H O E X T E R H O L O G R A M

Westphalia, Nov 2013

 
Ho Ho Hoexter…what a pleasure to return to this little enclave of ease and comfort after such a while. Last time we were all strangers expecting strangeness, August sun and carnival, this time we´re happy to meet people dear to our hearts, to face sounds dear to our heads....

But at first historical twilights, digging in the muddy dirt of an alleged correctness. The evil and the sun, Sorath and the frisson of reading between the lines...occvlt observance...
Quick time lessons and diluting art at Walhalla...six o ´clock and “I will walk you out” she says. Friendly assertiveness and doubtlessly we understand.

So one castle fades away and the next appears at the horizon...What a frequency of past! Appeasing to realize that nothing seemed to have changed here, except seasons and daytimes.
It feels good to be here. Noises and conversations, acquaintances and family relaxation.
Seeing the guys of Salvation AMP feels like never been away, like leaving for just buying some cigarettes, Reptyle´s way crossed the own more than once up to now (even in a personell-wise way for a while) and Sweet Ermengarde appeared firstly on our screen two years ago...at the edge of mercurian dawns. Stations in Bochum and he confessed “This night you won” contritely...

And the stable is filling and realizing certain faces it feels like being more than just guests in East-Westphalia. Minor geography and it´s intimicy. But the crowd is waiting now and the smoke machine is ready to serve...so... Ludi incipiant!

later...

What do I remember?
Mainly great songs I heard and an audience giving all it got. Not that usual frozen urban army (thin ice, I know!), but sweat and tears... analogously. And I remember drunken ghosts and colleagues named after islands (oh yes, there´s still a talk to be done if the ways are clear again!), dissappearing drink tickets and burning stars on a black cope, the coldness outside  and the celebration within. And the faces at the breakfast table reveal that it was the hell of a night. Tired soldiers, wrapped in the enemies´ uniform (whatever name the label bore...)

Farewells chilled through and the promise to return, sealed with coffee, beer and cigarettes. See you, Hoexter...you always meet thrice!

Hoexter, Nov 2013

 

H-A-M-B-U-R-G-H-Y-D-R-O-P-H-O-B-I-A

Hamburg, November 2013

Sequence one: a room full of people, young and stickily fashion-forwarded. They are starring on a screen, which displays water and waves, sun, skies and the tanned skins of more young and stickily fashion-forwarded people. Laughter and stickily fashion-forwarded mood.

Tilt: a band of people, pale and smoking...worlds colliding, blending of conditions...

The scent of the sea and the certainty always to call out the same places. Ships and tamed dreams, collapses and hill tribes, shame and resurrection, broken bones and reconstruction. We left a lot of footprints on this coast over the years, coming home to foreign land. Berlin seems aeons away already and the echo died away on highways. Strips and rates, vectors and the repeating joke of August Ferdinand M.

(And we´re crossing the space-time-bidges, followed by armies masked with seasons and empty promises, yelling chants of beauty and imbecility...)

“Are we there yet?” he´s asking and the lights go red, the ships leave the harbour and those, who are waving on the bank turn around and go abroad. An incantation reversed, the spell of an illiterate.

It is comfortable here, rustic as they say, corners and edges, alcoves and hideaways, just like the memory. A place for drinking, for sociability as they say...or for sounds and fog, like today.

Sequence two: a room full of people and one animal, post-war tiredness. Slowly the noises leave the heads and pave the way for thoughts. Lost opportunities, colourful conversations, torpidity in glasses and thoraxes full of souls. New days and old faces, new masks and old habits. Fingers run over spines of book and he tries to remember the last line....down and down and down and down...

Earlier:

The machines are ready, so as the people. Revolting sound waves and negligible geography and while watching and listenting to Lotus Feed, it feels like if we´re doing this for years together now. Songs from the past, happily rediscovered. I really like their energy, which doesn´t give a damn about ceiling heights and marine depths, about August Ferdinand M. and the people starring on displays later that evening. It just moves forwards...like that ship I know somebody waits for my waving on. But I rather stay here, rather dress myself in sound and fog and leave.

And we´re entering the peak, densely packed but inebriated by a free will and I like that feeling of being part of that organism, being part of that unity...dispersed on a handful of square centimeters. And then songs about devils and kings, about torments and vengeance and when the curtain falls we seem to have made it up with the sea and its inhabitants. Finally.

Conversations and change of scene. The set is going to be replaced and so the people..and the fog. Salutes and foreign languages, foreign colours and a screen outside...water and waves, sun and skies...

And facing the gap in the fabric we guess it´s time to leave. The war is over and post-war tiredness holds the door open. Just a few corners (which seem all rounded down for a late-night mind) and the bivouac appears some floors above. Time to get some sleep and time to run over some spines of books for recalling lost opportunities, reflecting colourful conversations, torpidity in glasses and thoraxes full of souls. A passing view from the railing and a turned away memory.

Don´t grieve over the waving one, who wasn´t there, who won´t be there at any day, just wish profoundly that he would go away...

Hamburg, November 2013

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

HISSSTORY

Dark Spring / Tolenstein Fest

 
…as always, when you´re looking back it is hard to detect that specific point when the “then” becomes “now” or today transforms to history.

Eight months were swallowed by that year already and measuring the angle, “Riot” seems so far away yet. Autumn crawls in again and I remember we had put finishing touches on the tracks when that happened the last time. So either time flies quicker these days or our perception went blank for a few pages!

“Where are we now?” someone was asking when this year arose and that´s what I now want to know too.

Since the last Dark Spring Fest Joe is part of that above mentioned preterit and still it is strange to outline a fact, which denies settling down permanently within your awareness. But that´s how things run! And sometimes they´re side-slipping, hitting names and faces.

But all the better it feels now to have Lutz aboard and Tolenstein and Nottingham have proved that chemistry seems to be adjustable (apart from a few laws and dogmas!)

I think that our winter shows won’t finish that year only, but also something else, something bigger. A fact or a circumstance, a state or a history.

As Plato said: Our minds are protrusions of the great, central, cosmic mind into the material world. Everything that has been experienced or thought in history is held in the memory of the cosmic mind – or perhaps, more accurately, lives in a sort of eternal now…

So let´s praise the dead and worship life…

Tolenstein / Dark Waters Nottingham

FINNEGANS SLEEP

November, 30. Mannheim

Mannheim, November 30th 2012

Sind Wogen geglättet?

Sind Gräben geflutet?

Gern...und mit angenehm leichter Bejahung. Ein Stück weit Vergessen ist die kapitale Ernüchterung und jener kollegiale Dolchstoß. Bittere Legende…Selbstbetrug.

Mannheim mag nicht schön sein (zumindest aus tagesfernen Autoscheiben betrachtet), aber es scheinen auffallend angenehme Menschen dort zu leben. Es war ein wirklich großartiger Abend und Wem auch immer sei gedankt, dass wir es dieses Jahr endlich geschafft haben! Der erste Schnee und vergärte Wolken an prophezeiten Historien.

Sonne – Wald – Sonne – Stakkato…

Zürich kriecht in Reichweite…

Dezember, 01. Zürich

Vorfreude…und dieses Jahr wird Mr. Joyce die Ehre erwiesen. Versprochen!

„…riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs…”

Viel, viel später…

I´m so sorry, Mr. Joyce…wieder hat es nicht sein sollen. Schnee und Bürokratie haben Zeit gestohlen und Pläne geraubt. Dann halt nächstes Mal.

(Sie lächelt, als sie sagt wie traurig sie ist und es fällt mir schwer nicht zu weinen beim Gedanken wie froh ich bin!)

Zürich war schön. Wie jedes Mal. Vertraute Orte und vertraute Gesichter. Wären immer noch die spinnenwebrigen Halloween-Dekorationen an den Wänden gewesen, würde es in 20 Jahren schwerfallen die Ereignisse auseinanderzuhalten. Obwohl – diesmal waren alle Bands da!

Und als eindeutiges Indiz eines Jetzt-Bewusstseins ist da diese kaum abzuschüttelnde meteorologische Kälte. Doch bis auf das kurze Aufblitzen ihrer emotionalen Schwester (im amourösen Reigen mit befremdlicher Selbst- Apotheose, irgendwo im Süden eines Landes) ist dies alles händel- und ertragbar. (Es sei denn man gehört zu jenen, die aufgrund gewollter Unmengen an Zigaretten Unmengen an Zeit vor Türen verbringen müssen!)

Es war sicherlich kaum mehr als geplanter Zufall, dass die kulturelle Konkurrenz nur Katzensprünge weit weg Tagebuch führte. Aber ich denke wir hatten alle das gleiche Maß an Freude!

Das erste was bleibt, ist Müdigkeit und die Erinnerung an einen nicht vorhandenen Schlaf… (Geräusche und Dunkelheit, fauchende Dämonen und röchelnde Phantome, Acheron´s Quelle scheint ganz nah zu sein – Ich habe Angst!)…

Das zweite was bleibt, ist der angenehme Nachgeschmack und das Wissen mein Versprechen gegenüber Mr. Joyce und ihr bald einzulösen.

Das dritte was bleibt, ist die befreiende Reinheit von Schnee...

Fortsetzung folgt...

÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷

November, 30th - Mannheim

Do we have calmed the waves?

Do we have flooded the moats?

Gladly…and with a slight case of affirmation. Almost out of mind are the major disenchantment and that collegial dagger thrust. A bitter legend… self-deception.

Mannheim may not be the loveliest place on earth (at least what you see through day-afar car windows!), but it seems there are remarkably enjoyable people at home.

It was a really great eve and I´d like to thank whomsoever for making it happen finally that year. The first snow and fermented clouds in predicted histories…

Sun – wood – sun - staccato

Zurich is crawling in reach…

December, 1st - Zürich

Pleasant anticipation…and this time I´ll make Mr. Joyce proud. Promised!

„…riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs…”

At some remote period…

I´m so sorry, Mr. Joyce…again it wasn’t meant to be. Snow and bureaucracy have stolen time and robbed plans. We have to catch it up the next time!

(She´s smiling while telling how sad she is and it´s hard not to cry when I think about how glad I am!)

Zurich was great. As it has been everytime. Known places and known faces. If all those cobwebbed Halloween decoration would have been on the walls still, it would be hard to differentiate the events in twenty years. On the contrary - all bands were in attendance this time!

And as an obvious indication for a today´s awareness there´s this meteorological coldness, what is hardly to shake off. But besides the short flashing of its emotional sister (round dancing with a disconcerting self-apotheosis, somewhere in the southern part of a land) it is all bearable and sufferable. (Unless you´re one of those, who have to spend quantities of hours outside for the joy of quantities of cigarettes!)

Surely it was little more than a contrived coincidence that the cultural competition kept their diary just a stone´s throw away, but I think we all had the same measure of fun!

The first that remains is the tiredness and the memory of a nonexistent sleep (noises and darkness, spitting demons and rattling phantoms, the well of Acheron has to be very close – I´m afraid!)…

The second that remains is the pleasant aftertaste and the knowledge to deliver the promise I gave Her and Mr. Joyce very soon.

The third that remains is the liberating pureness of snow…

to be continued...

Zurich, December 1st 2012

NOVEMBER

November is coming in a clear and cold way. And so we´re shaking off the summer´s dust, cleaning our clothes and cleaning our veines. 

It feels so good, that RIOT made it´s way up to here. Who could have predicted that a few seasons ago?

(Thinking of a song by the Kaiser Chiefs, coincidentally...?)

I remember when we started “Riot”, the song, miles away from anything we are today. Holes in the structure and holes in our heads. But from that point on I already knew that all we were about to do, musically, lyrically, mentally would be stamped by the word RIOT.

Was it an intent?

Was it a premonition?

And what has italy´s capital to do with that? Or that little club in Berlin we waved goodbye to a decade at? Maybe the answers will be revealed at the end of the next chapter or maybe no one will ever know.

Rhea Silvia is spinning and an autumn is leaving a head...

Just two weeks ´til RIOT´s baptism and I´m a liar when I say that I don´t care.

Nervous? Maybe...Excited? Definitely....

It feels a bit like coming home.. or leaving permanently. Concretely...whatsoever...

Two years chained to sixty minutes – what a density that´s effecting!

The halo of a milky circle and the path the november is crawling in...clear and cold...and free from summer´s dust...