Little Pictures

Disasteradio comes to stay

Wellington music celebrity and one man electro-pop band Disasteradio came to stay with us in Amsterdam for a few days. His real name is Luke. I would highly recommend having Luke stay as he is an exceptional house guest. He was clean, kind, and very polite.

He took my completly broke self to the Anne Frank house yesterday, something I’d never done before. Super intense place, such a sad story too. There are usually massive lines outside the place but because it’s getting into winter the Anne Frank house was deserted. Which made it pretty creepy..

It was fantastic to have him stay! We managed to play together for the first time in Luxemburg in July which was awesome. He’s been playing in Wellington for 8 years, weird that we’d never managed to play together before.

Here’s a couple of his videos:

I am the master of the internet!

I’ve enabled comments, are they working?

Dutch word of the month club

It has recently dawned on me that I’m living in a country that speaks a different language. Amsterdam is a strange city regarding language. Almost every Dutch person I meet is highly fluent in English, in part because TV and movies over here are subtitled and not dubbed and because everyone learns it as children. Also, Amsterdam is so geographically small and such a tourist destination that you have tourists in most parts of the city. So English is often the default language on the street. I’ve seen this at work a few times, where two Dutch people will strike up a conversation in English and talk for a while before realising each other is Dutch and switching to Dutch. I wonder how many cities have a language culture like this?

Anyway, the upshot is that I often forget that Dutch people mainly speak Dutch. And so starteth the ‘Dutch word of the month club’.

This month’s word: Fiets

Amsterdam is pretty much over-run (in the best way) with fiets that all look like that. There are complex systems of bike lanes that have their own traffic lights. Everyone gives way to bikes, even pedestrians at crossings. It’s awesome! And everyone rides fixed gear bikes because it’s totally flat. Before moving here my only experience of fixed gear bikes were in pictures of Williamsberg hipsters. I think they look much much nicer than the ugly, futuristic mountain bikes that you sometimes see people riding in Wellington. But here there is nothing ‘cool’ about them necessarily, everyone rides them. I think the stat is that on average each person in The Netherlands has two bikes.

Also, some people sing while riding their bikes. Johanna and I haven’t bought a bike yet (soon!), so we walk. It’s weird having fiets after fiets (oh yeah) going past you with the rider singing. As it’s getting colder I see more and more bike riders riding with their hands in their pockets, to keep their hands warm. Also, bike riders don’t yell at pedestrians who step in their way. Instead they just tinkle on their bell. Very civilized. I’M WALKIN HERE!

Amsterdam central station: home of fiets

When buying a bike you have a couple of options. The most humorous of which is to buy a bike off a junkie for 10 bucks. Because there are bikes parked EVERYWHERE in Amsterdam, junkies like to steal them and sell them. In fact, I’m told there are organised bike thieves who go around in a van at night stealing bikes off the street. Fiets burglars. But buying a stolen bike just seems like an invitation to have the bike stolen off you. Also, I think those junkies should lay off teh crack.

We will continue saving, until one day we too can be robbed by junkies in a van.

Also, for added Dutch cycling hilarity, Johanna has to ride one of these for her job, with three kids in it. French kids. These kind of bikes are kind of dangerous because they’re massive and hard to turn. It looks a little like:

Mad Russian scientist/artist

The last date of our German ukulele tour was in Kassel. Kassel is a small town, but we’ve managed to play there a few times because our booker lives there. We played at the art school this time in this underground bunker, where they’ve put together this really cool bohemian bar. They don’t advertise openly for this bar, but instead only art students know about it. And it was full with just the art students there! The show was excellent.

After we played our set, this Russian guy came up and introduced himself. His name is Sascha and he is a student at the art school. He said to us “Do you want to come upstairs and see my music machine”. How can you say no to that?

And it turns out that Sascha has made a computer into a physical musical instrument. He is able to program a few floppy drives and a disk drive to make physical, pitched sounds. And then he’s programmed the whole machine to play classical tunes like the flight of the bumblebee. And it sounds AWESOME. Here’s a little video of it: http://www.vimeo.com/7383412

He then invited us to come to St Petersberg to perform using his machine at a giant art exhibition. And so of course we said yes!!

Unfortunatly though it turns out that it’s really expensive to travel from Amsterdam to Russia. And also we’re touring in Italy around the time of the exhibition. So it hasn’t worked out, which sucks. But Johanna and I have agreed to do some programming of the machine with Sascha, which will be heaps of fun. Maybe we’ll use it in some recordings, would be niiiice.

Thanks Sascha for showing us your instrument, it’s amazing!

Coming 'home'

We’ve only been living in Amsterdam for about three months, so it’s a strange feeling to come home from tour to Amsterdam. I really like it here, lots of different people and beautiful buildings. One room apartment living will take a while to get used to though.

We’re going to record a short release of the ukulele songs we played on our last tour. We’ll post up a link when we’re done :)

Berlin show - another weird sound guy

Last Sunday night we played NBI in Berlin. The promoter of the show was Robert, a guy we met last time we played in Berlin. He’s a fantastic guy and took great care of us.

We’ve come across a few weird soundguys, so we can add the soundguy from this night to the collection. Like I said before, we were touring with a Ukulele and a glockspiel. So we did each show without any microphones, and without using the PA. We would just come and sit with the people at the show and play some songs. It worked great!

But this meant that the soundguys didn’t have anything to do. For most soundguys this is a good excuse to go and have a drink or something. But not for the soundguy from NBI.

Halfway through our set, the soundguy who had mixed the previous bands came and sat down right next to us which was strange. We laughed it off, made some jokes about how he’s the new third member, people laughed. But he just stayed there. Then halfway through a song he leaned across me and started wildly waving his hands in front of Johanna as she tried to play the glockenspiel. Again, we just laughed and made jokes.. But what the hell? Bored sound guys- don’t let it happen.

We need a soundguy hall of shame or something

Last minute change of plan - The German Train Tour

Ahh, I’ve written this post twice now, but Tumblr keeps losing it.

So what happened is: the night before we were due to leave on our German tour we realised that our rental car wasn’t boked properly. We freaked out a bit, but our German booker was really helpful. He suggested we tour by train and take less equipment. And so the German train tour was born!

We’re on tour at the moment with just a ukulele and glockspiel. We had to put together the set the night before we left, we stayed up all night doing it. And it’s actually working out really well. It’s such a different feeling playing an acoustic set after being so used to having everything programmed perfectly, using electronics. I think it’s really good for us. We’ve been doing it with no PA at all, playing in the audience with everyone around us.

But in anycase we’re having a great time and people have been responding to it well. Even the somewhat confused promoters seem to be taking it well.

And traveling by train in Germany is actually really good. It’s so much less stressful than having to drive on the wrong side of the road. We’ve been watching the first season of Heros.. thanks Alistair. Need to torrent more. Will post up some stuff about the shows we’ve been playing soon!

The French are a friendly race

Playing in France this year has been a real treat for us. The accents, the bread, the round-a-bouts. This blog posted up a small review of Owl + Owl, it’s Frenchness is amazing!

http://ww2w.fr/2009/08/30/puree-de-dieu-mickael2-owl-owl/

German tour starts this week!

We’re really excited to be getting back to Germany! We’ll be bringing along a couple of new instruments and a bunch of new songs. Here are the dates:

24.10. -Hannover / Random Play
25.10. -Berlin / NBI
26.10. -Leipzig / Die Kassette
27.10. -Bremen / Zucker
28.10. -Siegen / Vortex
29.10. -Kassel / Underground

Need to finishing making merch/mastering EP/practicing set!