day twenty-six

day twenty´-six:

my camera mysteriously broke in Gothenburg, so this shit is going to be a little more texty and lot less interesting from here on out.

after Japan we flew to Oslo, Norway, where fools dropped the ball big time and our show never came through.  basically I tried really hard not to repeatedly sneeze all over a kind elderly Japanese lady on a 12 hour flight to Vienna, hung out in the super lame Vienna airport for 4 hours, flew to Oslo and then paid a million kroners to take a bus to central station, walk to a hostel (complete with stereotypical stoned 20 something graveyard shift receptionist and a brutally overpriced shared room with 7 dudes snoring simultaneously), then took a bus to Sweden in the morning.  I hope you use our financial contributions well, Oslo, though I am sure it was a drop in the bucket of your smug economy and fashionably clean-line sense of aesthetics.

Sweden was so fucking awesome.  Charlie and I spent 4 nights in Gothenburg with Dan 'Tötal Violator Style' Johansson and did some recording at UTMARKEN (one of my favorite places ever), took trams all over to record stores etc.  Total CML overload.  I did a show with Greg Malcom from Christchurch, NZ and Cave from Chicago, pretty weird mix but really pleasant show.  Greg plays three guitars at once and plays really multi-layered but completely live semi improvised music (no loop or delay pedals etc).  Definitely one of the top performances as far as experimental guitar music goes, dude had a Felix level bag of tricks and covered one of my favorite Ornette Coleman songs wonderfully. 

The next night we met up with my brother, who is doing a simultaneous european tour that crossed paths for one night.  It was really awesome to see him and we did a show together at Utmarken with Charlie, and Heinz Hopf (Dan and Mathias collab).  We had some scotch and rubarb soda (not together) and watched East Bound and Down late into the night.  It was a good one.

We said bye to Owen in the morning at central station (under a coincidental bomb threat) and took a train to Malmö (coincidental serial sniper shootings in recent events).  We had a totally enjoyable show at Sing Sang and in classic euro style, someone DJ'd and everyone danced until realllly late.  Now we're going to Copenhagen where we'll do two shows and post up for 4 straight days.

happy halloween,
-gordon