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Saturday, August 20, 2016

Pstereo Festival- Trondheim, Norway Aug 18-20th, 2016

 Aug 18th

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.
Dunbarrow
All them Witches were on the main stage at 18:55 and I heard most of their concert. I only have the bands first record but this was much more like the Grateful Dead somewhow. A lot of really cool songs. I spoke to them a bit backstage. Nice guys.  We did not catch too many of the other bands but we were on at 21:40 to 22:24.
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..
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.

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. 
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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