Appreciation

To Risk It and the Dresden crew.

To Pavel and everyone involved in Prague.

To the distinguished Fluff crew, and to Tomas’s forgiving patience.

To Jens, Jaan, Fille and Omar.

To Anchor, No Omega, Hårda Tider, Beyond Pink, Victims and Death Is Not Glamorous.

To all the kids who defied the mud, and to Michal The Wonder Years  for catching our flying bass player.

To all our friends from Poland, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Argentina, Norway, the UK, Switzerland, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Russia, Belgium, the US (yo Finland, Denmark, Holland and Portugal, we missed you!).

We spend half a life on these loose ends and think we have experienced most of what carries worth when it comes to energy bouncing between four walls, a floor and a roof; we believe that we know all about sweat blending from bodies on the verge of boiling over; we assume that we are aware of what passion can be transferred from eye to eye when the song starts.

Then we play a show like the one on Prague last Thursday, and it dawns on everyone that we are actually pretty clueless.  And we leave such a show, through a local storm of hugs, smiles and high expectations, re-affirming each other that yes, if there ever is a standard to be set for how a hardcore show should be, this must surely have been it.

And we roll into the Fluff camping site and pinch our arms so we can be sure that we won’t miss out on what’s going to happen right now, so we won’t flinch and find that it passed us by. As we hug Martijn and Angelo at the entrance, we know that this is somehow a home away from home for us.

We have our hearts in small venues and fifteen minute sets that leave PA-systems gasping for mercy, where we wait for the touring band to arrive in a mal-functioning van (and where we are grateful for sometimes being that band), where we hope that someone will sing along, buy a fanzine, meet for the first time and decide to start that band that we can stagedive to a few months later. We all share that. We have devoted parts of our lives and bodies to “breakdowns, fast snare beats, good lyrics, and intricate simplicity”. And the combination of these ingredients sets us off like a god damn neutron bomb.

“To those who paved the way, who still remain, we are one – from the same strain”.

See you soon!

XXX

// Stay Hungry, July 2011