B-E-R-L-I-N-B-E-L-F-R-Y

Berlin, November 2013

 Travel time O13 and I wonder what it is that makes it so special to play the homelands. Is it the faces, the familiar ones, all connected to certain and different aspects offstage of the routine you call life? The missing chance to leave the next day the same way you came, as a stranger? Or just the prophet´s missing honour in his own country (as Doc Marten will splendidly remark a few weeks later) that plants expectations, doubts, fears and muzzles for the ego deep in the corners of a solid brain?

Whatever, I´m fucking more nervous the usual...

Another point is the completely missing glamour while taking the train to the venue! Punching a ticket is all but rock`n`roll, no matter how hard you try. That´s why I´m glad that the Urban Spree is withing walking distance, at least from that point I´m standing now.

The maelstrom´s silhouette is pumping light in the dark sky and it´s breathing, gasping, rattling and sighing sounds so deceptively peaceful from here above that I almost fall for it. Trains and cars, people and ghosts and suddenly, not able to detect a reason, I have a line in my mind:”A man in my shoes runs a light and all the papers lied tonight...” Yes, you´re right Mr. Butler, time for chasing some ghosts tonight...Samael is already chomping at the bit...

The last time we met Lotus Feed (as far as I can remember!) was in Berlin too, supporting Mark Burgess´ ChameleonsVox early in 2011, just a stone´s throw away from here. Omen? I hope not, because I can´t remember anything but an incomplete band, one of the most beautiful eyes I ever wanted to fall in and a guy puking in the backyard of the Magnet. Rock`n`Roll, eh?

Difficult decision: finishing that cigarette wrapped in fascist coldness or entering the club?

Ice crystals and smoke are filling my lung and addiction is an asshole...

Shaking hands and it´s always strange to replace virtuality by reality, to face faces instead of pictures and while written messages can easily become chapters, now you catch yourself tainted with shyness and missing words. Phrases with masks. (A state due to erase just 24 hours later!)

Just a few minutes until some curtains will raise and Gabriel gets edgy in his stable...

And here they are, the faces, the familiar ones and I really forgot that some of them feel quite well. There are lost companions, thieves and servants, jugglers and forgers, beggars and soldiers, wizards and witches, midgets, giants, sirens…social myths and fables. Feels a bit like home all around…

…some sounds, drinks and cigs later…

Think it was a night worth to remember. I liked Aeon Sable´s felt otherness in combination with that undiluted Goth sound and I enjoyed Lotus Feed´s emotionally punching performance. (Later that tour I will try to list all covers they had done, but I will fail. Cure, Bauhaus, Joy Division, Chameleons…seems we have the same record dealer! Or just the same musical socialisation…)

It felt good standing up there and spotting Uriel in the crowd made me feel comfortable in a way I had barely expected. Not sure if sounds a bit too cheesy now, but it felt great to play “Snow” that night the first time after almost two years. “Where I´m at home…?” I guess in that particular moment I was sure about the answer.

A last hug, a last drink, last snatches of music…time to rush northwards. A prophet is packing his bag and we have to leave too. The sails are hoisted and the homesickness is moored…Hamburg, we´re leaving the harbour…. 

Berlin, November 2013

M-I-N-D-E-N-M-I-M-I-C-R-Y

Minden / Detmold,  November 2013

Travel time O13 and I wonder why always in winter?  The price to pay for fame, money and sexual excesses? Okay…I should leave that thought.

There´s coldness on mirrors and there´s coldness in rooms and I hate coldness in rooms, because the four-sided architectural boundary of space is supposed to suggest refuge from the outside, a sanctuary, a prehistoric cave-fire-warmth archetype, what coldness is ripping to shreds. So it feels like always entering an outside, a never finishing arrival, always on the go, on the run (from what seems to have slipped my mind!)…breathless.

But…I also hate artificial warmth! That dryness of the air, which is scraping on pharynx and throat, like inhaling sand. Seems there´s a lot of hate around these days!

Minden and Detmold might be no candidates for coming global political or historical events and I guess that the actual history got lost there by accident only, but both places are far away enough from the Berlin maelstrom and work well as a placebo for the usual and the familiar.

Disconnection where pagans dance, patriotic self-reflection in the dead angle of history, vertigo, some local drinks, homelands through a lens…tourist tour. And it works and it feels well.

Standing on a stage in Minden feels a bit like landing on a foreign planet, where all is still in order, structured and in the right position. People are nice, appreciating distances and taking care of comfort, so that I feel a bit ashamed while singing the last lines of “Happy Losers…”

Everything seems so pristine, so pure and free from the corrosion of the metropolitan tumor. No porous sub-culture, instead an audience with no special demands, grateful and all dressed up.

It´s a night full of conversation and observation, an alien studying a race… although I think this sounds more reprehensible than it was meant to be. It really feels good to be here. Lots of charming faces and the songs of No Heart Country are fucking great. Great tunes to swim through a night. Wish I could drink the focus away, just for being wrapped in blur, but for the fact that I don´t do that it´s better to stop here for putting the feet up on a table in a room of a guesthouse, which has the word “anchor” in it´s name. I really don´t get the link!

There´s a breakfast waiting around the corner and another stage, a few more colleagues to meet and a few more hands to shake. So Detmold, we´re on our way!

later...

Strange. Just a few miles but different worlds. Detmold was bit like time travelling, back to the places of musical origins. Rooms full of improvisitions, optically and aural, a self-governed anomy. Lists containing –isms to decline (learned the word “Lookism”!) and a kind of an elitist tolerance. Strange mixture and not even coffee. (Guess it was something about the dignity of the bean or some other ethical template).

No matter...the bands were enjoyable. Mindslide´s cure-ish landscapes, Salvation Amp´s amplitudes of salvation and finally some backing guys, who did a hell of a job. And all was full of foggy air, spartan lights, girls an boys in leather and black and a public adress speaker, which seemed to writhe at the death´s door. Time leap – two decades back. Great.

And if you sit in a kitchen, early morning dazed (finally got my coffee then!), surrounded by really enjoyable people, words and jokes, thoughts and laughter, then you know what´s the reward for all the miles on highways, all the hours waiting in cold backstage rooms, all the coffee-less ages.....

Some cigarette smoke gets entangled in a naked november tree, somewhere in the grey and murky vastness of Westphalia...the greatest murkiness I´ve ever seen.... 

Minden / Detmold, November 2013