Archive for March, 2010

Triptykon added to Summer Breeze

Sunday, March 28th, 2010

Triptykon

I seem to be hav­ing a good run with this fes­ti­val band thing. Just a few weeks ago I said in this blog post:

So first Gojira, now Fear Fac­tory… would it be cheeky to sug­gest a third must-see band, Trip­tykon? They’ll be tour­ing in Europe at the time, surely it wouldn’t be too much a stretch. Wacken, Party.San, Sum­mer Breeze? Anyone?)

Well, Sum­mer Breeze have kindly stepped up to the plate and added Trip­tykon (as well as Skele­ton­witch which I know is mak­ing some other peo­ple very happy). My life is now com­plete. I have no more suggestions.

It’s now time to com­pile a list of bands that are “must see” and hope like hell the sched­ules don’t have too many awful con­flicts. Wacken said they would be releas­ing their pre­lim­i­nary sched­ule on the 22nd of March but a week later we have yet to see any­thing. Still, I don’t imag­ine it will be long now…

Tags: ,
Posted in bands | Comments Off

Full Metal Pastry Chef

Friday, March 19th, 2010

Camp cooking with Stu

Our Wacken com­pan­ion from last year, Mr Vagrant, likes to cook. He’s par­tic­u­larly good at desserts: from his kitchen we’ve enjoyed choco­late souf­flés, truf­fles at Christ­mas, giant oat and macadamia cook­ies, and a deli­cious choco­late semi­freddo, to name a few.

After a few drinks the other week­end we “cooked” up a deli­ciously devi­ous plan: appoint Vagrant the offi­cial 2010 tour muf­fin cook and demand camp­fire del­i­ca­cies in the field. The deed was done on Face­book shortly thereafter:

I’m appoint­ing you our offi­cial “Blitzkrieg Tour” Baker. You will be required to con­coct some kind of deli­cious treat using only camp­ground mate­ri­als dur­ing Wacken, Party.San or Sum­mer Breeze. Are you up to the challenge?

The response was favourable and the chal­lenge was accepted:

Aye aye, cap’n. Expect me to bake under the influ­ence. And prob­a­bly shout things like “AH CAN’AE DO EET CAP’N” and “NO COOKIE FOR j00!” at random.

The next log­i­cal step was an offi­cial uni­form piece. Mouths water­ing in antic­i­pa­tion, we found a chef’s hat and got it embroi­dered with “BLITZKRIEG TOUR PASTRY CHEF”, then popped it in a post bag an sent it off to Vagrant Inc’s offices:

Pastry Chef

We trust it will be bet­ter than “camp cook­ing with Stu”, pic­tured at the top of this post.

Tags:
Posted in preparations | Comments Off

Blitzkrieg Tour 2010: all systems go

Saturday, March 13th, 2010

blitzkrieg

At some point in the last few months our epic three fes­ti­val tour has devel­oped the code­name Blitzkrieg 2010.

Cur­rent Blitzkrieg Tour status:

  • fes­ti­val tick­ets: Wacken, Party.San, Sum­mer Breeze: check
  • flights: booked and paid for: check
  • tent and back­packs: check
  • accom­mo­da­tion between fes­ti­vals: still to be sourced
  • car hire: still to be sourced

The Fes­ti­val buddy sys­tem is in full swing, with Charp set to actu­ally attend his first Wacken after bail­ing out on his two pre­vi­ous attempts. Zoe Zom­bie and uh, “Roger” will be at the Holy Grounds on their Full Metal Hon­ey­moon, and Vagrant is mak­ing it two Wack­ens run­ning as well as join­ing the full Blitzkrieg-in-a-bus expe­ri­ence (as hon­orary pas­try chef) and rock­ing on for a week of post-festival alco­holism in Krakow. The mot­ley Eng­lish crew will be in atten­dance in some con­fig­u­ra­tion or another as always, and we’re try­ing as hard as we can to get Metal As Fuck’s Bioda­gar on board. She totally fuck­ing needs to do it.

And who knows, there will prob­a­bly be other ran­doms that we know as well, includ­ing the dude who works at our local com­puter store (*waves*), Alex, a hot chick from Syd­ney I’ve been talk­ing to that found us via this blog, and the Perth peeps join­ing the Sound­works Metal Travel tour.

As of this evening, 144 days to go!

Tags:
Posted in festival, travel | 1 Comment »

You just try and wipe this smile off my face

Monday, March 8th, 2010

Burton C Bell

Fear Fac­tory have been announced for Wacken. I’d be doing a lit­tle happy dance right now, except that wouldn’t be very metal. Met­al­beast can con­firm that I ripped off my head­set and threw the horns before I could even vocalise the news.

So first Gojira, now Fear Fac­tory… would it be cheeky to sug­gest a third must-see band, Trip­tykon? They’ll be tour­ing in Europe at the time, surely it wouldn’t be too much a stretch. Wacken, Party.San, Sum­mer Breeze? Anyone?

I did my very first video inter­view in Jan­u­ary, with Bur­ton and Dino from Fear Fac­tory. You can laugh at me here: Soul of an old machine.

Tags:
Posted in bands, woa2010 | 1 Comment »

Wanted: Festival Factory

Monday, March 1st, 2010

Fear FactoryI

Last year, the all-new Fear Fac­tory lineup announced head­lin­ing club dates in Ham­burg (the day after we left) and Aus­tralia includ­ing Perth (two days after we arrived back home). But then those dates were can­celled due to their ongo­ing legal issues and the band went and recorded a new album instead.

They were then added to the Big Day Out fes­ti­val in Aus­tralia, but after most of the dates had already sold out and we weren’t about to pay to go when there was only one band we wanted to see on the bill any­way. So our chances of see­ing them live were snatched away again.

Now the new album, Mech­a­nize, is out (it’s a rip­per) and a set list from a recent show in Ams­ter­dam has a few of the new songs in it. Fear Fac­tory have been announced for the fol­low­ing Euro­pean fes­ti­val dates:

  • Hellfest (France), June 18–20
  • Graspop Metal Meet­ing (Bel­gium), June 25–27
  • With Full Force (Ger­many), July 2–4
  • For­t­aRock (Hol­land), July 3
  • Son­i­sphere (United King­dom), July 31
  • Bru­tal Assault (Czech Repub­lic), August 12–14

Now, to me that looks like there’s some big gaps in there, par­tic­u­larly in July and the begin­ning of August. My bet is that there will be some more Fes­ti­val gigs announced and maybe even some sideshows. Party.San is on at the same time as Bru­tal Assault so that’s prob­a­bly out, but Wacken at the begin­ning of August and Sum­mer Breeze on August 19–21 leave me with hope.

I’ll be keep­ing a keen eye out! Wacken organ­is­ers, you finally lis­tened to me a booked Gojira… here’s another tip for you!

Tags: , , ,
Posted in bands, party.san2010, summerbreeze2010, woa2010 | Comments Off