Hi all,
Myself and a few others (rumors are Koufar and Murderous Vision) may set out for fair Europa together at some point this summer, doing two UK shows, four or five in central europe and then a short leg of scandanavian / northeastern euro dates.
I don't want this thread to really be about us specifically, but in terms of more "playing abroad" terms, especially from the perspective of US guys going to Europe for a few weeks.
topics of interest:
- Visas / passports / paperwork
- Customs (merch)
- Rail travel
- Typical turnout / support of euro fans
- Language barrier a problem?
- Electrical issues
- currency
- dos and do nots?
oh, and if it interests anyone, our theoretical / desired routing:
- UK (dorset)
- Amsterdam
- Dresden
- Berlin
- Prague
- Italy
- Lithuania
- Finland
- Sweden
- UK (london)
in the span of like two or three weeks.
Quote from: Nyodene D on October 12, 2011, 08:22:10 PM
- Typical turnout / support of euro fans
expect the worst, it can only turn out better then :-D
- Visas / passports / paperwork
Passport needed, generally USA citizen don't need visa for such countries you mentioned or any other paperwork than few things they may give while entering country.
- Customs (merch)
Never been a problem. In some countries it is illegal to show certain "symbols of hate", so overtly offensive merch to be either avoided or shipped in advance.
Don't expect things to fly out of your merch table. Depending on situation, sales may be ok, or may be nonexistent. Strong value of Euro currency may be benefit and help sell merch.
- Rail travel
There are things such as Eurail pass. Google for price options. This needs to be purchased 6 months before you come from USA and validated in first day of europe. It can't be bought from europe. That's too late then.
- Typical turnout / support of euro fans
Depends totally on country, day, warm up's, venue etc. It must be just about same as in US. From 10 people to even 100+. Most organizers can't offer guarantees for bands with no local fanbase. So unless you're Prurient or Merzbow, forget about demands, and treat the tour as holiday. It's your own risk, where you may get free meals, free place to stay, and sometimes even some $$.
It really depends on "local scenes". In some places you may have stronger interest for PE/Industrial/ambient, while in other places it may appear to be so, yet there exists no people to go to shows of this type.
- Language barrier a problem?
No problem.
- Electrical issues
Try to get things that work on batteries or if not, get the box that changes voltage. Generally voltage & plugs are the same around europe, so one box will do it. We have more power here, so possibility to burn your gear exists if you don't take care of issue.
- currency
Not a problem. Credit card rule the game now. You can take cash from any ATM anytime. Euro works for majority of countries.
- Do's and donts
Don't expect success or getting your own back. Good time at the best. When nobody does it for money, pretty much every organizer does a sacrifice of time and money to help out. It's not good to make too many demands.
It might be best to focus on trying to get couple "major events", and set up rest of the things on the way and skip the places where is no point. I'm assuming doing all - south europe, north europe, baltic, etc.. it may not be that good idea. Travel takes so much time and money, so it will be probably cheaper and easier to do 2 tours separately, than do everything at once. Especially if you'd do railway, it would take ages to go from Italy to Finland for example. Planes may get expensive. If you book well in advance, you might get good budget prices for flights, yet often these cheapo flights are done to small airports, where you pay great deal of money to take bus to actual city.
Thinking about Italy:
European Railpass doesn't work on all italian trains because we're cheap thieves, check www.trenitalia.com for more info.
Language barrier here is quite strong: almost nobody speaks english.
I'm quite sure you'd always at least get free food and places to sleep all over Italy. Don't expect much money but you never know..
Also, personal advice for visiting Italy: don't be a vegetarian - you'd miss a good 70% of the fun..
any more questions about a possible italian tour send me a pm or email!
oh, yeah, I keep forgetting that scandinavia ain't same as "europe". Germany, Italia, France, etc.. there IS language barrier. Over here north, everybody speaks pretty fluent english.
thanks for the advice so far guys! we're not really looking for much more than a fun experience, so losing cash isn't a huge worry.... if we get the Eurorail pass early and travel mostly on that, it's less a worry too (money is already spent, you know?)
I think regarding the italy-to-baltic, we've been looking at flights, aided by Mykolas from Body Cargo...
Regarding the length and scope of the tour: we thought about limiting some of the dates (and we still might) but the fact remains that very few of us will be able to to swing two separate trips to europe, having the jobs and schedules we have. we may consider some different routings or stops if they are limiting to us...
Essentially, this is a vacation we're all willing to take, so we're going to just have fun and hope europe is kind and fair to us, which it likely will be.
Try to make as many Concerts as you can, since Nobody will drive long ways for Noise Concerts anymore. In truth, for most people it is too hard in the own town to move the ass.
And its morely around 5-40 People in Germany. Even Whitehouse plays for 40 if the Circumstances are not so good. Genocide Organ have better Followings, but otherwise its not really good. Other Bands tried also this Living Room Concert Thing, i think were fckng bstrds who played everywhere.
Just ask Pruirient maybe, he had a Europe Tour last year or so?
Quote from: Goat93 on October 13, 2011, 08:22:45 PM
Just ask Pruirient maybe, he had a Europe Tour last year or so?
Nah, too high profile to be comparable. The one you should try to get in touch with and ask for advice is Michael Nine (MK9/Death Squad). He's been touring all over Europe on shoestring budgets more than once.
good call, i'll shoot him an e-mail
Oscillating Innards+Unexamine did a massive Eurotour about a year ago, must have been over a month, check with them.
And don't be allergic to animals since you'll probably be sleeping on couches in living rooms most of the time.
i am also planning a euro tour for next year with nundata from serbia, so this thread is super helpful to me as well. thanks for all the advice!
we will be hitting up germany, italy and france for sure. we havent worked much else into the schedule just yet, though. i would love to go to the uk but i am not sure we will be able to because we have a specific driver for the whole tour.
Only comment i could make is;
Why UK (dorset)?
Best bet in my opinion for UK is doing London (which you're doing) and somewhere up north like Leeds or Manchester.
Id come to see you both even if you just played London to be honest but the larger cities up north (ie leeds manchester) seem to miss out on this type of stuff even though their not exactly small enough to miss.
Plus on a travelling side note - you have not seen the true England till you've seen the North, Londons he fucking disney land wrapped in cotton wool tourist version of England!!
i just threw some kind of other city in there. we're likely going to play with Witch Cult and Content Nullity, so wherever they want to play (Bournemouth perhaps...)
Its a bit off topic but id be looking forward to this - your last record was good.
Do you do live interpretations of recorded songs at gigs or is it improvised.
QuotePlus on a travelling side note - you have not seen the true England till you've seen the North, Londons he fucking disney land wrapped in cotton wool tourist version of England!!
yes! go north
i am going to be using a new live setup that is a Moog MG-1 and scrap metal with some loops on a tape or ipod. I can reproduce some album tracks, but a lot of the time its a lot looser, though its still based on the structures and using the synths i can't play live as a framework for some noise improvisation. I typically play new material i'm working on for the next few releases when i play live, but i'm hoping for a way that i can do one track from a future release and one track from Ever Knee Shall Bow or other tapes for live shows.
Okay, here's my advice.
- As for railpasses, they can be damn expensive, so make sure to really research it and figure out your options. For example in Germany taking busses between major cities can be super cheap (down to something like €10 to some places), so it might be worth it to try and check all options. Also booking ahead is usually a good idea for any kind of transportation, the faster you act the cheaper it usually is. If you have a railpass it takes the edge off everything though, which can be a good stress relief - then it's just hop-on-hop-off - which can be pretty good, when you have enough other chaos to deal with on a daily basis.
- Turnouts are random as hell. It depends on the day, the weather, other acts, your friends, their friends, the amount of other activity (shows etc) at the time and so on and so forth. As said earlier you can expect from 2 to 100+, depending on your luck and often how many friends the local acts have.
- Getting paid much isn't too easy. It seems like most people I know in Europe are having problems raising funds for gigs at the moment, so guarantees are really hard to come by. Don't expect anything on that front and
be stoked if you get paid €100+.
Also as Mikko said, don't expect merch to sell like drugs in a crackhouse ... sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you don't, but don't expect to base your daily needs on merch sales.
- Bring as compact a set-up as possible. Carrying around a massive pile of gear is a huge pain in the ass, especially when you have to run for a train. So make it as light and easy to carry around as you can. This should almost be obvious, but just how annoying it is might not be as obvious right away. Even though I basically only had one case of gear with me on my last tour, it still weighed around 13kg (30lbs) and when walking around for a while that ended up feeling a lot heavier than first expected.
- This is probably another one of the obvious ones, but as a longtime promoter it's something that still amazes me that people don't think about: Bring a sleeping bag and a towel, when you're several people touring together. Don't expect the promoter to having blankets and towels enough for all of you. Also you'll be happy you brought your own, when you're staying in some crusty-looking place.
-
Be a friend. Seriously I think this is just plain and simply the most important advice. You get extremely far in Europe just by being friendly - most promoters and artists will go far out of their way to help you out, if you're a genuinely good guy. Be a douche or too full of yourself and you'll quickly find a lot of doors closing very fast. Again one of the obvious, but apparently not obvious-enough things.
Quote from: tisbor on October 13, 2011, 12:07:10 PM
Language barrier here is quite strong: almost nobody speaks english.
I'm quite sure you'd always at least get free food and places to sleep all over Italy. Don't expect much money but you never know..
Also, personal advice for visiting Italy: don't be a vegetarian - you'd miss a good 70% of the fun..
Just came back from Italy, and I don't totally agree with this. While there sure is a language barrier, then just make sure to do your homework beforehand, learn how to say "where", "how", "thank you" - combine them with a bunch of place names, foods, people etc and you can do pretty well. To my experience most people into noise and subcultures in Italy know pretty good english and are insanely friendly, so you can quite possibly get help from them with a lot of stuff.
Also Italy is like vegetarian heaven, in my opinion. There's so many different fantastic vegetarian dishes there, so getting great food is hardly a problem at all - and it's not like a lot of places in Germany where the vegetarian/vegan options are all junk/fast food (which gets tiresome extremely fast). And it's not like some places in the Baltics where you can't get by anything except a pile of lettuce and perhaps some stewed veggies.
Make sure you hit all the red light areas & huge pornshops (Club 88 in Paris is a lot of fun). Definitely different & more fun than any in the U.S.
Sometimes when i go to shows now, i tend to think that it's obviously way too easy for foreign bands to tour nowdays, heh.. During the 3 years i booked shows here in Gothenburg, my view on touring bands changed a bit. You wouldn't believe how many show requests we recieved at times from bands all over. At some point i think you have to ask yourself why you even want to tour. This may come out wrong, but my opinion is that it's somewhat important to "have a name" before considering touring, especially if you're booking the tour by yourself. If no one ever heard of your act in a foreign country, things will obviously be harder. Dosen't matter how hard the promoter work on it, some of the responsibility is on the bands. If you want to tour Europe, one good idea might be to try get a release out on an european label in advance. I guess on this level it's best to see it as a "free vacation" and don't expect too much, but on the other hand there is people busting their asses off with putting up shows and sometimes loosing money on it, so be grateful. This is no critic towards any projects here, just some thoughts.
QuoteTo my experience most people into noise and subcultures in Italy know pretty good english and are insanely friendly, so you can quite possibly get help from them with a lot of stuff.
Yes, of course (fortunately!) this is quite true. I was thinking about everyday needs at restaurants, supermarkets etc etc
but yeah don't worry too much - if you hang out with the other bands/organizers they'll help you out.
Italy has lots of great traditional vegetarian dishes (from back when "vegetarian" just meant you couldn't afford meat) and i'm sure salad lovers can get good stuff way easier and cheaper here than in the rest of Europe, but still you're going to miss tons of yummy stuff.
Fuck i'm hungry again.
Do you have planes to make Concerts in North Germany?
dunno what constitutes north, but doing Dresden and Berlin. There's also going to probably be a Warsaw show if it's closer to you.
UK / Amsterdam / Berlin / Dresden / Prague / Warsaw / Vilnius / UK
7 shows in two weeks.
Quote from: Nyodene D on November 04, 2011, 07:23:32 PM
dunno what constitutes north, but doing Dresden and Berlin. There's also going to probably be a Warsaw show if it's closer to you.
UK / Amsterdam / Berlin / Dresden / Prague / Warsaw / Vilnius / UK
7 shows in two weeks.
Wow, Warsaw... is known what a day it would be?
Berlin and Dresden are both East Germany :(
North is more Hamburg till Kiel or such, but makes no sense when you drive berlin/dresden route