22 November 2006

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Most presenters organize concerts as part of a series that takes place on a certain night of the week, maybe just once or twice a month. This means that rather than being able to move in a nice direct line from gig to gig, you sometimes end up traveling almost 10 hours a day in a train crisscrossing over the same stretch of geography, over and over again. Particular highlights on this FME journey were:

1. The trek from Krakow to Jena (Where we had to get up at around 5am to catch the first train of the day. This part of the trip lasted 8 hours, giving us a chance to sleep, but when we woke up the dining car had been disconnected- so no food for the day, which was apparently a good idea since none of the bathrooms on the train were functional).

2. The 7am flight from Warsaw to Milan that was followed by a five-hour trip to Florence in a van was also nice. I was so disoriented by the time Nate McBride and I tried to find a sandwich to eat when we arrived, I couldn’t remember where we had played the night before.

3. The next morning we had another 5am start; then a set of two flights, from Florence to Bologna from Bologna to Vienna; concluding with a car ride that put us in Nickelsdorf before 11:30am- just in time for breakfast.

Somehow, in the midst of all of this sleep-deprived lunacy, the trio played remarkably well. Most of the material we worked with was taken from the compositions recorded on the new Okka Disk album, ‘Montage.’ For the first time we went on tour playing only pieces we had worked with before, and having a chance to dig into this set of tunes more deeply was a great experience. I think the standout concerts on the tour were in Krakow, Jena, Warsaw, Florence, and Enshede. Mainz was a shakeout, a chance for us to adapt to the music and hostile office managers. On the other nights I think the group played strong sets despite having to deal with some serious exhaustion.

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