central & eastern Europe 1

Today I took off to go on a journey through middle and eastern Europe.
I am with the Endlichen Automaten - Laptop Orchester Berlin (http://
endliche-automaten.de/) and we are going to visit 6 or 7 cities in 5
countries to meet up with local musicians and composers to write a
composition or a develop a piece of music together. In each city we
will stay for a couple of days to rehearse the piece, then we play a
concert performing the pieces we have learned so far and then we move
on to the next city with a new composition in our repertoire.
This tour is sponsored by various cultural institutions (otherwise I
couldn´t afford to take a whole month off from Berlin) which is why
our journey takes us to small and medium sized towns - the places our
sponsors have some sort of involvement with... I guess cities like
Prague or Budapest also already have enough going on and maybe even
their own Laptop Orchestras.

Our first stop is Ústí nad Labem in the Czech Republic. A wonderful
small town right behind the german border.
We didn´t do a lot today except for checking out the venue - an old
factory on the outskirts, had a typical czech lunch and walked for a
couple of hours to find a nice cafe somewhere along the river Elbe
(Labem), which was impossible... I guess they just don´t like to sit
by the river and have a cool beer (pivo) in the warm spring sun.
Tomorrow we are going to meet our local musician - Prof. Neutrino - a
hip hop producer and then rehearse for 2 days in a row.
The concert will be on monday.

Stay tuned - I will try to keep you posted as often as possible.