on it, and I loved working on them with Isaac. He would try out different solos on the songs and we’d decide which ones worked the best. It was fun to play around with them and work in that way. I’m very happy about having Isaac in the band. We wrote more and more with the guitars this time. In the past every song was built up starting with the orchestra, but this time half the songs started with only guitar riffs. For example, ‘Martyr Of The Free World’ and ‘Semblance Of Liberty’ were written completely on guitar and we added the orchestral parts here and there. It was a completely different way of working, but that’s what I mean by keeping yourself motivated and challenging yourself by doing something differently.”

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