Long journey- My week of discoveries

I write this post from Ayutthaya, the ancient capital of Thailand where I am since yesterday.
My final destination is a place called Chiang Rai, where I'll spend 5weeks in a special centre dedicated to meditation/yoga and mindfulness.
I have much to say and i don't know where to start.
Yes first: I love the sun, i love the heat! Going from a snowy Amsterdam with 2degrees Celsius on Friday to this 33degrees Celsius, and incredible heat is quite overwhelming for the body but i still prefer to be sweating than to be freezing. It is just this thing that SUN makes me smile, makes me feel in a good mood, healthy, full of life.Maybe it is more contact with the environment around, the wind, the sun they all touch one's skin more, with less clothes on. Same thing for walking with open shoes or flip-flops, you feel a better contact with the ground.
So i have started the project of "one picture a day"on my twitter and have uploaded the first picture
(today indeed).
Thai people inspire me for their easiness and joy, they smile often, they laugh and joke often.
Even if they don't speak so good English, they manage to communicate and make you understand and understand quite well what you are saying.
And I finally tried that fresh coconut juice today, aaah delicious!

Myspace please change? ( My week of discoveries)

So the neverending story with myspace, they do not change the website and it is heavy. heavy to navigate. And they have a very ANNOYING PLAYLIST SYSTEM, because even if you select your music, once your selection ends,one of their random tracks start playing and believe me some STAFF out there is not NICE to the ear.Or maybe it is the way the sound is processed...it does not equalize...
i do not know and frankly i have to investigate and give serious feedback to myspace, because i try to be on the site the LEAST possible because of the ANNOYING random playing of that STAFF. Ok sorry i stop the ranting.
But i was on myspace to check the website of this lovely singer songwriter that i spoke about last week from somewhere in Australia and touring Amsterdam. I went to the intimate concert a few days ago....she made a kind of partnership with the company BMO which sounds like a record company but it stands for Blue Mountains Originals which is a brand of shoes and boots originary of the Blue Mountains Region in Australia. This is an interesting form of advertisement, where music and other products meet. The company BMO had sponsored the venue for the launch of her debut album, a cosy place with pianobar in downtown Amsterdam.
This is a picture of last Tuesday at the concert of Coby Grant.

Castor Oil,( my week of discoveries)

Since I have discovered the website of the Australian radio TripleJ dedicated to emerging artists from OZ, their website is a bookmark that gets clicked at least once a week and listen to their new charts and often comment and rate when i find something worth saying good things about or also advices...
Then there is my weekly check of the world of Couchsurfing to find there also pearls of indie-everything from news, to artists, to things to do and way of life.
So the band from Western Au. #Needingcherie deserves some attention. I twitted them. I played them a lot and their sound is quite unique. Makes me think of those blue and red parrots that i saw flying on my head while i was trekking to a waterfall in New South Wales, just 2 months ago...

>>>That's me indeed at THAT waterfall. But i can't find a picture of the bird and i have now realized for the first time i don't have those pictures.

And tonight i go to the concert( i am actually on the guestlist) of a singer,songwriter from Perth named COBY Grant and i am quite excited. She was advertising her show on couchsurfing and i felt connected to her, as she is doing in reverse what i want to do. Go to the other side of the world and with a small budget do a promotion tour of my music.
So tonight i go to see her play live.
The castor oil is the oil i bought to repair my skin from really shitty cold weather in Amsterdam, which i got just this morning, on a cold rainy day at 10am near the canals...and i did not have gloves on.Castor oil is really soothing and well....musicians don't just live of music.But also of cakes...as i write this i am enjoying the nice chocolate cake that a friend of mine baked for my return at her place after my 10days in Copenhagen...How sweet, her and the cake itself!
So i discovered today that castor oil is translated into "olio di ricino"in Italian.But "castoro"in Italian is a beever....and not the plant. In the translation world, these type of words are called "faux-amis". Castor oil, a very dense consistency, very  different from the much lighter almond oil.
BUT last week i wrote a new song, called "hundred things"and it does NOT talk at all about castor oil, or shitty weather or cakes. Nothing of that. But the song is still in process,i feel i want to add a 3part to the song and experiment in adding layers of music. I may work on it with a friend this week and the song will be born!

Inner discoveries 12.3.2013, My mind and its quest for perfection

I am living, you are living in a particular time of history: 2013. The Pope abdicated, the Dutch Queen Beatrix abdicated and this is a big thing for the Netherlands where I am living.
Their national holiday called Queensday, by decades fixated at the date of April 30, will CHANGE into Kingsday and moved to April 27.
In Italy, my home country, we had elections 20days ago and the political and economical situation is still not clear and unstable.
I wrote a new song last month called "Children of the sun"and it is a song full of hopes and positive vibes for this world.
In this period of my life, several things have changed and i have lived in a nomadic way, without a stable home for the past 3months. That has been both unsettling/stressful and also interesting as i have lived with different friends and their flatmates and that gives you and leaves you something, a trace. Everyone has different habits/uses/priorities and it is so fascinating to see these differencies...but i also end up trying to find the "right"way, and this is when i don't like the workings of my mind and i realize i want to work on my mind to be more relaxed and flexible.
But as of now, my mind is still very uncertain, trying to find rules for everything so that she is not unsecure, so that she can be sure to do the right thing all the time, without hurting others.
I realize my mind has been working like that forever, building inside of me tons of rules and expectations that i had to fulfill, making "life"in itself a static process with lots of deadlines that i had to comply with. Criticizing everything and wanting perfection in everything....wanting one only way for everything....
And all this of course, has finished for stressing me like crazy...for making my life unpleasant.
So slowly i'm going through this journey,trying to calm my mind, trying to find a new definition of life, making her understand that lots of people live happily without the same stupid rules that she/it thinks she should comply to.

Inner discoveries 02.03.13

I have been playing since October with Charlie,Dave and Sahiela, in our band called "D. and the Badhouse"and in the time of a few months we have created a really compact group with a lot of energy on stage, open communication and lot's of engagement from everybody.
I have felt really lucky to perform with them, and feel their love and enthousiasm for making music together. I have to thank them, for the 4concerts that we had had in the small amounts of time and rehearsals often until midnight.
I have loved every second of it. Every repetition of the same song again and again,
the constructive chats on how to ends or attack songs and the making setlists for the concerts while having a quick bite all together, in a cosy cafe'somewhere in the winter of Amsterdam.
The video i linked to, is our last performance, a gig a Cafe'CCmuziek in February. 
The only downpit of the place is the non-existance help in adjusting the volumes....so in both the two times we played there, we had to do sound-checks during the first 3songs of our gig, asking the public if they could hear our microphones or if some instrument was too loud. This interaction with the audience is actually quite pleasant, it creates some compliciy with the listeners and i sincerely liked that i had to do it. But it may be hard along the gig, to still have a good sound if someone is not constantly adjusting it, which may mean a complete change in the quality of the gig.
So, i would say of all the videos of the night, the performance of the video above is the one with the best sound quality and we had an awesome gig with a great atmosphere( as you can hear from the screams of the audience)  and lots of friends. A long night, ended with spaghetti with garlic at 3am and a long bike ride home at 4 am, with a heavy snow storm. Yes a real snow storm, so heavy i had to cover my eyes with one hand, because the flakes of snow were hitting me and i could barely see.
Nevertheless i could not help from cycling home, in the storm, in the cold, avoiding to slide my bike on the ice and i was realizing how lucky i am to be living this.
To be sharing with people the miracle of music.

Inner discoveries 25.02.13

Dear blog and readers, i have been writing this blog for a while, speaking about discoveries online/offline and promoting young bands and my work on Radio cicada.

 >>>Passion fruit cheese cake in Byron Bay,NSW, Australia!
Now i feel like i am ready to add to my blog a more personal side, a part about my life as songwriter.
I hope with that to get more in touch with other people, to communicate more to readers and fans about the philosophy behind making music for me.
I have noticed how hard it is to get really in contact with bands and musicians online, not because people DO NOT reply to me( or to you in general), they do reply
But the amount of data and emails is so overwhelming that we do not have the time anymore to understand much of what counts. We get sucked into lots of information and visuals and sounds.
So much we have forgotten how to stop and focus on little.
This realization in the last period of 2012 brought me to start to change my life.
I have downsized my belongings from an apartment of 80m3 to a room of 8m3. I have given away as gifts to friends books, board games, appliances. I have organized a clothes swap party and made lots of women happy with my two full bags of clothes.
The thing is, years ago, i was attached to things and i had a hard time throwing away things. I used to keep receipts, memories of days with friends, souvenirs of lots of things. In general lots of things that i thought "i may one day need"and lots of clothes that "I may one day feel like wearing again".
What i realized, is that i never had the time to actually look at those memories or souvenirs.
That many of those garments were still in the same box after 8months and i had not felt the need to wear them.
And i also realized that at a certain point, it was easy to give away things.
And that later i felt lighter, and not less. I also was surprised to find in myself a feeling of serenity and peace when seeing the reaction of people to unexpected presents.
In the last weeks i am downsizing even further, going from 18boxes of belongings, into living with only 5boxes of belongings and in 10 days i'll go down even further to 1 backpack and 2 bags because i will start travelling for some months and busking and playing gigs where I can.
In this blog part i plan on sharing my journey around the world.
I will probably pause the other parts of the blog as I will not be working for radio cicada for a while, but the blog will be very active.
So, that was a short( long) introduction...

My week of discoveries

Rose leaves and ginseng tea: warming discovery of the week....and very useful to me in these last weeks of snow in Amsterdam, here the winter does not seem to want to end...but luckily I will go somewhere very hot soon....i will tell you more in my new blog post, which will be also more personal and the beginning of a series of blog posts about my JOURNEY.

>>>Food that got my attention at the airport of Seoul, North Korea, can you guess what it is? ( hsifyllej) < read viceversa and you'll find the solution


Everyone has a journey to accomplish, a journey into life, full of experiences to make us learn things.
My journey last week made me go to the website of sellaband to check the latest bands and projects and see who to invest for,(for those of you that don't know it, sellaband.com is like an online record company, where fans/listeners can invest money in the album of an upcoming band) but i have not found anything that drove me so crazy as to invest in them.
So i checked their charts( they publish weekly charts) and gave a deep listen to several bands i had plucked within. And i listened to all the songs they were enlisting on sellaband.
The following are my humble opinions, as a music lover, a fan and someone who appreciates every form of art and as a musician( and a very critical one!but the Muse music is a perfect creation and we have to strive for beauty and justice in music!):

Lischkapelle: they do a kind of pop and folk, you can clearly hear nice ideas in their music but they need to be developed further. Like an unripen fruit also some work is needed on the vocal skills which really have potential.

Mr Oskar Schutser plays in clearly a folk style,without vocals( at least in the tracks on sellaband) his music could suit perfectly  instrumental music for movies. I see lots of gipsy influencesand most of his songs are very pleasant.

 The last,also suggested by sellaband in their newsletter disappointed my expectations...I am talking about Anne Height. The style of Anne is also pop and folk and DON'T get me wrong: there are some very nice ballads but it isn't much new or original,it is pleasant to listen though.

But an awesome discovery was the website of TripleJ Unearthed where to listen and create playlists and rate upcoming bands from all over Australia,i am addicted to the website.