Music

Live concerts are great. Especially when they're. On Friday, there was Summerbreak Festival in Linz, with the German band Mia. playing as headliners. I saw Mia. once before, at Aerodrome festival. But this time, I managed to actually get close to the stage, and so the whole concert was just amazing compared to Aerodrome. The music is so much full of energy, it's absolutely wonderful. Their choreography (yes, you won't believe it, there are "normal" bands who have choreography!) is just wonderful to look at, and I really enjoyed the unusual, weird, amazing, powerful moves and jumps done by the band's singer, Mieze.



Unfortunately, they didn't play their song "Was es ist". At Aerodrome, they played it in an extra-long extended Samba-like version that was much cooler than the song on the album. And they didn't play any encore, either. But still, I really enjoyed the whole concert.

Yesterday, there was the second day of Linzfest, an annual kind of festival with lots of international bands playing. I took the time to go there with Paula, and listened to some really interesting music. It started with Skamp, a Lithuanian (thx2spellchecker band, which was pretty boring.


Then "Les Babacools" were playing, a German band playing Reggae, Ska, Hip-Hop, and similar stuff. That music was really nice, and it was the only act this day where most of the people in the crowd directly in front of the stage were mostly young people. Everybody was dancing, and it was really relaxed, a few even started smoking their spliffs, so the air was filled with this typical smell. Directly after the concert, I bought a CD from "Les Babacools", which is not as great as the concert was, but still really nice to listen to.


After that, some Hungarian band was playing some Dub thing, so we started wandering around and saw Günther Paal (aka Gunkl) during his sound-check twenty minutes before his show started. So we went around a bit more in the Donaupark, where most of these things were going on, and met some of Paula's friends that she knows from her German course. Then, at 21:30, Bauchklang was performing (man, they're bad...), and we stayed until the end of the concert. Then we went to the (overcrowded) Cafe Strom to have a beer, and then home.

Today, I bought the new CD "Stille Post" by MIA, a German "alternative" band from Berlin. They have a really nice sound that sounds (to me) unique, and not comparable to other bands. The lyrics are pretty good, and quite unique, at least totally different to other German alternative band's lyrics. But one song, "was es ist", has some kind of German nationalistic influence, saying

Ein Schluck vom schwarzen Kaffee macht mich wach

Dein roter Mund berührt mich sacht

In diesem Augenblick es klickt

Geht die gelbe Sonne auf

[...]

Es ist was es ist sagt die Liebe

Was es ist fragt der Verstand

Wohin es geht das woll'n wir wissen

Und betreten neues deutsches Land

But well, that's something I have to cope with, since I'm totally fine with all the other song's lyrics.

Today, my brother's band, Polly Rocket, is having their second concert so far, and already in the well-known Posthof. Their playing as kind of introduction to 3 Feet Smaller, Austria's most successful (and probably best) punk band, who start their new tour in Linz. I wish my brother good luck, and I hope that he won't get too nervous (and therefore drink too much .

Today, my brother found some old "Bravo Hits" CDs from 1994 and 1995. So I took them and listened to a few tracks of it. The 80s are dark ages regarding popular music, but to be honest, the 90s weren't any better: so much crappy music, it's really awful. Especially that techno stuff. Really bad sound, and totally callow compared to today's electronic music. And just like today, 99 % of all "artists" were one-hit-wonder losers.



But then I found one thing that highly amused me, namely in the "Bravo Hits 11" booklet: the whole booklet was dedicated to some mystical thing called "the internet" that had something to do with computers and world-wide communication. Two pages were made to explain the most important buzzwords and phrases, but see below for some examples (sorry, it's in German):

Web Page - Eine Seite im World Wide Web. Ungefähr so groß wie Dein Computer-Monitor, kann Texte, Bilder, Töne und Hyperlinks enthalten.

Netscape - Mit dieser Software macht das Surfen durch das Internet [...] besonders viel Spaß. [...]

That was almost 10 years ago, and (in some way, fortunately) they couldn't predict many important developments of the internet, e.g. instant messaging, weblogs, the spam problem, P2P, ...

Yes, those were the days...

Kind of "favorite song of the hour": S.b.astler ls. Raggamaffian Wachbirn - Kaspaltheather Dvorak Revival

For all the reggae maniacs and addicts out there, I found something very nice: Soundsgood Intl. put mp3s of some of their remix tapes online. The quality is not extremely high, but enough for copying it to tape (remember: these are mp3s of remix tapes, you know, this ancient medium with the cassettes that tended to get stuck in the player just when you needed the tape or the player desperately).



I already downloaded the "high bias 2" remix tape, which is a reflection of modern dancehall reggae, remixed to 2x46 minutes of non-stop reggae. Currently, I'm listening to side A of the "pure niceness" tape, which is pure roots reggae (i.e. "Bob Marley style", the way reggae used to be in the very beginning, with real singing, slow downbeats, a good bassline, and real horns and trumpets). Nice music to simply lay back and relax (or blog ...

Right now I'm listening to the CD that I got from Desentluevo at their concert (some readers may still remember). I'm really disappointed by the poor quality of the recording, and the relatively boring songs that are on the CD. Live they used to be so much better. Well that's the problem with a lot of small "underground" bands. What also sucks is that you can clearly hear the singer not getting his notes right. I'm not really impressed.

Yesterday, I've been to a concert where a friend's band -- The Pagan's Offer - was playing. I've seen them live only once, in a really bad environment sound-wise. But this time they really rocked. I took a lot of pictures, in case anybody's interested, you can watch them here. Anyway, I found their music really refreshing. Of course, their main advantage is that they have an extremely good drummer, with 10+ years of experience. And then Filip, their guitar player (and the friend of mine), who has an interesting style of playing, being able to play more than just simple riffs, but really complex solos, which makes the whole thing even more interesting and enjoyable.



After them, there were two other bands playing, too, one was Desentluevo, which rocked pretty much, too, and a third band, which I didn't like that much, since they had the least sophisticated drum and guitar playing of the three bands of the evening. After the concert ended, they (not the band, but some technician or whatever) played some classic music from CD, which was a really pleasure, giving a certain balance to the whole evening.



Then we went to El Mariachi, some kind of bar in the Altstadt of Linz, drinking and having fun until 3:00 am or so.

The song "Jackpot" by Tocotronic is IMHO one of the best love songs ever written (although maybe not immediately recognizable):

Du bist der Jackpot meines Lebens

Zugegeben der Vergleich ist eher schief als eben

Doch wenn Du lachst

Gehen drei Sonnen auf

Wir sind raus

Und wird sind stolz darauf

...

To translate it to English:

You are the jackpot of my life

Honestly, this comparison is more aslope than flat

But when you laugh

Three suns are rising

We're out

And we're proud of it.

I don't know, this is just beautiful poetry to me, and of course one of the best lyrics I ever saw. And yes, my life is totally Tocotronic-centered. Sometimes.

On Friday I was at "Dancehallfieber" at the venerable Posthof in Linz. The last few concert I attended were mostly punk/alternative rock concert, so I was pleased about a dose of reggae and dancehall. The whole thing started with a B-class "band" (one female selector, one really bad shouter), Soundsgood Intl. that is. Well, I really like their remix tapes, but live... nope.



Next act was a band called Ischen Impossible. It consists of four female singers/shouters and one DJ, doing Hip-Hop, Reggae, Dancehall, Ragga. What made their performance especially enjoyable was the fact that they were all really good looking... what do I say? Gorgeous! And their music was really first-class, too. I can only recommend them.



The last two acts were Miss Mono (I didn't know she grew up in Linz) and Nikitaman, performing together. Both have excellent skills, making it an excellent show. They even do this "signal da plane" and "row da boat" stuff you probably know from the "Like Glue" video by Sean Paul. They explained that this is very common in Jamaica's dance halls, the DJ shouts "signal da plane", and everybody's doing the "signal da plane" waving with their arms. Really nice. At the end, two guys from Texta join in, playing a very fast song, that was some kind of mix between Dancehall and Ska, with some Jazz influences. BTW: Mono and Nikitaman were backed by the Soul Fire band, so no DJ in the background, but real live music! Reggae that is played is generally more interesting than Reggae from tape/vinyl.