Wednesday, January 23, 2013

The Start of a Journey

Heyheyhey, and welcome! We have a blog. Amazing.

We are going to try to publish right here what’s going on, we’ll see how it works out, hoho.

DSC_001711234567Okay! It’s been two weeks since Johannes arrived, and we had a lot of stuff to take care of in the first days. We had to get the car fixed, a lot more work than expected, but our man Jacob helped us get it all together. Here’s a picture of the experienced, and in Jacob’s opinion, talented car mechanic Johannes Sickan Olsson just taking a break enjoying a locally brewed beer. We also hade to set up a few more gigs for this week since we hade a pretty big gap and we needed to make t-shirts, cds and patches. Everything sucessfully completed, yes!

The first gig was a homeschooling event at Bedford Elementary School. We started out playing a few songs from different cultural regions, explaining the differences and the origins of the songs. Following this Kjartan held a workshop in Traditional Hungarian dances (he’s going to write more about this in another post later). We finished the day in Bedford by having a small question and answer session in the library.
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Sunday we had a similar gig at Unity Church in Kalamazoo, on monday we had a house show at The Black Lodge. Great show. Nice crowd. Pictures taken by Lucas Renoos.
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We had a last minute cancellation for our Wednesday gig at the Black Owl Café. We went across the street to Old Dog Tavern and managed to set up a gig there instead. Turned out to be a very lucky shot! One of the best, if not the best show Skogen has had so far. Wild ring dances on a bouncy floor is hard to beat. An extraordinary last perfomance in Kjartan’s home base Kalamazoo before heading towards Ann Arbor. Ooopa!

This town was not bad either. We played at Komphaus, and we had the favourite bouncy floor ring dance experience once again. We forgot our mouth harps though, but we’ll come and fetch them later.

Next stop was Lansing. We played at Scene Metrospace, great gig as well. On of the shortest gigs Skogen’s had so far, a big challange for us to pick out songs for only 45 minutes since we are used to the three hour shows. But we managed I think. There was free coffee, so we might have played the tunes a little too fast. Thanks to Rose and Star Path, and The Devil’s Cut who played before us. Special thanks to Augusta Rose, for fixing the gig for us, having a party and hosting us! You can check out her music right here: https://soundcloud.com/dj-gus-1

The next story is pretty interesting. We had a gig booked in Detroit for Saturday, it got cancelled so we set up a last minute show in Windsor, Canada. Yeah, we’re just going through a tunnel and play a gig and stay for a night and then back again, we thought. Did not really turn out that way. First we missed the turn for the tunnel three times, and then we apparentely were two suspicious musicians. The man in the booth asked us tons of questions and decided that we needed to be further inspected. The next officer told us we couldn’t just bring our instruments and jam in a bar and then go back. Eventually, for different reasons, we had to go back to the Detroit. Well, I guess it wasn’t meant that we should play this day!

The only thing we did on Sunday was basically hanging out a coffee shop, eating carrots from Ben and the gang in Lansing. They were delicious, thank you.

Monday, we went back to Ann Arbor, for another house show at The Augur's Kettle.  Greatgreatgreat, people started dancing instantly, and for three hours. Good job. Yesterday was a pretty lazy day, we were hanging out with the Fossum family, thank you very much for your great hospitality, and for the gig of course!

Right now, Wednesday morning, I'm sitting in my sleeping bag trying to finally post this damn plog post. It has to be done. In a few hours we're leaving for Cleveland, and Prosperity Club. There's going to be a Serbian accordion man playing before us, sounds great.

Oh, and here’s a short clip of our show in Kalamazoo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQ2Fa110pg8

Anyways, this was the first post, I might have forgot a lot of important people and stuff that has happened, please forgive me. We love y'all!


Yours sincerely,
Johannes

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