Spring is here again...

Tender age in bloom.

Despite all the photos I took during the last two months and a half of touring, I decided to post here a picture of what I found once back home: our trees have their green leaves back.
So no more pics to post here, until the North American leg of the tour will be over.
Only this one.
Our trees did spring.
They will stay green until we come back. It's their way to tell us they'll keep protecting us.
And I completely believe in it. One of the few certain things we have left.

The trees tell us stories from the past.

We stopped and stood in front of many trees in the past 4 weeks. So many trees, in so many different countries. Every day we play, we drive, we eat and we hear stories from the Trees.
I have plenty of new pics, plenty of words going around my head.
I'm happy today, I'm enjoying the Sun.
The Sun is telling our bodies to be strong and keep on our path.
Here you will find three pics, of different trees, with different stories.
The first two are from Terezin, also known as Theresienstadt, in Czech Republick.
There were a konzentration camp in this little town. We played one minute away, so we decided to go and pay our respect to the dead, and show our anger towards the ghosts of the perpetrators.
Trees told us stories, told us never to forget. If we will forget, it will be only for a choice of ours, so then we will pay the consequencies.
This few words won't teach anything to anyone. Few words to remember a day we spent hearing maybe some of the saddest stories from some peculiar Trees.
Last photo comes from Stoke Newington Cemetery, where we went to fly balloons with booklets of our beloved Ving Ngo. We freed the booklets in London's sky, and we did it again in Amsterdam, Holstebro DK and Prague.
Another way for telling stories.
It won't take me so long to come back here, I promise.
Let yourself willin to hear stories from everyone, especially from the Trees.

White snow, true Winter

After a while here I am, back to the trees' fort, or to the fort on the trees.
We've been travelling a lot in the recent three weeks, with our younger brothers Les Rhinoceros, and with our cicero Jakub from Seek Harbour Booking. We were East, tomorrow we start another tour and we will go West.
I thought of not writing post for the 4 months of touring we had ahead, for then coming back with tons of new trees photos and stories.
But it looks like i have already too memories from the first leg of the tour that I won't be able to take any new ones, so I decided with post something, every once in a while.
Three pics for the first three days of the tour.
Between Slovenia and Croatia. Trees are tall, they're able to keep apart all the grey. They're stunning. Even if I wasn't driving at all, I couldn't sleep in the van, I stared at the window and just tried to count'em all. Of course, I didn't make it.
They are so many of them, it is something that simply makes me joyfull.
They will win, they always will.
And I rememberd when I thought I was scared of Trees.
Now i can only think that posting these three new trees it is the best wishing luck for the new tour that is starting.
Take care, you too.

Beijing Winter Tales

Lotuses grow out of the mud pure and clean.
Some Beijing Winter Tales are about the lotuses growing out of ice, waiting for the Spring.
The beauty of Winter colors is a bold statement in which I read the art of enjoing the waiting, every little step. It is so hard sometimes. As when checking a pic before posting it to see if everything is in its right place.
This whole set of picture was taken by our C. Lee during her last staying in the North Capital of China. They were shot in December.
There are 4 of them.


A fifth photo is of a Tree coming out of a Beijing Wall. You can see some starlings flying around. Are They the ones I was talking about few weeks ago? I like to think that!

So, 4 pics of Lotuses + a Tree= 5. We miss one thing to get to Six, and you know how picky I can be with Numbers.

And the sixth will be the teaser for our upcoming album "Anyway, your children will deny it", shot by Luigi Dalla Riva e Simone Piva, on a Ba Abat set design called "HereWeare".
Just click on the link below.

"ANYWAY, YOU CHILDREN WILL DENY IT" TEASER

Friday, january 27th
signed

f.

Waves over the miles

Last time I was writing something here it was almost a month ago.
Now we have a new year, I personally have thousand different thoughts to follow in my head, and tons of pics to better organize.
Anyhow, there's a detail that I've been noticing in all the photos I took from the end of December to yesterday (January 11th, dates, you know, are important!): WAVES! Think of it as a concept, as the waves which (butthole) surfers are looking for or just as a lonely and gigantic big Wave that will wash all of us away, i can tell you they've been picking up on my mind for almost three weeks now. And if you check this three pics I'm not sure you will see anything related to it. Maybe it's just me thinking that trees can protect us even from that gigantic Wave. The sound of the wave hitting on the trees, I imagine it to be atonishing, though.
This short introduction is to present the new first pics of 2012.


I'll be hitting the road with my cohorts soon (check live page for updates!) so I'll be collecting new pics from this side of the world and the other, as we know it.
And I'll be posting here the first promo pics for the new record (Anyway, your children will deny it) very soon, pics which were taken by our friends @ quasimontecarlo, on a set design by Ba Abat http://www.baabat.com.




By the way, the second picture in this post depicts a Birch Forest up in the mountains between France and Italy, an amazing place where I did find some peace in the last days of 2011.






God speed.

signed,

f.

After going Sinister around the world.

After introducing C. Lee and the photos she took while in Shanghai (she's still there, still hiding, and I underline that I mean a positive thing in saying "hiding". Hide yourself in the woods! There you'll find protection), here some other news: besides our beloved Trees, you will recognize some birds on 2 of the 3 pics I'm posting today.
I've learned these birds are called starlings.
They've been reharsing for days, in order to migrate.
It's still kind of warm here, 8 to 10 Celsius degrees, maybe 5 in the evenings.
When I was a kid it was like this earlier in October.
Anyway, these birds have been doing circles all day long in the past couple of days.
At the beginning I had the feeling that I was missing something...
Then i remembered.
With C. Lee, three years ago at least, we did record some birds while they were doing this same thing. We used those field recordings as introduction to "Go Sinister", a song part of the "...and He told us to turn to the Sun" album...
And now here they are, and I'm pretty damn sure they are the same birds. Less maybe, but they came back.
And I want to be clear, I'm not saying here that they came back for me, nor for C.Lee. No, they came back to the Trees. They found once here protection, so they came back.
They prove me right, or I prove them right.
Here a link to listen to that song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ceeb7y407Uo

The birds taught me that I always should to go back to the Trees.
These trees of ours.

Sub Pop

Hectic post today.
I've been asked by our friend Dean Whitmore to provide a top 10 something for the Top Ten of 2011 Friends of Sub Pop Edition.
Here's my contribution.

Among the live shows i had the chance to see in the last couple of years while touring with Father Murphy, this is my top ten (in no particular order):

Talk Normal, performing at Sonic City Festival, Kortrijk, Belgium
Deerhoof and Xiu Xiu, performing Joy Division's Day of the Lords, Lee Palace, Toronto, Canada
Asian Women on the telephone (AWOTT), live at SKIF Festival, St. Petersburg, Russia
KILLL, live at SKIF Festival, St. Petersburg, Russia
Sic Alps, live at Victoria Dalston, London, UK
Thulebasen, live at Sodra Theater, Stockolm, Sweden
The Ex & Brass Unbound live at Magasin 4, Brussels, Belgium
Movie Star Junkies, live at No Fest, Turin, Italy
Dead Western, performing at HUB, Sacramento, US
Monstro (i believe they changed their name to "Consort of the true drone", anyway look for Ezra Buchla!) live at The Smell, Los Angeles, US

Updated the live page, with the archive list until 2004.
Check also clips page, and new pics.
Soon more details about our new "Anyway, your children will deny it" album, due to release next february 2012 (the more we listen to the new tracks, the happiest we are for asking Greg saunier to mix this new jam of ours).



Hectic post, hectic photo of a green tree coming out from the myst.

Protect yourself, now, You.