Another Livelooping festival, this time in beautiful Florence ...
Some of you might remember the sentence "my god, it's full of stars". Another situation, but one could also say this about my new suitcase that I had to buy because the airline that calls itself "Easyjet" allows for only one piece of cabin baggage. For me as a travelling livelooper (well, occasionally), this is a bad restriction: I need to carry the laptop in one hand and the small Hohner G2 guitar in the other hand. I wouldn't check in any of those two of course, and to put the laptop into my suitcase didn't feel so safe. The solution for this was finally to get a large new dark blue suitcase that could contain not only my toothbrush and t-shirts but also the guitar, squeezed in diagonally. And to be able to recognize it at the baggage claim, I put lots of little fluorescent stars on it, on all sides. It looks really nice, and they glow in the dark!
Massimo Liverani the hero had organized the 4th
International Livelooping Festival in Florence. And as if that wasn't enough, he also housed us, fed us, drove us, and showed us around the town.
Among the liveloopers I met in Florence: Gareth Whittock, and his wife Emma, from Bristol ...
Willie Oteri and Dave Laczko (WD-41, and I know the secret story behind this name now) from Austin, Texas ...
Fabio Anile from Rome, with his friend Michaela ...
Rainer Straschill from Munich with Michéle ...
Enrico Coniglio from Venice (right) who turned out to share some unusual passions with me (such as, wandering around with binaural microphones, or dipping a hydrophone into the sea and listening to fish) ...
We walked around the old city after midnight ... Roman statues, old bridges, cafes that were the birthplace of the futurist movement, and of course breathtaking buildings ...
We drove up a hill to take the tourist look over the valley of Florence ... the city and the area of Tuscany are amazingly beautiful, I want to come back and spend a vacation here!
The venue was an open air stage in a beautiful park. It was very warm, and families and kids were all around until very late.
My set was the last one on this day. I replaced Randolf Arriola from Singapur who couldn't come.
My set had some weak moments, but all in all, I was very happy with how it developed, and I felt that this gig had been a significant step. Too bad my long pants had disintegrated unexpectedly the day before, I look a bit sloppy with my short pants, but it works if one closes one's eyes and just listens to the music :)
The Sunday after the Saturday before. Massimo and his wife fed us with pasta, and we all sat together in a small garden under a fig tree, eating and having coffee and talking.
After this, most of the tired loopers went to bed again, while Fabio, Michaela and me set off to Rome for the next adventure. Fabio had invited me to stay with him for a few days, to make music together. Because he had to work early on Monday, we missed the second day of the festival. Too bad but the first day had already been very enjoyable, with very nice sets of Giovanni Lami, Enrico Coniglio, Fabio Anile, and Rainer Straschill. (And me.)
I stayed in Fabio's place for several days, and on each day when he came home from work in the afternoon, we improvised together for several hours, and recorded everything. It will take some time to listen through all of this! Some of the improvisations will probably be good enough for a CD as they are, some others need some working on, and some might be used as a sketch for a composition. The music that we produced was quite beautiful and dreamy, often involving silence or very few notes.
On my last morning in Rome, before going to the airport, Fabio drove me to Tivoli, a few miles outside of Rome, where we took a look at Villa Adriana. "Villa" is a somewhat misleading word for this huge complex of buildings. This amazing place had been home for a while to a Roman emperor who liked it better than his palace in the city - I could understand why. Of course I did not only take photos but also binaural recordings with "headphone" microphones (wearing my furry black windshields which Fabio found very funny).
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