Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Dockville- It All Ends In Blood



Again, long time without posting. BUT, I had good reason. I spent most of my days and nights out at Dockville sight building, teaching, playing, DJing, whatever else I felt like doing, and being on a computer was not something I generally felt like doing.

We played with this group of kids for a week. They wrote their own lyrics to a couple songs (one being We Will Rock You...) and then performed for their parents and others on that weekend.








Last Saturday, not this past one, but the one before that, we held a little party out there on hte horn and Terrible Eagle and the Gallantiers played to a small group of people.






The rest of these pics are from the festival proper.

The first couple are of people playing the instruments on the horn. I have to say this, it was amazing to see the reaction of the people. The festival had something like 15,000 people at it and I believe most of them passed through the horn at some point, and I would guess that most of those people beat on something for a couple seconds or minutes, or like the first guy in these, Max, spent most of their festival experience on the horn playing. It was magic to see all these people communicating without words. We gave them the tools and the place, and they gave us the music. Sure, it wasn't always good, but it was always fun.










On Friday night, I DJed on the horn. All of the above pictures are from that experience. Hundreds of people all dancing wildly and letting loose. AMAZING. I had a ball.




Spectrum played in the middle of the afternoon on Saturday and someone stole Pete's hash...









All in all, this has been the most magical experience of the last years of my life. I can not express how grateful I am to everyone who helped and jammed and made this possible. You've all been amazing.

Here are other links that I found in the last days, both from Tim (SPRDFKT)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sdfkt/3825550707/in/photostream/
the sound quality on this is pretty bad, but at the festival, it was really amazing. Thanks Toby.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBOIcS3EFzM

Monday, August 3, 2009

fashion or function?

Hey- My Computer is working again and I have a few minutes while I wait for a call back from the American Embassy in Berlin concerning getting more pages for my passport.

In the last week or so, I've been pretty busy. I had my 34th birthday and spent the majority of my days out at Dockville, then went down to the south of Germany to play a festival in the Hollfeld area near Bayreuth and then drove back up here to Hamburg the next day on a spare tire in order to be around for last night's opening of theart portion of the Dockville Festival.

I did this entry in sections so as to not confuse. They aren't really cronological like normal, but this gives you a broad overview of the last days.

Section A- My Birthday at POW Gallery

Both Justin, from the Gallantiers, and I had our birthdays last week. Mine on Sunday and his this past Friday. We decided to throw a joint party at our favorite place in Hamburg, POW Gallery. Helena handled the cops quite nicely while we were playing and then handled the bar. Tim (AKA SUPRDFKT) DJed. It was a GREAT time. My cousin Melli even made an appearance with her friend Lotte that she brought to America some years back.





Section 2- Dockville Stage Build

This is the stage/horn/art installation we are building.












Section III- Dockville Instruments

On the stage are instruments that we built. Here is us building some.









These are a few "finished" pieces. Our marimba broke last night, so tomorrow, I fix it.






The thing above is like a turntable. The cards pluck the strings that are in the boxes above the turntables.




The dude playing is Clay, he's from Australia. Cool muthafukka.

Section d- Klangtherapie

These are the images us and the Gallantiers at the Klangtherapie Festival.








Section #5- Random Dockville




We decided to go swimming one day because it was wicked hot. The lake was real real real cold. We played chicked and Nathan and I are the world grand champions of the world. Long live the champs...























Sorry I don't have more time to write, but I gotta vamos and get this passport mess taken care of.

Tschuss ya'll!