Wow and Flutter

Copenhagen show, June 28 at the Artists Collective.

Going a bit out of order because this night was so special...

Getting to Copenhagen from Warsaw is a long day, so Friday went on and on.

The ferry was a nice respite from the 7.5 hours of monotonous 140km/hr hum of the the A2 and autobahn….driving from Gedser to Copenhagen was a mostly pretty ride past rolling farmland and small towns.

Ended up being a late night after dinner, but for me it was great to be back in Copenhagen…I was born here, lived in Denmark until I was 5 years old and still have family here, including my father and sister. It’s isn’t home for me, but it feels like it could be.

The show was at the Artists Collective, a 4th floor warren of artists studios located in a former city hospital across the street from the backside of Tivoli. Jules & Geoff have known Michael, one of the collective's founders, for a few years.

He's long wanted to arrange a show with us where short films made by Collective artists would screen behind us as we played, and this tour was in part built around this show.

It was possible that this show would be sort of a denouement after the electricity, great vibe and end-of-set mayhem of the Warsaw show. Indeed we all seemed a bit hung-over from Warsaw...not in the alcohol sense, but in the adrenaline come down and knowing we were at the end of the tour.

The adrenaline surged again from the first notes. Once again we played a fantastic set in a small space. We've dialed in our sound to make small rooms work, maybe even better than larger spaces. Here we had the crowd of about 50 people right on top of us, and the films were projected to a screen behind the drum kit.

At my request, Race to Mars was the starter before we ramped up the pace. Only Repeater slowed things down later, but the crowd stayed with us on everything we did. Of course it helped to have a roomful of friends and supporters, but even my friends who didn't know much of the band came away impressed.

It was our 10th show in 16 days, 4th show in 5 days. We were playing the last notes of the tour in the city of my birth, a city the rest of the band came to love right away in a space that was perfect for our sensibilities...the night was all adrenaline and emotion combined with the musical cohesion that comes from playing night after night. I'm pretty sure it exceeded all of our expectations, and we couldn't have had a better end to the tour.


photo by Rachel Znerold using my camera

Copenhagen set list:
Race to Mars
Duck and Cover
Mountain
Black and White
Repeater
Day for Night
Slowboat

For the 1st time on the tour we got a raucous request for an encore, so we obliged with Illuminate with the Transmission outro, with Geoff handing off his guitar to a guy in the crowd (who turned out to be a good friend of two of my friends) while the rest of us banged and clashed and created a wall of feedback and noise. We went off loudly into a very good night.

If there was a denouement, it was the late-night döner that Geoff, Julie and I had with Michael. Standing out front of the main railway station in the cool night air we were able to breathe and relax a little bit, share good company, good doner, and let our emotions settle.