By:Larm in Oslo!
Well what can I say about By:Larm; the amazing 3 days filled with music and seminars and meetings flied, as days do when your having fun!! I traveled in the company of the best organisatinon in the world: BRAK
I meet a lot of wonderful people and saw so many great bands and artists. My favourite experience was Katzenjammer on Saturday night. Four girls playing crazy-happy-feel-good-folk music. The harmonies where so good, and they most certainly must be Lilith Fairs wet dream.
Bandit is the name of another band that blew me away.
Their music drags you into a rocky-carnival-fairytale universe that you never want to leave.
My gig on Saturday went really well, lots of people came, and I had a wonderful time. Thank you all for coming out! I played some of my new songs and the audience gave me rally good feedback, and that means a lot to me.
The seminars were very helpful. I got tips on “how to tour smart”. Computer geeks told me about digital distribution and sales, widgets, viral marketing, online community and fandom. An ongoing theme in discussions and debates is still when or why or how can we fin a solution that satisfies both the consumer and the artist when it comes to free downloading of music. Very interesting.
An other interesting thing is the fine art I saw in "VG-teltet":
I just want to say music is life, I love the scene, I love the dream.
Heidi Marie
Social Networks
Spent most of the day in coffee shops and wifi bars with GMM, talking tubes.
GMM is the mastermind behind Ugress, and the newly released album: Unicorn, and like me, is an independent artist running his own label.
We're venturing into social network explorations and collaborations, and I tell you, the SG labyrinth of Myspaces, Facebooks, iLikes, OpenIDs, Youtubes, Flickrs, feeds, blogs, fans, trolls, and telefaxes is quite the challenge to keep everything running, and in addition, in sync. Modern artists often spend more time updating a gazillion SG websites than writing music.
We talked, discussed and philosophicated around a lot of things. Todays subject was Paypal as our future financial provider and a unison decision to turn our Facebook profiles from previous semi-private to full public profile; the nature of Facebook has changed over the last year and I think we're both considering Facebook now more as a way to reach fans than the personal system if was before.
todays wish: become a fan of Heidi Marie on iLike!
love HMV and GMM
Day 12 - Kiel -the end....
by Susie Asado
Kiel smells like the ocean. It smells like sail boats and strong winds. Tonight is our last show and there is a strange void in our group. Heidi Marie had to go back to Bergen a day early because she is in a play that has a show tonight. We keep saying her name as if saying her name would magically make her reappear. Clearly things are coming to an end. After checking into the Peanuts Hostel, where we are warmly greeted and instantly feel at home drinking tea and listening to music, we go over to Prinz Willy's. It is all sparkles and glamour that the royal name promises. Willy surely is a prince and we are treated royally with food and drink. Soundcheck, however is filled with obstacles, and we prepare for a rocky last show. We try our best not to be fazed by the adventurous sound or by the luminous and sexy local heroine Janina. Her warmth and spunk reassures us that whatever the night will be, it will be fun.
And it is. All of us stay for the second round and then Ava and Janina battle out the third round. I think these two improvisations are some of the most spectacular of the Tour. Ava sings a poppy bossa nova and Janine a sleazy love song. There are words like Penguin and Schneegestöber. I wish I could recall the details of these two songs accompanied by Mark Scheibe, but it was simply overwhelming and I can't put it together anymore. Janina wins the golden lamb and Mark Scheibe says she surely will make it vibrate even if there are no batteries included. The Kiel audience turns out to be our loudest audience ever. During the voting by clapping and screaming I have to put my hands over my ears in fear I might loose my hearing. The level of participation and excitement is awesome.
After the show we head back to the hostel. Mark hurries to the kitchen to prepare a final supper. A 2 a.m. feast of beef and fancy salad. While Mark makes intricate sauces and prepares the delicious salad, I awkwardly crack walnuts with the foot of a chair. As soon as all the food is on our plates, we break out into arguments about the tour and we go on disagreeing for what seems well into the morning. I can't help thinking that by now we have become a family not afraid of speaking our minds or chopping each others heads off and being forever tied together. Love comes to mind too.
Now I am back in Berlin and already the 12 days on tour are melting into a blob of strange and lovely experiences. I am still slightly discombobulated (as Ava would say) but I am doing my best putting the pieces back together. This is where I write "The End", and leave the stage with a little curtsey.
Cheers, Susie Asado
PS: We received a text message from Heidi Marie and it reads as follows: Oh, my favorite Motherfuckurs! You will not believe what happened: we just cancelled!! Can you believe it!!? No people showed up because of some X-mas shopping going on outside in the streets! And you girls, it's still not too late to cancel your last show. : ) I miss you all so much . . . xxx
Day 11 - Hamburg
By Heidi Marie
We had to get up really early because our soundcheck started at 12'o clock in Hamburg. Such a shame we couldn't sleep in, coz the hotel was really nice and warm. And I thought it was so cozy that we were all sharing one big room. I wanted it to last a little longer. I started to feel that the tour was ending, and at this point it was making me sad.
Ceylan definitely turned out to be our new hardcore tour manager. She was really in control of our time schedule and she got us to Hamburg before soundcheck. We didn't have to spend all day in the van! We left all our bags at the Hotel, and went to the venue Zeise Kinos. It was such a beautiful venue, a real movie theatre.
After Mr. Hardrock in Rüsselsheim and the bachelor party in Osnabrück as an audience, we were all really hoping for a big crowd in Hamburg, and this venue was perfect for a big crowd! The sound-check went pretty well, except from the fact that they did not have a cd player which freaked Sanni and Ava out a bit. After a lot of back and forth, Sanni managed to get all the backing-tracks for her and Ava's performances onto her iPod. Mark would be in charge for this technical procedure during the show. He had never touched an iPod before…
After soundcheck we had dinner in a nice restaurant. The food was delicious, and we were all very happy, but so extremely tired. The night before we were talking about going on the ferry. A guided tour on the river in Hamburg, but after our stomachs were filled with Indian curry and Nan-bread there was no chance we could go on any tour. We really needed to sleep since we were falling apart piece by piece. At this point we could all feel the "11-day-non-stop-preforming-and-driving-in-the-van-forever-tour" not only under our skin, but in every vein and in every cell in our body. So we went to the hotel - or should I say hostel, or as Ava and I described it: the prison, coz it really looked like a prison: Tiny rooms with tiny beds, no bathroom and cold as the North Pole. Not even a bible on the bedside table. Oh well, we managed to sleep anyway, and felt a lot better when we woke up a couple of hours later.
When we got to the venue, there was a line outside! We all got exited and said we would surely kick as tonight.
It was my last show. I had to leave the next morning or I don't even know what to call it when it's five in the morning. I call it not human, that's what I call it.
So there we were, ready for our last show together. Our local heroine kicked ass, and she was so nice, but it can't have been easy to pierce our group that night, we were tight and emotional. I thought the show was great; the audience was not only amazing, but also a big crowd! During the show I almost cried like five times, and when it was finished, and I packed my cables and my guitar for the last time on the tour, I did cry.
I won the lamb for the fifth time, it felt good, but the lamb didn't feel important anymore. Josepha, Sanni, Ava and Mark felt very important to me.
We went to have our "last supper". Kebab: the only thing available at 02:30 in the morning.
We ate, talked, laughed, looked at each other and smiled. A bit like our first lunch at the Lamm records office in Berlin 11 days ago. Only that now I was not nervous anymore, and I did remember their names, and I would remember them for the rest of my life.
Love Heidi Marie.
day 10- Osnabrück
To Kicker Or Not To Kicker
Our Lamm Records Girl Song Slam gig at the Unikeller in Osnabrueck almost didn't happen. When we arrived at the location we immediately noticed the kicker in the corner. It was just sitting there staring at us, as if saying: Ok girls, it's going to be me or you tonight, and I know I'm gonna win. The owner of the bar and the monstrous machine refused to shut it down for the night, Mark refused to play the show if he didn't, and it was only thanks to our tour manager Ceylan's diplomatic skills that we could avoid catastrophe.
Things were starting to look up when we met our local heroine for the night, Katrin Remmert. Only 1,50 m tall, she had the personality and guitar skills of a rock n' roll giant.
Once the show got going, a friendly bachelor party joined us and added the distracting background noise of consistent talking and glass clinging. We gave our best trying to be heard by the audience that came to see us play, secretly wishing we had Katrin's guitar amp turned up to maximum volume. Because the applause-o-meter, even though on the highest technical level, cannot make the distinction between good noise (screaming, applause, and stomping by our audience) and bad noise (drunken partying by our bachelor friends), Mark decided to abandon the whole competition idea for the night. We ended the evening with all of us improvising to Mark playing a mean bossanova on the Fender Rhodes. To hell with the competition! Now we can admit it: We are not secretly loosening guitar strings, scratching playback CDs, or cutting holes into stage outfits at night in the hotel. We are in love. With music.
Dear Katrin, don't be sad you didn't take home the lamb that night. The lamb is kind of a slut anyway. Although Heidi Marie was its favorite, it spent at least one night which each of us. So, now I said it.
Sanni Baumgaertner (Dancer vs. Politician)
