Berlin: Koma F and beyond

Berlin Saturday July 17^th Koma F.

After sleeping until 1pm, we grabbed our backline and driver Gzeg (pronounced "gajedge". More on him later!) today before heading to the show.

We were playing the storied squat/DIY space Koma F just across the river from the Berlin Wall. Apparently this venue has somewhere between 25 and 40 years of history depending on who you ask. It, like many of the pre-WWII buildings was partially bombed out, and never quite found its way back to “normal.” Imagine a well-lit courtyard with big dogs, lots of empty bottles and a series of apartments with two venues and a bar all tucked in. One side had a Planet of the Apesesque statue portion that looked like a replica of the statue of liberty. Either way, it was tight, and after a quick walk around the neighborhood, we set in to use our hosts’ hospitality.

We grabbed a quick practice before the show and were fed some amazing seitan strips with Tzatziki and white cabbage. The food was as they say in our country, fucking delicious. We didn’t clean our plates well enough and received a bit of a reprimand. Now we know...

As for the show, we played with Your Fucking Nightmare from the Czech Republic, and they were really good. We’ll play again with them at Fluff Fest in one week, so if you’re reading this from Europe, please check them out.

For our set, we were tighter than we thought we’d be at the first show and were able to pull out a few more songs than we had intended. I think the total set was still 25 minutes with three extra songs…tops. Kids seemed into it and showed some love, especially for our cover of Crucified (Iron Cross). There was a nine-year-old from CZ there, and we traded him a shirt for a punk rock bracelet. Hess swears he’ll wear it at Fluff Fest. He won’t even take it off to shower as it is.

We debuted the tour 7” and shirts with mixed reviews, and met some cool people including Sebastian from High Score, Pavel from YFN, Mario from Dresden (an 18 year veteran of the European scene!), MeanXMike (who was sporting a crucial Vision 1989 tour shirt!), Hannah, from Berkeley USA and Sammy. All-in-all it was a great first show and introduction to the European scene. We decided that we love bubbly water to boot.

Straight Euro Bloggin'

16 July 2010

I’ll precede the next few entries by saying that tour journals are often a lot bit boring: “We played with so and so, they were awesome. The scene here is really cool in town X. Thanks to everyone who came out and all the kids who bought records.” Throughout the next few weeks, I’m going to try not to merely give canned details on the who, what, where and when of things, but give slightly more insight into the backstory and individuals at play. I’ll introduce the town and the things that stand out to me (Nate) and the rest of the band will fill in other pertinent details in posts of their own. Hopefully we’ll be able to tell a story and show what’s it’s like to be friendly, monolingual Midwesterners in a foreign land of vegan food and diy hardcore.

Berlin Saturday July 17^th

We had arrived on Thursday and Friday to a cancelled show in Dresden, so we had the day (16 July) off in Berlin. It was a blessing and a curse as we used the time to pack records and sort merch, although we had to weather the day off without playing. The shimmering silver lining was hanging out in the city of Berlin. We’re all thinking of it as the New York City of Europe (or maybe NYC is the Berlin of America?)—big, multicultural and full of things to do at all hours of the night. We had great coffee, vegan pizza, burgers and ice cream as we took the train around and took in the sites, from the Berlin Wall to the numerous riverscapes, to the historic architecture and lack of open container laws. It seemed that everyone had a beer in hand wherever they went, from the subway to the beach, to the parks and bikeways. I guess straight edge isn’t quite mainstream here either.

In our travels, we encountered a subway bass playing cruster and walked through a park of death with Robert. Apparently in Germany, it’s cool to walk through really dark parks without a knife or gun because nobody else has a knife or gun. We had soda that was orange and cola mixed, and lots of mango-peach juice to keep us company as we wandered through the aforementioned woods adjacent to the Tempelhoff Airport and greenspace. Sketchy doesn’t translate well, but that’s exactly what it was.

The weather was hot, about 40C, so we sweated some pounds off as we toured around Berlin and came up with a killer game called “dew it.” Dew it is a game in which he who says “…do it” must then do 50 pushups. We’re quickly stripping the phrase “Lets do it” from our vocabulary and getting great pecs in the process. I think I’ve done 400 pushups in the last three days in addition to drumming duties.