Eurozeit

It’s Friday May 28th and I am in the middle of nowhere as I am typing this, deep in the Baden-Württembergian forest. All I can remember is boarding a flight from London Heathrow to Stuttgart this very morning. I got chauffeured here from the airport, to a rustical little German guest house in a rustical little German village. The amount of surrealism is immense. However, unfortunately, the lady at the ‘reception’ doesn’t know what an internet is (“is it that thing about computers and such?”), so I’m pre-typing these lines offline while I wait for my Rotbarschfilet mit Dampfkartoffeln and a freshly draught brewski, hoping for some internetical wirage in the next couple days. Tryna recap the last 4 weeks! About effing time! Shame on my ass for infrequent travelogging. Oh well. I’ma do it backwards, Memento-style.

I spent a week in beloved Londontown until today. In which other European city might it occur that Pakistani dudes with massive gold chains offer you hits from their airhorn-sized spliffs while you’re waiting for the double decker bus at 11am. Last Friday I went to the Coronet Theatre in Elephant & Castle with Italian noblemen Solo and
Mowgli to see Switch, Popof, Jack Beats and Riva Starr set the roof on fire.

The place was poppin’, but I spent most of the time backstage, eagerly and drunkenly discussing with Hervé, Trevor Loveys and Mowgli about whether French or Italian cuisine is le top notch shit. We also witnessed various gentlemen urinating into plastic cups and snorting blow off  a demounted ‘jesus clock’. Welcome to London.

A rather beclouding happening occurred as well while I was lounging at London Fields in Hackney last Saturday afternoon. The sun was out and the park was rammed, when all of a sudden I heard gunshots and noticed some dudes chasing each other right next to me. A totally noninvolved unlucky chap got shot in the middle of some gang crossfire. WTF LDN? Read the Dailymail article here.

The rest of the week was quite chill- I raided British supermarkets, did a gig at the Westbury in Kilburn, went to see Tate Modern, ate pan-fried chicken at 5am prepared by some highly hospitable Mexicans, ran into Major Lazer’s Skerrit Bwoy at Uniqlo on Oxford Street, took long walks alongside Thames river, went for molto sfarzoso Italian dinner with Solo and Teki Latex of TTC and Sound Pellegrino, downed some pints with Sinden and MJ Cole and also kicked it at Sinden’s studio for a bit,

where he hooked me up with some of his latest tunes and remixes as well as the first releases on his newly born Grizzly label, a trademark to absolutely look out for in 2010.

Before hitting the United Kingdom, I spent some time in Berlin, where I met daddy-o (congrats!) Daniel Haaksman of Man Recordings for Portuguese coffee, had a meeting (and a crash course in Traktor Scratch Pro and Kontrol X1) at the Native Instruments headquarter, highly considering to shift sides and become an endorser of aforementioned products, visited Wasted German Youth mastermind and Kiwi gentleman Paul Snowden at his recently opened shop,

had dinner with the German boys & girls from Jackmode agency, the Finlandian guys from Renaissance Man and the South African chaps from Yogazelle, paid a short visit to a slightly odd bash held by Vice magazine at Ritter Butzke, and tried to spend as much time as possible with some good old homies whom I get to see way too infrequently.

Right before Berlin, I was in Paris to play a gig at La Machine, a club in the basement of the world famous Moulin Rouge. I extended my Parisian stay for a few days, feasting on bucketloads of mussels and crepes, having picnic in front of Sacré-Cœur on the hill of Montmartre and taking long walks around the Palais du Louvre with homegirl Miss Yellow who was in town as well for a quick stopover. I also had the chance to kick it with former French ITF branchman The Yom and le seigneur de Montmartre, Wolfgang 3000 de la Zonders.

Jeez, my fingers are getting tired.  I didz a couple gigs in Switzerland earlier this month with crewmate J-Bounce, the Playgroundkids duo and Suivez & Cedric Gentil of the legendary Ponybomb span. I really like this Switzerland. Might wanna retire there some day. Larry David once said that Swiss people like to ski and eat chocolate, and they don’t like to fight. Which is kinda true. The rest of my Eurozeit I spent in Düsseldorf with the bro Rafik so far, who just text messaged me that the club he played at in Moscow last night got raided by cops with machine guns and ski masks. дерьмо! I am now in Ulm, Germany, getting ready to do a gig at Su Casa for Jackmode‘s regular night UNTITLED. It is undoubtedly one of Germany’s best club nights in one of Germany’s nicest clubs, so I’m really looking forward to this one! I played here before in 2007 and 2008, and I fucking loved it both times.

I’ll be on the road for 4 more weeks, next stops are Ingolstadt, Munich, Aachen, Prague, Warsaw, Krakow, Milan, Vienna, Bucarest and Bern and maybe even Barcelona, enhanced by a 5-day-roadtrip through Iceland. Godspeed me!