Bergen

I can't believe I actually agreed to this, but I took a 3 day trip to play ONE HOUR in Bergen, Norway and fly right back home to LA. Ridiculous. Nice town though, and it went well.
From top down:
After 3 planes and a day of traveling, sunglasses hide a multitude of evils. Outside the hotel. The venue (a former sardine packing plant). Another view outside the venue. View flying into Bergen from Oslo. Yet another view of the Bergen hills. I wouldn't have believed it had I not seen these with my own eyes, but straight from the Simpsons it's bacon-wrapped sausages. "Bacon up that sausage, boy!" "But dad, my heart hurts!" Me in all my fried, severe wrinkly-shirted glory in my sunny hotel room. And finally, a shot of us during the gig taken from this blog.

Norwich

Summary: More stressful than usual, due to very poor organization (not ours, theirs) but the concert actually went pretty well. There's something amazing about hearing 100 human voices in unison that is unlike any other sound on earth. And while I hate anything to do with religion, it must be said that the cathedral is an amazing space.

Botanic Gardens

Couldn't resist these blogtacular shots I took earlier today.
Note the MOTHER-HUGE bats- they're called Flying Foxes, and
are actually fruitbats
(thank god). UNNERVINGLY big. Also, as exotic as those Rainbow Lorikeets look, they're actually very common here, I was surprised to learn. Ditto for the Sulphur-Crested Cockatoos, seen here posing like celebritards in a tree at the Gardens. And finally, the hibiscus shot, looking alarmingly like some generic stock photo.

Mountains of Blue

...it looked to be a case of Complete Weather Sabotage™,
but there was a clear bit and I managed to get some photos through the mist in spite of the grey. Behold the Three Sisters.

Back From France

After an insane, densely-packed 4 days,
we're back from recording for ECM in Provence.
We spent 3 days in the studio with Manfred Eicher,
which was an amazing experience.
A lot of great material got recorded, and I feel we have
the makings of a fantastic record now.

...From the betting-on-the-wrong-horse dept.

This isn't exactly an original sentiment,
but in this case it is very apt:
FUCK BIG CORPORATIONS WITH A POINTED STICK. I figured I'd done my due diligence a few months ago when I researched HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray and went with HD-DVD. Everything made sense- More mature format (versus Blu-Ray's spec changing every year or less), cheaper players, and Sony's miserable track record of format introduction (Betamax, DAT, MD). Well, looks like I (and a few hundred thousand others) lost. As it happens, I bought a Blu-Ray player as well awhile back because Sunshine came out in that format (see my comments on that film in an earlier post) and I quite rightly felt it would be quite an experience in HD. I also bought the Blade Runner Comic Book Guy Special Edition (again, see below) in HD-DVD. Sigh. Oh well, whatever. Both formats look great, and now at least the war is over, but the whole thing just grosses me out.

Yet more predictable vintageness

I realize it's been a long silence around here, but that's only because I have nothing suitable for semi-public consumption to report. I wish I had a mind-bendingly earth-shattering post with which to break the silence, but alas, it's just more vintage technofetishism (so stop reading now if that sort of thing sends you to sleep.)

I have an AMS RMX16 and DMX-1580S which I love dearly and use on most projects. However, being over 25 years old, they are starting to show their age (worn keypads, broken switch caps and switches, etc...) so it was time to spruce them up with
some spare parts from these guys.

So far, the tally is 1 new keypad and two new (repro'd) nudge caps on the DMX. Left to go: a switch replacement on the RMX and a repair of its rare and fabulous remote (not shown), which came with an actual barcode reader and barcode program cards to allow extra reverb algorithms to be downloaded into the RMX! (This is 1984
state of the art we're talking about here, kids..)

Incidentally, replacing the parts on the DMX took about 5 minutes, but getting the screws back into the chassis (because of the horribly awkward internal layout of the unit) was a lengthy nightmare. Be warned in the unlikely event that you ever decide to undertake working on one of these yourself!

Get yer spend on

'Nuff said.

End Of Tour Party, Los Angeles

...Not at the Sunset Hyatt though, sadly.
The past few days were a bit rugged- played in Kourtrijk then left at 4am or so for 2 planes to Bari. Played that evening after a typically hellish Italian soundcheck/gear experience (and typically amazing food followed), only to leave at 5am for 3 more planes home. Normally we'd have taken a direct Frankfurt-LA flight on Lufthansa, but this wasn't possible due to the scheduling, so it meant an awful YouNighted "Airlines" experience and a layover in Dulles. Next time we'll stay the extra day to make the nonstop possible. In any case, Kourtrijk and Bari were ok gig-wise, though Bari suffered from a very boomy hall, along with all the other problems. I think it's pretty much impossible to have a smooth concert experience in Italy unless you eliminate the Italians themselves from at least 90% of the production process. They've still got it goin' on in the food department though, which goes part of the way toward making up for the other glaring shortcomings one always encounters there in the concert world. In a general sense however, for a group like this where a significant amount of technology and logistics (and not enough money) are involved, playing live these days is pretty difficult. The combination of lack of money for a road crew (despite the Herculean efforts of our fantastic tour manager/FOH man Arnaud "Arnocito" Mercier) and the draconian airline overweight baggage policies and their attendant costs makes for grim scenarios pretty much every time. Photos from top: Johan (left) from Einsturzende Neubaten, who's a big JH fan, turned up to see us in Kourtrijk. Bottom: Me at soundcheck in Bari.

The video show...

People keep sending photos of our shows over the past few days, and while some of them
are (IMNSHO) truly horrible, there are the occasional good ones that seem postworthy.
We are actually doing two different shows on this mini-tour: The main JH music one and another which is "live scoring"
to the video of Belgian video artist Kurt d'Haeseleer. We've did one performance of each in Genk (the other concerts
have all been the normal music set), and we're doing the second tomorrow here in Kortrijk.
The photo above is from the Genk video performance.

Kortrijk

Day off, thank Jeebus. From top: Street scene, one of the venues used by the festival (not the one we played at, though), an astonishing warm goat cheese salad, chocolate mousse.

Uppsala post-mortem

The Uppsala gig was good- nice reaction from the audience. Spanking-new venue with great gear as well. However, the building was severely overdesigned in the tech department. The CCTV flatscreen view of the stage (top photo) was nice, and the electronic sign next to the dressing room (second photo down) was cool as well, but the dressing rooms had card-key entrance and immediately started locking us out for no readily apparent reason. You really have to wonder why a dressing room needs card key entrance- So unnecessary. They ended up calling the maintenance guy in charge of the system to get us sorted out. Anyway, not a bad gig at all. Back to Belgium tomorrow.

Last London stuff (no, really!)

Right as we were about to leave the hotel to fly to Sweden, I managed to organize the first in-person meeting between myself and my friend Rainer Brüninghaus. I've been a fan of his work since about 1980, first interviewed him for a magazine in '87 and kept in touch sporadically since then. However, he never comes to the USA on tour anymore, and I wasn't over in Europe all that much so we never actually met face-to-face. It turned into a fun little "ECM summit" of sorts when JH and Jan Garbarek turned up.
From top: Rainer and I, Jon/Jan/Rainer, Jon and Rainer.

Last Day in London...

From top: The hotel, my old hero Rainer Brüninghaus playing with Jan Garbarek, my friends Andy and Guy working on A Major Record Project™.

Random Londonology

The QEH London gig went very well.
From top: The QEH stage setup (sorry 'bout the blur), the giant sightseeing-ferris-wheel thing, Steve and Jan, Brian after the show.

...and we're off.

The view from the hotel. Genk, Belgium.