Who's afraid of Virginia (woolf)?

It's rainy and wet outside, and we're both sitting next to the warm fireplace (Thomas is sitting right across from me, his face is glowing in the light of the computer screen.) It's very peaceful here in Virginia. Sweet Erin left a few hours ago to the barn to take care of the horses. We will join her later, and I might get a chance to ride a horse for the first time in my life.
This day off is basically an internet day, and we're happily plugging ourselves into the wifi, trying to dust off the corners of our very many lives here, there and everywhere.

But the world feels hard today.

Maybe it's the weather, or maybe it's the ungraspable discomfort of the suburbs. I don't know. Right now I just miss Amsterdam and our urban family. I miss the little compulsive ceremonies we conduct in the city and the allusiveness of my existence there, where most of time I don't even know how I got to be part of it all.
I miss a particular kind of disarray, and a few very specific couches in loved living rooms across town. But I think I got a temporary solution for all this yearning:

I'm gonna go listen to Patti Smith.
I'll look at some pictures.
and I will never NEVER wash my hair again.

A

new show in Youngstown!!

Everyone please help us spread the word about our new show in Cedar's lounge in Youngstown Ohio this friday!!

hope to see you there,

T&A

reap what you sew

under the radar

Some one in brooklyn told us that there's no reason to leave New York because eventually, everything ends up (t)here.

After the last 4 days in that city, I can completely understand what they mean. We have been through so many parallel universes, let alone the different people and their different walks in life; the diversity between Harlem and Brooklyn is incomprehensible. Even between Green point and Bushwick, you're spit out of the metro into a reality which only shares a common skyline with the one before.

One of the the realities we were recently plunged into was a club full of dark red satin, red fish in crooked aquariums hanging on chains, and the best sound system Controllar has seen to date. Le Poisson Rouge, happens to be (as their menu so clearly states) a mecca for eclectic and multimedia/crossplatform nonsense. Once you buzz word the menu like that, one must expect something exceptionally extraordinary to live up to the tall order of everything which is new, relevant and groundbreaking in the world of music. Why controllar was playing there is still a bit of a mystery, but we like that... mystery.

On this special Martin Luther King Weekend, Inon Barnatan invited Controllar to create an eclectic program consisting of the musical treatement of song as poem and poem as song. Mendelssohn, Ravel, and Thomas Adès rewriting Dowland "In Darkness Let Me Dwell" complete with a stunning performance of the original by a counter-tenor and guitarist. Anat also performed a special piece in this first half written by a composer in New York named Gregory Spears.

To follow such a program is something which Controllar never had the pleasure of doing. In all honesty, it was very daunting, and we were nervous of the reception (or lack thereof) which might accompany it. And I can assure you, the first notes of "You do it all the time" were explosive. Not because they're particularly explosive, but simply because of the element of surprise which they contained in this context. By the time PH came on the menu, we felt a genuine pleasure from our audience, and no one regretted the second helping of "eliot" for dessert.

Before we realized it had begun- it was over. This is every concert, every drive, every day. Now we're in Pittsburgh, enjoying the magnificent weather, and the wonderful speed of life which this "American Tour" entails.

Thomas

Posters are coming your way

CD release in the Nieuwe Anita

It was like the tide coming in.

The last weeks have been some of the most intense in our lives; and besides that, we were mastering, printing and sewing our new CD

It was an enormous amount of work, and we loved every bump and snowy maneuver along the way.

After finishing sewing the covers yesterday at four thirty, we packed it all up and tied it tightly to our bikes and braved the snowy roads of the Amsterdam winter to arrive at the Nieuwe Anita.

We did, and many other people did as well! There was a magical electricity, perhaps from the extreme cold, or the low ceilings, but the Nieuwe Anita was alight with cocktails, and January passion. And we felt it, and we breathed it, and it was good.

We want to thank everyone for coming and joining this amazing Subbacultcha party, and making it such a wonderful CD release experience!

And now, now we're ready. The tide will go back out, and we'll fly away with it, to write about a whole other set of adventures. But it all started here. It was just so very fine.

White snow and going again

It has been a long time. A long time since anything has appeared on this page. But, for the first time in many weeks, I've taken a completely free day, and decided that it was time to start writing here again. A sort of preparation for the up-coming travels.
Although we haven't written anything here, we have been doing a lot. We just regarded this blog as a memory of our travels on our motorcycle through the summercountry and all the amazing things that happened to us there. We just couldn't touch it.

But as the dates for our next tour in the US start to become more and more solidified, we've decided to revive the blog, and continue it. It is completely unnecessary, but well, how many unnecessary things we do in our lives anyway.

We will leave again on tour for three weeks starting on the 12th of jan. Before that, we need to finish mastering the new CD, print the cases/posters, burn the CD, and package it. In holding with our DIY mentality, we're fashioning something special, though our DIY crew is slowly growing to include more and more wonderful friends to make all this happen.

Finally we've decided to initiate a newsletter. (So now that the blog is active, we can include that in the newsletter as well!) Of course, today was beautiful and empty, so all of these undertakings seem completely possible- aside from the music itself. Speaking of the music itself, we're very excited about the new CD coming out on the 8th of January! there will be plenty to go around.