I flew up from Copenhagen a week ago to play with Black Moon Circle at Pstereo.
This is the biggest festival in Trondheim with 7000 tickets. It is timed to
start the first weekend that the students return. This is a big student town
with 36,000 students. Anyway, this was going to be our biggest and most
important gig since Roadburn Festival but for a lot more people. I had been in
town for nearly a week. We had a pre-production studio that we could rehearse
in for 3 days. We played through the set once each day and also did some
jamming and played some older songs just to keep them a live and fresh. The
mood was great all week. We had a really special light show prepared so last
night when the stage was finished we could do a test run with the oil
projections and this high resolution camera and projector. It looked amazing…
Anyway, today we arrived at the festival around 16, loaded the gear
with some help to our backstage tent. At 19, we could move it over to the
stage. We had booked dinner for 17:30 (smoked trout, duck comfit and dessert
with red wine… amazing food)… I caught a few songs of Dunbarrow, a Trondheim band playing music in the vein of Uncle
Acid, Pentragram, Witchcraft.. Pretty
good… I spoke a lot with the guys later
in the night. Very cool and I got their record for a future review.
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| Dunbarrow |
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| All them Witches |
I have to say, Black Moon Circle,
we played a great gig and the audience was just mesmerized by the lights and
the sound. It was a solid set and we still had a lot of time to jam and
improvise. We opened with Plains, some space sounds and only Vemund’s guitar to
start. Usually, he does this alone but I was just too excited to hold back.
Next was a long 15min Magnificent Dude from our latest album, Sea of Clouds.
This we could really extend out. Lunar Rocket, which grows out of this one,
came natural and I just love the guitar riff on this one. We talked to the
audience for 1min and then off with Warp Speed for e last blast out into space…
The audience loved it and it must have been 1000 people, at least.. Amazing
time..
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| Foto by Elin... Thanks... |
I saw a bit of Sigur Rós
from Iceland, and this was very impressive from the view point of the lights,
projections, etc…. Pretty amazing at times. We were told this was the largest
most elaborate performance ever for the band. They had a crew of 22 people to
pull this off. Musically, it was a sort of dreamy post rock, spacey pop music.
The crowd was not that engaged and slowly left over their 100min show. The visuals
were sometimes stunning and they could reach some heavy parts with this bowed
guitar at times.
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| Sigur Rós |
We hung out until the bar closed at 12:30.. It was free good and drinks
for the bands. We also did a podcast with the NRK1 and two local comedians.
Cool guys and quite fun.
Some of the other acts that played on this Thursday were mostly
Norwegian artists like Sondre Justad, Lars Vaular, Ary, Todd Terje, RGB Unit,
Husky (Australia), Postaal, and some DJs.
Aug 19th
We had a band promo foto shoot at 16 today and then afterwards we went
to the festival. We caught a local punk duo called Barren Womb. Intense drumming and guitar playing. Shouting vocals,
sometimes quite funny. Guitar player liked Primus for sure and even wore a
short and he played around with some guitar effects and did a bit of double
tracking on a few tracks but mostly it was just heavy riffing. Reminded me of
the Dutch band Dyse sometimes. Cool..
The Thurston Moore Band was next. I had
not seen him since I saw Sonic youth back in the 90s! He had a 4 piece band
with Debbie Gibson on bass, a 2nd guitar player, great drummer and
Thurston on guitar and occasional vocals. They had some long parts in several
of the songs, including the very good last track called Aphrodite, where the
bass player, she did some really cool stuff with the drummer while detuning her
bass and using some effects. It was way cooler than the noisy guitar noodling,
which never really caught me. I had a
chance to speak with Hans from Motorpsycho, which was really nice. He said he
had heard the ØSC cds I gave him and that he had really enjoyed them a lot. 
Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats had a decent
crowd of 500 or so and said they were here to ruin our day. Their set is very
much the same for 50mins. Not a lot of dynamics. High pitched bee gee vocals
with a sort of Black Sabbath like vibe but no progressive rock elements at all.
Some great songs but it is all too much the same in the end If you have seen
them once, then you know exactly what you wil get. Plays mostly all the same
songs every show as well. I had hoped to hear something new. Nope… Set List: Waiting for Blood, Mind Crawler, Over and Over, Death's Door, Poison Apple, 13 Candles, Pusher Man, I'll cut you Down, Melody Lane, Withered Hand of
Beach Slang from
Philadelphia were really good fun. Great lyrics, funny front man and a lot of
passion. A heavy hitting drummer that really drove the band hard. Musically it
was melodic rock-indie vibe but we enjoyed it quite a lot.
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| Beach Slang |
A Norwegian band called Highasakite
was the main headliner and this was not my kind of music at all. Apparently
they play nearly every year for the past few years. It was a cool festival but more mainstream
music. One of the most beautiful festival sites I have ever seen. Just amazing.
Trondheim is a super beautiful city and I got to see a lot in the week I was
there. Thanks to the amazing Black Moon Circle guys and Kim the organizer for
taking such amazing care of me… Love you guys….
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