TCH & Mytrip Spring Tour - Days 1 & 2 (London & Leeds)

31/03 A free improv night in London

So a not so early start of the day is always welcome and gotta be at the airport about 10 is perfect. I get there, go through a fast check and surrounded by a good number of English accents (Bulgarian being one of the best ones) I wait for the gate to open. Almost no delays and we're up in the air flying. As with all other means of transportation I sleep on this one as dead. And some hours later we land in London. After playing a bit of human snake before the passport control (Britain is great at queueing indeed) I meet Tim and we're on our way to his place. London is too huge for my taste, thankfully I gotta guide cus otherwise I'd sure be popping in the suburbs end up among the wrong football crowd.

So we reach Tim and Didi's house where I have the chance to meet its guard - the awesome Rab, who sadly won't be allowed dog coffee as he's 12 but so energetic. After a quick coffee spill on me and we're best pals, something the mailman will never experience as Rab is quite an anti-post office guard.

Anyhow we're in for a nice homemade pizza, a tasty salad, then after the coffee it's some ginger tea and we're ready to hit the train to St. Clement's Church for a free improv night and a warm-up for our tour. After a bit of circling in the small streets of big London we're there. Even my friend Jeff Cloke who we've tried to book twice to play Bulgaria but there always were some issues is here with his wife. Georgi is here too. Great times.

And the place is lovely. With great acoustics, such a fat reverb that you want to hug it and we started playing, I play the laptop a bit, Tim plays the guitar then the piano, his friend Andy makes a neat circuit of effect pedals and other peculiar gear all through a tiny Orange amp. There's also Tom playing a flute (if I remember correct) and Pete Yelding playing a very cool cello. Then I play a bit with Tim's guitar, Duncan who we met some hours before is on the piano (and snoring later) and happy and refreshed we get back to Tim's so we get some sleep.

01/04 First proper gig in Leeds

Sunny Leeds from Dave's door

Leeds is not super far from London so we leave at about 12 after Tim cooks us tasty toasts, scrambled eggs and some cheese. All this with an immense cup of awesome coffee and we're ready to go. We pack his beast of a pedal board and everything else is easy. The second I'm in the car I'm asleep, even Duncan is not able to wake me up for several hours haha. At Leeds we leave him at his place and go to Dave's who's setting up the show. Then more coffee, a nice veggie cream soup with cheese sandwiches, then even more coffee and we go to Fenton. It's a cool place over the ordinary part of a bar, we set up, soundcheck a bit and wait for some folks to show up. 

Our neat stage

About 20:40 I start playing cus that's how I like it - play first, then enjoy the rest of the show. Not so many people show up but it's fun, the sets are awesome, and Now Wash Your Hands is hell of a project - "the cleanest power electronics act" really stands for something. I'll show you a video. A great surprise is that the whole Aetheric Records crew join the show so I finally meet Alistair who did great job releasing the mother spit debut 'carve', and who knows we may have cool new plans now! This time arranged in real life hehe.

After the show we head for Duncan's place to sleep, yea sleep is good. It's about twelve now and time for coffee, breakfast and then York, which is actually pretty close.

Spring Show Rampage

If you have looked at my gig agenda on the left of this blog you may have discovered quite nice news there. It's been since my last tour w/ Expectations last June when I had such a blast of upcoming shows. What I'm most excited is my first UK tour that's starting off next Monday.

TCH & MYTRIP - UK SPRING TOUR 2014

But before that there's a crazy week ahead currently going on. With the highlights being two shows of my new band Leaver opening for Nadja (CAN) in Sofia and Bucharest.

2503 sofia, BULGARIA w/ dayin

2703 sofia, BULGARIA w/ leaver

2803 sofia, BULGARIA w/ mytrip

2903 bucharest, ROMANIA /w leaver

The distro traveller

It's been some time since I last wrote something outside my usual 'I make music, I play it live, I release a record' stuff and yesterday a tiny thing happened that I decided to share here. I was in the office, packing a parcel with stuff from the Amek distro so I ship it to Canada. To make sure everything goes well and the record makes this long journey unharmed I put it in a box I received some months ago with a bunch of promos I had to cover for Heathen Harvest.

I removed the address labels and what I found below made me exclaim 'Wow, we have a neat traveller here'. Maybe I gotta get a bit in detail about some unwritten 'running a distro' facts. First of all it's fun, yes, you're getting a lot of music you'll probably never hear anywhere else. It rarely pays off, especially if you're selling the stuff we have with Amek and to save costs or just to protect the goods people ordered you recycle hard! Everything from cardboard boxes, pizza boxes, hit proof bubble bags whatever you can think of. That's why I re-used the box I got some months ago. And so did the guy before me and who knows maybe the same faith awaits it.

The distro traveller

So removing the labels I discovered that this box came to Bulgaria from Sweden, where it got from the USA. Now as I write this it's probably already travelling to Canada. And it surely made some people happy, and who knows maybe it will keep doing that, maybe one day the world will get it back to some of its former owners. Nobody knows. But at least it got me thinking about nice stuff for at least a while and in the same time it's a bit depressing to know a box has done more travelling than more of the people you know.

(re)Emerging Patterns

Those last months my side-projects are having something of a revival. First we got our debut record as mother spit finally released, now I'll be starting the year with a live of my long forgotten death industrial / rhythmic noise project Emerging Patterns. 

Emerging Patterns 2012

Actually it's not that long since we did something with it. It was in early 2012 when we made our first two shows, which were erm... fun. We wrote our first tracks somewhere in late 2010 and ever since then we've been slowly adding new stuff, leaving everything unpublished for no particular reason. Check out our piece 'Process' below, it's actually the only stuff we have put online.

Anyhow we're back now, at least for a show w/ the cool German band Phosgore. For that case we made several new and quite more rhythmic tracks, improved some oldies and reworked some abandoned sketches, but Emerging Patterns is still atmospheric and forever NOISY as HELL. The rest you can hear only live. The event link is below. We hope the PA at the venue will survive our distortion/overdrive abuse.

180114 Phosegore (DE) live in Sofia
w/ Emerging Patterns (live) & DJ support 

mother spit debut out on Aetheric Records

Finally out through an awesome label, in a super limited edition, on the format we've always envisioned this piece to published.

mother spit live 250410

  

A tiny disclaimer - mother spit is Angel S. (Mytrip) and Martin L. (gokkun). It's a collab that has existed only live. Our music is somewhere between drone, ambient and noise. We create in a total decline of any other communication means, but the sound itself, which is developing on its own as much as its manually shaped. We basically played one live per year from 2009 until 2011. We're still trying to find all recordings from those shows, hopefully they're not forever lost. We almost got re-united in 2013, but eventually it didn't happen.

mother spit ft. Tsveti live 060411

A lot of love for the boutique UK label Aetheric Records who have decided to put out our debut as an extremely limited run of 3” CDr's and of course as a Digital Download. The awesome Stephen Cammack was also kind enough to do a short write up on what's in 'carve'.

mother spit - carve (2013)

In a world of grey.
In the surround of abandonment.
The offer to crawl from the scorched earth.
And drown in the freezing pool of mother spit.
A post apocalyptic feel, very Eastern European - the escaping gas swirling around only inches above the earth...
~ Stephen Cammack (SoundArt Radio, Dieter Müh)

Looking so much for the moment when me and Martin L. will be playing live again. In the meanwhile enjoy 'carve', send us some feedback, and maybe at some point we'll confess that we do have one more piece waiting somewhere unedited to be set free one day. Hmm... as I said, until then... 'carve'.

Leaver and some upcoming travels

I guess I have to start using this blog not only to show off current works and feedback, but for more everyday writings. Something that's not boring people to death. Will see if I do it, however it feels pretty dead here already, I hope there's still somebody catching up on stuff from time to time.

And as you can guess from the introduction, this one will be again for the good old showing off. After the recent (June 2013) cuts of all bands I had been involved in I was left with quite a lot of time and energy for new music, and it somehow resulted in something new. It's a project called Leaver, it's a duet with Daniel Donchov, a good fellow, who's taken up my place as a bassist in Expectations. The project brings my work in the drone / ambient field together with a taste of singer-songwriter stuff in a pretty interesting and enjoyable, especially for playing live, mixture.

Here's a video with a live sound of our very first rehearsal.

We already have a full record written, artworks prepared. What's left is to be recorded and published. We already have 3, 4 shows scheduled and spanning over what's left of this year and the beginning of the next one. The debut is on November 13 w/ the Polish Drip of Lies, and Torah, a pretty cool sludge duo, also based here in Sofia, Bulgaria. 

131113 Leaver (debut) w/ Torah & Drip Of Lies (PL) @ Sofia

Another show in December will be announced shortly, but the better news are for something happening in March 2014. Info will be unleashed late December.

As to my other activities, I've got a bunch of records I'm pretty proud of coming in the next few months, including the debut mother spit 3" CDr which I was trying to find a home for almost 3 years until I reached the rad people at Aetheric Records. Mytrip is also putting out something new, a quite harsh and extreme split tape w/ Human Larvae on Danvers State Recordings (US). Until then I'll be playing several weekend shows, for currently I'm a busy corporate dude with a day job, investing every coin saved in new gear so I can get back to freelancing as soon as possible!

Here's some posters and events. Hear you soon.

3011 Mytrip & Portable Elephant @ Question Mark, Bucharest

0112 Mytrip & Portable Elephant @ Old School, Rousse

As Far Away As Near (2013)

Watch an excerpt of the video at serapionov.info

'As Far Away As Near' (2013) is another video art piece featuring my music, this time in a collaboration with my buddy Martin Lukanov. The piece is a work by Kalin Serapionov. It's combining various night city landscapes, all filmed at random. Our task in building and structuring the sound was to create an absurd soundscape, merging with the lo-fi urban ambiance, already captured by the camera. 

What we did was play around with a no-input circuit using an almost broken mixing board. Besides all inner sounds emerging in the console I played a lot of synths and various software instruments, and we got their sound destroyed by the mixer as well.

The result? Well you have to hear it. It's sometimes subtle, sometimes piercing your ears with ultrasounds and often it reaches harsh ambient/drone or almost industrial peaks. 'As Far Away As Near' (2013) has already been presented abroad, and from October 2nd until November 2nd it will be shown in ICA Sofia. The opening is on October 1st at 18:00. Details here.