Wow. What a night. What an audience. What a club (the Trouw in Amsterdam). And 360 (aka Nuno dos Santos and Patrice Baeumel) are at least as fantastic. Great that the night was filmed (the pictures below are stills from the video footage). Excerpts of the video will be posted soon!
Not in our faintest dreams could we have hoped for a better night to premiere our new show.
Ronni Shendar made an amazing video for ‘Glare’, one of the tracks of Christian Löffler‘s fantastic ‘Raise EP’. For more info, go to c.sides’ website…
Christian Löffler – ‘Glare’ (c.sides006) from c.sides on Vimeo.
Somebody was so kind to put more videos of that night online, that we keep in such good memory… it was our last show of the October/November 2009 performance tour, and we really ripped our hearts out that night. Audio quality is so so, but it’s amazing to have these snippets online. We had so much fun!!
Well, not the whole thing, but a few really great snippets. Note to myself: no more chewing gum on stage!!!
Glitterbug & Ronni Shendar from c.sides on Vimeo.
So. We are still 15km south of Mangalore, and we got through a tropical Cyclone (named Phyan) that confronted us with some of the most extreme weather at least I have ever experienced. We had some serious floods in the area, unbelievable thunderstorms that even hit the hotel that we are staying at, and endless walls of rain for something like 48 hours, including power outages, which, well, forced me to take some serious computer and music breaks… yet I managed to make three new tracks which i am really really happy about.
This is how the rain sounded like…
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We took a little trip to the city while the rain was still going strong… this is how the bus ride to the city sounded like.
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One of us had to do some bank transactions, and here is a little audible impression of the State Bank of India in Mangalore…
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But the tropical storm is passed us now, and the sun is back and with it the electricity (most of the time).
Here is an impression of what i can hear in the early morning when I wake up, and what i see from our balcony.
Today or tomorrow we will start rehearsing for the next upcoming show, at the Plateaux Festival in Poland. We are really excited about it, but the weather change will be challenging i guess…
We landed in Mangalore yesterday afternoon, which is on the shores of the Arabian Sea pretty far down south of India. We will stay here for a couple days, and I finally have some time to work on drafts of tracks that I started during this wonderful, yet sometimes emotionally challenging trip.
In case you want to know exactly where we are: here is a Google Maps Link…
My little, very rudimentary studio is located on the roof of our tiny hotel (which is 15km down south from Mangalore), and all i can see is palm trees and rain-forest vegetation around us, and i hear the sound of the waves and the notorious crows (that one finds everywhere in India), if I do not wear my head phones.
This is how the place sounds like.
We sadly only spent 2 days in Calcutta, and we saw so very little of this beautiful, strange, captivating, lively city. So here is a second impression, this time of a little street corner somewhere in the center around lunch time, with endless people eating at one of the endless little food stands, which i do not dare eating at anymore after i got horribly sick in Mumbai.
And this is how this corner sounded like.
We arrived in Calcutta, yet again a city which is not comparable to any other place we have seen so far, and it’s actually quite different in many ways. It feels much more like being in Asia, being so far in the east, even almost at the border to Bangladesh. We will sadly only spend 2 days here, but we all fell in love with this city.
Also, this part is under a communist rule for almost 30 years (the oldest democratically elected government worldwide, so we are told), and maybe that’s why some things seem to be less extreme here than anticipated- but again, we are here for such a short time that we actually did not have a chance to even leave the center of the city, which is the 2nd largest in India (also something i did not know before).
We will be performing here tonight at a club called Roxy, inside the Park Hotel, where we are also staying, and will leave right after the shows to Bangalore (argh! the flight leaves at 6:15 in the morning), which is again a 2,5 hour flight down south.
Here is a little walk through the center of the city that we took right upon our arrival here.
Again we were cruising through slums, dust, through a city that consists of endless gated communities, walls, huge streets, and is totally inaccessible without a car or one of the ever-present rickshaws (with or without a motor). We went all the way out to the south to meet some artists that we performed with last Saturday that are cooperating with a bar/ cafe there to establish a commercial art space, and- without being prepared- ended up in shopping mall that looked like it could have been in Dubai- glitzy, shiny, with the obvious Luis Vuitton flagship store right next to the Dior flagship store, you can imagine how it looked like.
Here is an audio impression of our (hopefully imaginable) confusion.