8 weeks offline

Hello worldwideweb,
i just pusblished a post that I wrote circa 7 weeks ago and since then, I have been in the midst of moving to a new apartment and not having the internet for a while.
So lot's of packing and of course waiting  for the installation which took a while.
I have it has been refreshing not to be online for a while, being more present,and stopping the rhythm like this.
I learnt  to be more time-efficient when being online because i only had available a couple of hours a day. Incredible how much our life is related to this machine of information and data. Incredible how we are so entangled to it.
Maybe we get re-wired as well and start leading our life as a net, the same way the web works.
But this period of  "offliness-ness"( i love to make up words) made me start to do a lot more things such as a band to play with, that kind of came without too much searching for it. But it came.
We are maybe complete and we had a great 1st show last Saturday at a party house, called Badhuis, an old public bath! Superb building, with old arcades and original mirrors and tiles. 10 performers for this party and we managed to close it just before the midnight with a cover of i shot the sheriff by Eric Clapton, The Who with Can't explain and my original song Not afraid, which was kind of improvised because the drummer had never heard the song and we had never rehearsed it with him.
So it actually went SUPER well and I was full of adrenalin for many hours later.
And this is a very blurred picture of the FUN night:

The party was in a street called Nirwana, which in itself i thought was charming!

My week of discoveries

Tuesday night i went to see live the Scottish band The View and they were superb performers! great energy there, I am glad i saw them 'cos i really got a lot of inspiration.
They were playing at Melkweg.


 

My week of discoveries

A great club for Songwriters in Central Copenhagen or København in the local lingo..called Råhuset or more understandably  Raw House.It is not far from an area with the old slaughterhouse, nowadays a very lively area with clubs and parties. A few musicians there really caught my interest,and I had the pleasure of meeting and hearing perform: Daithi Rua I wish I played guitar that well as he does...damn! I heard two of his songs and he can perform with great energy and stage presence while being Irishly friendly and humble. I liked his two songs and I recommend anyone to check him out,a pleasure to meet. 
Second musician i was very impressed was a young man from the South of Sweden, precisely from Malmö where I actually lived for 1 year in 2010! 
The link to Ludvig's songs is here: http://soundcloud.com/ludvigjonathanandersson
He is to be followed: original songs, awesome voice and all the ingredients for a new talent coming from the incredible Sweden, full of handsome people with great open spaces and a talent for making good music. Something they eat, breath or maybe the good fresh polar air! This is Malmö, my town for one year:

This superb video: I love the scenery, the costumes, the haircut, the dancing...
I Love the voice and the song and I love the powerful positive message it carries:

      
SAY MY NAME 
       
AS EVERY COLOUR ILLUMINATES
     
WE ARE SHINING 
         
AND WE'LL NEVER BE AFRAID AGAIN 
   
SAY MY NAME 
       
AS EVERY COLOUR ILLUMINATES 
      
WE ARE SHINING 
         
AND WE'LL NEVER BE AFRAID AGAIN

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I  Hope this embedded code works,it is so hard to embed these days from youtube, or am i behind in social media skills?

My week of discoveries and listened to this week (one post)

When I tell people of how frantic life rhythms are nowadays, they mostly confirm that's the way it is.
They start to tell how it is normal that everybody works full time and makes a living and how more full of things to do our life is.
But I disagree with simply keeping things as they are, especially if we could change it, thanks to technology. And i see more and more people envisioning the same.A campaign by a Peruvian architect named Carlos Tovar  ( on twitter Carlintovar)  http://4hourworkdaycampaign.wordpress.com/ about the possibility of transferring all productivity into a 4hour shift, with a process of several months and gradual decreasing.
The point is that the technology of today could make machines do most of the work.
I was checking out the contests of the website wearelistening and found that the winner of the 2012 Songwriter competition is  an extremely talented man named Putnam Murdock, who won with the 
warm and country song "When I die" . Not all the songs I listen to, make me have some kind of visions of places and that song does: campfire,a ballad with a guitar near the prairie and big spaces on sunsets, fantastic landscape thank you Putnam for these moments!
One interesting blog i discovered is about Moon Phases, as I believe they influence us a lot( and it is scientifically proved), so this one, I am now checking regularly, it is boorkmarked! http://newmoonmanifesting.com/
I am quite excited and soon...off!!! for a few days of extreme North in Denmark and a few gigs at Songwriter events. Pictures published here in a week or so!

Listened to this week

Trueidentity music, alias electronic music from the Netherlands, how did i stumble on it? he went to perform at Zero20 Unplugged anniversary party later on in June.

The amazing classical-pop band from Greece Mikrokosmoi and the experimental and 70's inspired video of the NZ PURPLE PILGRIMS that i stumbled upon while looking at some live clubs in London.All rock and all from Milan: Hellekin Mascara, who look like sailors?

I also forgot to mention for a while all the amazing unsigned bands that we have been playing at radio Cicada on salto.fm every thursday night from 9 to 10pm.

Here they are: Juan Perro, Santiago Auserón’s post-Radio Futura artistic alter-ego

Thanos Kalliris  Greek singer  born in Athens and also involved in the Eurovision Song Contest. 

Tus Locas Razones really enchanted me with the Spanish "Tu controlas tu destino" that I stumbled upon in a period where I was realizing exactly the message they bring across. Link to their reverbnation

Just over 10days ago we played on airvPapel Mojado, a singer songwriter with beautiful  ballad rock in Un Segundo, una eternidad  and same day from Greece... i love their name, and the elegance of it, in both English and Greek language:

MIKROKOSMOI/ΜΙΚΡΟΚΟΣΜΟΙ  this band ranks number 4 on reverbnation Corfu'!

The people in Portugal, have irony and have with with it, in fact a group of Portuguese musicians created a band called Homens da Luta that's literally "battle people" and they composed a song called "O Ronaldo Paga a Crise" : Ronaldo,(the footballer) pays the crisis!

Another band from Portugal: CINTURA, we played their songs: NO DA GRAVATA e Desculpem La’, the same day we did, back in beginning of July we also had some Croatian music with Luka Nižetićs. He is best known for his hits like "Ponekad poželim" (Sometimes I wish) and "Proljeće" (Springtime)! 

Do you know my favourite parfume is Myrrhae?Certainly not, now you do...but we played a few songs from the Greek talent:

Christos Dantis link to his page ,on air we had his "To Palio Mou Palto" and "Ena Tragoudi Akoma" he composed "My Number One" for Elena Paparizou, winning the Eurovision Song Contest 2005 for Greece.^[1] 

Experiments with healthy cakes 1 and is living like a KID a bad thing?

As a base I used the recipe on the British All recipes.co.uk ( should I be ashamed, as Italian to cook following a British website ???Kind of inverted Jamie Oliver) http://allrecipes.co.uk/recipe/8729/easy-banana-cake.aspx

with modifications as follows:

Serves: 10;serves 8

• 125g butter>170 g coconut butter
• 150g caster sugar>100gr cane sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla extract>20gr cinnamon,10gr chilli,5gr cloves
• 1 egg, beaten>same
• 2 very ripe bananas, mashed>4 very ripe bananas,mashed
• 190g self raising flour>same
• 60ml milk> no milk
  
  
  
  The result was a delicious ( i would call it) Banana Creme Brulee
  
  
  
  While I indulge in experiments with cooking I have been faced in the last weeks with an exchange in points of view in life of me and people, friends, family around me of more dramatic intensity than before in my life.
  We call it all with the same word, "life"but we do have extreme different ways of living it, both how we live experiences outside and how we process them as information and how therefore we see WHAT life IS, HOW life FEELS and THE POSSIBILITIES in this LIFE.
  Many see LOTS of rules in life, that LIMIT them, and I think for a period of  my life I was taken and drained out in this type of thinking.
  Living like a KID nowadays means, realizing that there may be no tomorrow ( adult thinking) and therefore live like it is a game, where you try and if you make a mistake you try again and in any case you advance and something happens. And along the way you meet friends and people you love and you share experiences, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, but never losing the taste of the adventure, because adventure is the dice to the game of life.
  Playing every turn like it was the last one, and loving every minute of it, because really from one moment to another,the game may cease. When I was a kid, and i remember it well, there was no limit of time when I started to play a game,I was intensely in "it"even if it would last only a short while because we were called by our parents to do the "homework".
  Nowadays we have to remind ourselves of our own "homework" or include it as an active part of the game.
  When I was a kid, there was no exclusivity and no jealousy, if a friend passed by and then life brought us apart,there were no hard feelings. The same way I think, we can realize that we continuously change and sometimes people grow away from each other and it is not a bad thing, but just the evolution of things.
  For the first time in my life, just like Jack in the TV serial "Lost"I am realizing that I cannot fix it all, amend it all, save them all but I'm accepting the law of allowing, and also allowing that others don't take actions and that certain things evolve in the way we had not expected or planned or wanted.

Bands listened to this week

Stephen Michael is a songwriter with powerful songs charged with emotions,i'm glad he found me so i could listen to his music, then Irish music in original irish language....nice with Irish Root Cafe'.
I expected a different music when I saw the profile image and the name of Inner Planets, anyhow, very original and nice to listen to, from NY.
And on radio cicada last Thursday we played the Serbian singer Dzenan Longarevic, very pleasant! Nanah, also a Serbian artist with a mystical voice,really surprised me, her song "More sokol pie" deserves to be discovered by more people, really!
The spanish band Centura encharmed us with their cool tracks and then i stumbled on Alex Canasta, who are Danish from Copenhagen and are working with Massive Music and that's how i found them. Lovely sounds.