technozid

Just to show off – I’m probably the first person to have a ticket for the show in November

Finally Saturday evening arrived! The concert was part of the “Schicksalsfest” (Destiny/Fate festival) – a 3 day festival for fans of the Middle Ages. The setting was an old castle in Belgium, close to my hometown, and many attendees dressed in medieval costumes or phantasy costumes (a lot clearly influenced by Tolkien). Since my ticket was valid from 8pm on and the concert started at 10pm I was able to attend a very interesting demonstration of the different wrestling, knife-fighting, fencing and swordfighting techniques along with a historical explanation.

Finally the 6 Fiddlers Ralf, Stefan, Rainer, Frank, Tobias and the “new guy” Pat entered the stage. Since I never visited a Fiddler’s Green concert before, I was a bit surprised when one of their roadies – dressed with rags and a sheep’s skull – opened the concert with a ceremonial drum banging, but I was informed that this is the traditional opening of the “Folk Raider” character. I was approximately 7 meters away from the stage and once the first chords played I was glad that I had my earplugs since the sound was deafening. Well, I’m not 20 anymore, but I saw that several other people also had earplugs. Actually I was surprised to see that I was not the oldest person around. I would assume that I was at the lower end of the oldest third, but quite a lot of guests were clearly in their Fourties and even Fifties.

Lead vocalist Ralf ‘Albi’ Albers had a knee injury which forced him to wear a bandage, so he had to sit quite a lot. But this didn’t kept him from wildly moving and gesturing around. Along with fiddle player Tobias ‘Tobi’ Heindl (in typical tartan kilt) and Pat, the new guitar player who only joined the Fiddlers some 6 weeks ago), they did all the talking. Apart from being new, Pat also seems to be the youngest of the group and was subject to many (friendly) puns because he doesn’t know all the song titles and meaning of the lyrics yet. Accordeon player Stefan Klug celebrated his birthday that night and was spontaneously greeted with our regional birthday song “Hass Jeburtstach – Au hur!” which is too rude to translate and which clearly puzzled the group from southern Germany. Stefan, be assured it was meant friendly and actually it was quite an honour to receive such a chant.
The 90 minutes of concert were quite a good workout session, not only for me and the other visitors, but for the band as well. I knew almost all of the tracks excpet the 2 (3?) of the new album they are going to record soon. I was especially pleased when they played my favourite song “As I roved out“, especially since they gave it a Reggae-touch I never realized before (or which they evolved only recently). My other favourites were “Queen of Argyll”, “Lanigan’s Ball” and of course “Folk Raider”. I had the impression that the program was “aiming for safety”, playing more the traditional-like songs – probably due to the fact of the medieval setting. I had hoped for more modern songs like “Tangerine” or “Out of the darkness”. As for the traditional repertoire I had hoped for the “Black Sheep Rag”. But even so it was a great concert which made all of the estimated 200 guests dance one way or the other. A small group in my vicinity started to Pogo-dance on a few occasions. Though I had my share of pogo dancing when I was at the university it seemed quite out of place and a bit annoying during the Fiddler’s Green concert.

After the concert the musicians were available at the merchandising booth. I bought the “Celebrate!” CD which was recorded at their 1000th concert and had Ralf, Stefan and Tobi sign it. I also had the opportunity for a small chat with Ralf. Tobi was under siege by female fans, so it took me a while to get his autograph. I only had limited cash with me (as a precaution), so I couldn’t buy the “Fiddler’s Songbook”. However it’s available in their online shop, and since it is my birthday soon…

Finally, when the roadies began to pack the equipment after 2 (3?) encores, there was a demonstration by the fire artist group “Evil Flames” which was very impressive too. Nevertheless I left early since it was a rather long and tricky country lane leading to the parking field and I didn’t want to be struck in congestion in the middle of the night. I was home at about 1am and poured myself a glass of Laphroaig single malt whisky to chill down.

And what about my checklist? I should have taken a spare T-shirt since mine was soaking wet with sweat. I had too much water with me, but since I left the second bottle in the car it wasn’t too hard to carry. A towel would have come in handy too.

Thank you, Fiddler’s, for this perfect evening. I’m sure I’m going to visit one of your concerts again!

Ticket? Check!
Digital camera? Check!
Water in plastic bottles? Check!
Earplugs? Check!
Rain cape? Check!
Rucksack? Check!
Anything I forgot?

Only 3 days to wait for the Fiddler’s Green concert at the Eyneburg castle in Belgium. There is supposed to be a weather change towards the weekend – I hope we won’t have thunderstorms that night. I’m going to post some more after the concert.

As mentioned in an earlier post I am brushing up my guitar – ahem – “skills” during my vacation. Yesterday I was sitting with my friend Holger who dusted off his old electric bass in a similar attempt. I told him about my guitar and when I mentioned the manufacturer’s name “Framus” he raised an astonished eyebrow. Since I bought the guitar back in the early Eigthies from a classmate for 100 DM (“felt” value today ~100 EUR) I always thought it was some cheap far-east factory stuff. But as it turned out Framus is a respected German guitar, bass and banjo manufacturer founded back in 1946. They went bankrupt in 1975, but began production again in 1995. Among the artists playing Framus instruments, there are the “German Elvis” Peter Kraus, John Lennon, George Harrison and Rolling Stones bassman Bill Wyman. There is quite an extensive article on Wikipedia as well as the history section on the bilingual homepage.

I was not very kind to my Framus guitar. It came in a light blue finish which didn’t look “cool” enough to me back then. So I “attacked” it with my dad’s hot-air fan and scraped the paint and finish off it, leaving bare wood and lot of scars. Then I glued a mirror between the pickup and the neck since that looked cool too. Click on the thumbnail to see the full image of the guitar. Last night I took some pictures of my guitar and sent them to Framus’ “Vintage Specialist”. This morning, he answered and told me that my guitar is a “Framus Junior de luxe (Model 10370)” which was built in the early Seventies, most likely in 1972. He also told me that it was modified since the original model only had a single coil pickup – my model is equipped with a humbucker-pickup. They only have a picture of a Junior 4 bass from 1973 on their page, but the similarity is quite obvious. So my guitar is probably only 5 years younger than I am. I have not yet made my mind up whether I should renovate it (I always feel inclined to use the article “her” on my 3 guitars), give it a new finish, get rid of the mirror etc. – or whether I should leave it like it is. Right now I’m tending more to leaving it like it is. What do you think?

A couple of years ago I was first confronted with the task to create a small (educational/promotional) video. Since I am working with Adobe Premiere since version 4.2 the production of the video was not a big task. But since it was to be used for commercial purposes, the soundtrack was the real difficult part due to licenses and royalties. Finally I discovered Magix Music Maker – a tool aimed at amateurs which came together with huge libraries of soundbits and which allowed the easy creation of royalty free tracks. Over the years, a handful of songs have been created – and more will follow. I have released them under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 License. Feel free to download and use them according to this license. The tunes can be found on a special page: http://www.technozid.de/music/

Due to the Warholian 15-minutes-fame moment of my Bodenständig 2000 iTunes post and its appearance on BoingBoing, the artists decided to put some more songs available for download onto their webpage. Everybody who thinks they are making neo-nazi rock can listen to it and hopefully see how wrong this assumption is.
I’m still trying to talk them into releasing some material to CC:Share Music or CC:Sampling. I’ll keep this blog updated on that matter.

Update: Youtube has a video of their 2004 concert in the Scala in London