We left at a not unreasonable time the next day to get the 4 hour drive to Wroclaw (or more accurately for English pronunciation Brauslev) underway. Luckily for us Poland has gone the open border route which lessens the stress load when you do not speak the language at all and guys in camouflage are carrying automatic rifles. I feel like an idiot but the entire time we were in the country I had no idea what the currency was called since the spelling involves characters that ain't on my keyboard and everyone spits out the word like it's on fire and poisoned. We stop and get fuel at the border, bad gas station snacks and exchange some Euros and we are on our way into Poland.

Not sure what's up with the Polish highway department but either we just happened to choose the Forgotten Entrance of Damned Germans or someone in the Polish bureaucracy is playing a prank with 30km of highway and offramps. I forget what the speed limit actually was but this was the first and only time while I was in Europe that people were actually voluntarily driving under it. Think offramps made of cobblestone and rapidly decaying tarmac akin to a ribbed condom made out of ashphalt and giant cat's tongues. The bizarre thing was that as damaged and ignored our lane was, the other side of the highway was pristine as if to say, "Leave if you want assholes but don't even think of coming back!" Thankfully 30 clicks or so in sanity returned to the highway system and helped to disperse our sudden mental images of a Poland as a Road Warrior themed dystopia.

To be continued. . .

Berlin is pretty close to Dresden so we end up at the venue pretty early. It's strange for me on the way in as my memories of Berlin are based on arriving on a high speed train and then taking the subway through town to the East end which is pretty damn scenic (being surrounded by crazy peeps on the train no doubt helped). This time we are driving in from the East and the urban sprawl is a lot more noticeable though the Soviet Bloc flavour of the old apartment buildings is still pretty strong. After seeing so many 200+ year old buildings, the dreariness of East German 60s architecture is refreshing.

The venue this time is called the Wallywoods Gallery, an old "Kulturhaus" that some art freaks have temporarily managed to appropriate. When we arrive head tall, British expat and venue honcho Paul is wandering around re-arranging random flotsam on the patio (posters, signs, chairs, assorted refuse) looking a little lost. After introductions shows us around the venue which is absolutely coated with chair themed graffiti and feels a tad squatish, especially with Paul going through the castaway items from the theatre next door all binner style (everything from cool communist era posters to Christmas ornaments). Lots of rad art scattered around the space ranging from Joe Coleman style dark comic fantasy to abstract weirdness. And we can now add "gallery" to our list of venue types we've made a racket it.

We are so bloody early. And it figures we hit Berlin when a train strike is in full force (from folks blase reaction it sounds like this is a bi-weekly occurrance). According to Paul we are on the main drag into town but after walking for an hour we really don't seem any closer to the core so grab food, beer and most importantly chocolate and head on back. What we do find though is a glorious giant communist era bust of some serious looking Lenin lookalike in the middle of a depressing square by some old apartment buildings, all derelict and adorned with random tags. In another 20 years East Germans will regret it if they let this sort of stuff be lost, it's something unique architecturally and part of the identity of the area. Plus art-phag tourism is where it's at.

Skip to later in the evening. . .

Markus is my hero, I think I should just get that off my chest. Not only does he take advantage of a slight by Peter of L. White Records to generate some self-promotion (related to an imaginary feud), he relays what is one of my favourite stories of the tour. Originally we were supposed to play with Berlin local Sudden Infant. The original poster for the show had the performers in alphabetical order using an identical font which meant that Brutophilia and griefer were at the top. When Markus showed him the first draft, Sudden Infant complained that he was much more well known than these other acts and demanded a new poster with him more prominently listed. A while later Sudden Infant asks Markus, "Where is the new poster?" Markus (no doubt with the smirking devious grin he had on the whole time we were at the venue) says, "Here's the new poster!" and hands him the final version which has Sudden Infant no where on it (kicked off the bill). Poor guy, one minute he's the Lord of Fonts and then the next reality slaps him upside the head and stomps his noise crown to little bits.

The show itself was pretty strange, especially the mix of small art house crowd with the few dirty noisers that found their way into the gig. Things kicked off with a musically OK but excruciatingly boring laptop set who's only saving grace was that the older German woman behind the screen glow had this sexy disinterested look like she was standing with glass of expensive wine in one hand, a whip in the other and your testicles pinched under her high heel. Next up (if memory serves) was Markus's act CD Kreisverband Friedrichshain which was a creepy mix of electro-acoustic and academic sounding weirdness. Odd but interesting. Kakawaka went on before us and brought up memories of the Monopolka insanity a week before in Tilburg, even managing to lightly stab me in the hand with a contact mic'd salad fork of all things. Too bad for me it doesn't sound particularly macho when you brag that the source of your wound involves eating a healthy diet.

Our set went alright though the small crowd and preponderance of seated art haus types made it feel less intense than I would have liked. Brutophilia had a better time of it as the dirty noise contingent seemed rowdier by then (read: drunker). Hearing Markus feverishly demand everyone come up close to the stage was great even if no one paid attention (perhaps even better because of that), the guy's a trooper.

Afterwards our shitfaced Canadian contingent wandered out together with a mix of US expat punk deviants, them in search of a cab and us in search of something warm and greasy to eat. Being a speedwalker by nature I ended up half a block ahead when I noticed this bizarre turd shaped substance (no idea, probably a bread stick product of some nightmarish form) that had been strewn across the sidewalk. I had drunk enough local beer at that point that I presented to Berlin my bare squatting ass as I bent over and pretended to pinch out a loaf on the sidewalk for the benefit of the folks behind. I think I at least scored a short moment of horror when what they thought was a menial mooning turned into a "moron took a shit on the freaking sidewalk!"

We finally found a sleazy donair place foolish enough to be open that late which was in full on zoo form with a stew of drunk German jocks wearing football fashion, a serious looking Turkish contingent huddling around gambling machines smoking and an out of her gourd surly old lady sitting alone at a table surrounded by empty drink glasses. After ordering our food Owen ended up getting tangled up in a potentially messy alcohol fuelled ballet with the old lady that alternated between her trying to get his beer and berating him in German spoken too fast and too slurred for him to get even a remote clue as to what she was saying. The jocks found this an instant draw and momentarily it seemed like things might devolve into some nationalistic soccer hooliganism until Owen started talking to him in German and suddenly he was befriended in a alternating self-deprecating exchange of "I'm stupid, I can't understand you." Then the surly grandma busted in to try to abscond with one of the Jock's bottle of beer creating a raucous diversion that allowed us to bid the zoo goodbye. A long walk back dripping lettuce and hot sauce and then it was couches and sleeping bags and dreams of Poland.

After some cool back roads (complete with bad ass Czech king of the street surveying his domain in a small farming hamlet) compliments of a confused GPS navigator, the traffic gods gaze kindly upon us and we are through the blissfully open Czech border and on our way to Dresden at a decent time. It's irrational but I have fantasies of Dresden being a sea of war ruins but of course that is not the case as we drive into the industrial looking town proper. To me it looks depressed, run down tenements and deserted looking factories lining the road on the way in but Ullrich (our host and promoter) later assured us that Dresden is actually one of the more affluent towns in Germany at the moment. If it wasn't for the shape of the apartments and church spires it would seem like we were visiting Portland, OR, especially with the 1940s looking metal bridge leading over the river towards the venue.

We arrive pretty early so we park the car and then take turns going for a stroll around the block. On my round I strangely run into our MILFy host from Frankfurt Patrizia who just um . . . happens to be in Dresden and after the greeting formalities tells me she is coming to check out the show tonight with a sneaky sort of smile. Too bad for me that I have the fidelity gene in a strong way, especially since she intimated to Owen later on that her hostel was very far away and hard to get to.

The venue turns out to be a kulturehaus sort of place with a clean, cafe type space downstairs and living quarters upstairs. A big change from the bunker in Prague and yet another checkpoint in our growing list of venue variations. The PA is reasonable and we pull out a decent set for the small crowd somehow without smashing the pristine tile floor.

In an attempt to bloat the attendance we were booked with this breakcore act, let me correct that - an extremely shitty breakcore act who's amphetamines stopped them from noticing that their Alex Empire impersonation (a bad choice to begin with) was not going over particularly well. Luckily they went on last and the 2 or 3 hour set allowed us plenty of time to drink and cuss.

During the extended breakcore "smoke break" we wandered outside and discovered what has to be one of the single coolest potential tour vehicles of all time - the Opal "Blitz". Primer red with white streaks, sliding doors, ladder to the roof. The kind of vehicle that you mount a bazooka to or tour eastern Europe in (the two not being mutually exclusive).

Eventually the laptop kids wore themselves out and got to crash in the fire hazard loft like space of the venue after plenty of drunken slurring and extended farting sessions. Talk about high class.

In the morning we hit up a 4 hour of sleep refueled Ullrich's house for breakfast, obnoxious videos and a sad but hilarious tattoo story before heading of to Berlin. On the way we came across this cool abandoned barracks looking complex and decided to try to get in and snap some shots. While we were snooping around a partially blocked gateway some dude across the road shouted something in German that Owen decided meant "go around back". Immediately after that the cops drove by so we decided to take the advice and drove around the block to see if we'd fare better there.

At the corner are some street looking peeps who have piles of refuse they shake at us (presumably a homeless flea market) and then it opens up to a huge gray wall on one side and a fenced off view of some glorious dilapidated barracks on the other. Completing the scene are security cameras perched atop tall poles so no urban spelunking but we do patrol the perimiter to gawk at the cool structures. After making ourselves very noticable for a while we clue in that the huge wall opposite must be a serious prison. Luckily no armed guards come running out to drag us to the other side of it for looking suspicious. Fuck I love ruins.

Another country, another open border. It's a strange (and welcome) feeling to be able to whiz through the decommissioned checkpoint crossing the border into the Czech Republic, especially compared to the anal ugliness that is the Canada / US border. We change some cash into Kroner's which thankfully we can pronounce the name of (unlike Poland's currency) and get our first taste of the insanity that is Czech advertising with a pair of Engrish "Rollerking" hot dog ads, the phallic dog being happily gazed upon by a beautiful woman. The second one some smart ass has horked on so that a jizz like drip completes the obvious sexual undertones.

Now back to the subject of advertising in the Czech Republic. The Velvet Revolution happened comparatively recently (1989) and the economic situation would not have been great, especially with the latent corruption from the old regime still lingering on during the switchover. You mix that up with foreign corporate sharks swooping in to grab a slice of the Czech pie and you have the "Blade Runner" advertising nightmare that is Praha. On the way into town there are these huge eagle cutouts perched menacingly on rented farmland which we guessed were pitching cigarettes or a political party but turned out to be slinging bottled water (the most brutal and authoritarian of bottled water apparently). Driving into the city proper every bit of free space seems to have ads plastered on it. Sides of buildings, banners strung over the roads, billboards every which place, it's such visual overload that I wonder whether any hearts and minds are actually being won or whether the Czech Republic's population are instead the most ad resistant culture on the face of the planet.

Europe has a lot of old cities whose road systems never were intended to deal with the weight of a gasoline fueled emerging middle class. Praha gives us a quick lesson in why driving should be avoided when at all possible, the slow crawl into the city scenic sure but not much quicker than walking (and you can drink beer while strolling). Owen's locational sense is getting finely tuned and we manage to get within walking distance of the venue before we even talk to Tomas, our host and guide for the night.

Time is proving to be fluid in much of the EU but this lets us figure out how to ask for espresso at a nearby cafe and do the pee dance until Tomas arrives. After reparking the car a bit closer to the bar we start the descent into what is one of the singly coolest venues I have ever had the luck to grace. Nuclear. Fucking. Bunker. Beat that? Forget it, you can't! I don't know how these folks managed to secure the space but if you can get a chance to play there, leap at it. When I was a kid and Reagan was pushing out images of Eastern Bloc sourced death reigning down from above across the border into Canada, the Czechs were hanging out in this bunker with mirror images of the same bullshit fucking up their day. Seeing this shit in the flesh is intense.

The stairs down into the venue circle around of all things, a climbing wall which lends a different flavour initially but is quickly forgotten once you get into the caverns proper. Claustrophobic tubes much like a nuclear submarine snake off underground with a good portion of the actual complex off limits behind military green painted doors. Making it weirder though is the huge Xbox 360 and "Gears of War" ads painted onto the floor of bar. I guess the lesson is to never underestimate Microsoft's cynicism.

We sound check through the thankfully not total ass PA and this is when we get our first virtuoso demonstration from Napalmed. Radek and crew have a bunch of metal refuse (oil can, chains and what not) plus at a table of electronics and are not afraid to use them. Brutophilia gets the first slot which makes it necessary for us to work harder since Cory always pulls off a dense set sonically. We discover a PA glitch where certain frequencies at a high level cause the PA bass bins to do this weird super low end kick thing, all energy momentarily compressed into a single thwap that fires through the cylindrical bunker like lunch from a bulimic. It should be annoying as hell but it is so physically intense that you are too unnerved to get angsty about it. We follow and manage to avoid the sonic cannon effect. The crowd is small but this gives us more room to pace and clank in and even if no one was there, it would have been worth the trip to play in that venue. Napalmed close out the dedicated section with an epic noise set, a lot of ebb and flow from full on cacophony to more structured rhythmics. Once they are done Tomas seems upset that some late comers missed the out of towners and induces a 3 way collaboration which due to excessive levels is mostly Brutophilia + Napalmed but includes the odd griefer contribution when the distortion whores back off their redlined mixers. We run it for about 30 minutes straight until the PA calls it quits and then its beers and disc trades until we head off in search of food with Tomas and company. Fun stuff.

After sucking in a dangerous amount of second hand smoke through slices of pizza we discover we are crashing in Richard of Schloss Tegal's apartment which is pure communist era infrastructure all the way (think appliances that look like they run on coal). Richard has a young cat bouncing off the walls and we all instinctively try to find a way to sleep covered without suffocating to avoid being woken up early in the morning by a feline trying to eat our faces off. Luckily most of the claw action happened before we dozed off and we avoided locking ourselves out when traipsing down the hall to use the shared toilet. Richard acted as our guide the next morning for some suitable touristy shit including ripping off of the local transit system (no way to actually buy a ticket means no money for you), Czech vegetarian food (sadly sold by weight) and some bitching about local government corruption. Our resistance to old architecture is well in place by this point but if yours ain't (and you can deal with Toyota ads on everything that doesn't have a pulse), Praha is pretty amazing on that front.

Dresden here we come. . .

We drink up our free beer, schmooze and eventually decide that we are going to meet up for some drinks and food at this cafe with our hosts plus some friends of Owen who live in Paris. After grabbing a table at the back we run into what became a re-occurring theme in France - an inability to get the wait staff to actually serve us anything. Hand signals, calling, going up to the bar, nothing really seems to work other than waiting until their apparent disgust gets overpowered by their apparent pity. Wait staff in Paris are not there to prepare or serve food - they are there to satisfy their personal fetishes for mistreating the public and the sooner you accept that the less likely you are to starve to death. Some how we actually round up drinks and food, which in my case is an insane cheese plate (by non-cheap cheese North American standards) which is about 30% edible and 70% moldy corpse skank. Luckily there was a true cheese aficionado present to suck back the reeking Tilset like bits and call me out on my false cheeseness.

While this mundane shit is going on, Cory is buying this lady who complimented all of our sets a drink on the other side of a support beam which is frustratingly obscured from our table. Things quickly devolve into our table trying to sneak a peek of the groupie courting, rooting for Cory while booing each drunk guy that tried to swoop in and fuck things up. The place starts closing (as does Cory) and the rest of us split to Brian's and leave Cory to satisfy our Paris sleaze quotient.

We walk back to Brian's and after being led into their second apartment (that we get to ourselves which is fucking awesome) Brian starts yanking out select PE and industrial records from his disgustingly vast stacks and demanding of us with an evil manic eye, "Have you heard this? HAVE YOU FUCKING HEARD THIS?" Brian's drunkenness is no where near enough to squelch his mania and this process gets repeated multiple times with an extended Taint set being the most amusing / disturbing. We all are swearing he's on meth and something nasty but apparently booze and sick PE is all that is necessary to turn our host into something dangerous. Cory gets back around 3AM with a satisfied smirk (and story set to a Joy Division song) and we decide that for us booze is not enough and to rise to the occasion and up our own mania we dip into some ketamine while listening to Le Syndicate. Not sure why weird disassociatives seem to mesh perfectly with old school industrial and PE but other than the subsequent days of bloody snot it was a perfect end to an intense night.

We had an extra day off so decide to spend it in Paris, sticking to a mix of the usual touristy stuff and dogshit. We climbed the Eiffel Tower which nearly kills Cory (and gifts us with Angry Cory for a while), acted lude by various sculptures, enjoyed the subway, learned how truly terrible Paris high fashion actually is (ha ha ha) and took pictures of prominently dropped dogshit whenever possible. I keep expecting the French to display a genetic shit sense from the sheer volume but almost every turd we cross has been stepped in multiple times. Later on we try out a vegetarian spot which reinforces every lame ass stereotype about Paris restaurants much to my chagrin. Obnoxious and rude waiter (presumably acting gay solely to complete the stereotype for us), shitty service varying from forgetting half the order to getting much of the rest wrong, cheezy new age decor (waiter dressed like he is in a SoCal Christian cult), crap food (small portions and pathetic recipes) and of course it was unreasonably expensive. Unfortunately gratuities are included in France so there was no way for us not to tip our waiter. So far my luck in Europe with respects to restaurants has me convinced that Scotland is not an aberration but the fucking norm - why everyone is not either suffering from jaundice or is morbidly obese I don't know.

Truth is that as cool as La Miroiterie is (playing there was definitely worth the trip) and as decent as the folks we met were, Paris as a whole appears to be just a big over hyped expensive city with no parking and tolls at the entrance. If you can only visit one place in Europe, skip Paris and go straight to Berlin.

We roll into Paris at a decent time and luckily for Owen's sanity, the venue is not overly close to the craziness that is Parisian driving. Let's talk about that for a moment. Years ago in my home town we had this crazy guy living across the street who drove this huge silver spray painted piece of shit van. One day his van got boxed in by two cars and his solution was to floor it into the car in front, then reverse ram into the one behind and repeat until the two cars were pushed out of the way. To this day we call this sort of fuck you behaviour "doing a silver van man". Well in Paris silver van man is the norm - every single car has dents and scrapes all over the front and rear bumpers (if they are lucky it stops there, many are in way worse shape than that). While avoiding all the dogshit we got to watch a guy calmly silver van man an expensive compact and accompanying shit box that had caged him. Our own vehicle magically escaped this though we did have to risk parking illegally for two days since there essentially are no free legal spots in Paris.

The other really "fun" thing about France is tolls. It seems that somewhere along the way the French government decided that toll roads were not annoying enough and that to address this problem, they needed to focus on nickel and diming the motorists at least every 30km. Our total toll costs in France added up to something around 100€ by the end of the tour. You enter or leave the country, that's a toll. You leave the highway to get something to eat, that's a toll. You drive more than 20 minutes, that's a toll. The French road system translates as "Fuck you, pay me."

So back to gig day. . .we park the car and ditch Cory (he was in angry Cory mode so we had nothing to lose) and then go walking to try to find the squat we're playing that night. La Miroiterie turns out to be behind a gnarly spin art / nightmare collage gate where these two guys holding tools are looking halfway between tradespeople and binners arguing over who gets which booty. They let us in and then we wander down a trashy alley besides an uber funky series of narrow buildings that would be at home in "City Of Lost Children" (at least if it took place on the set of "Breaking"). It's wet and dark and very rad. Our snooping gets ignored initially until someone directs us to Andy of Evil Moisture and we get the low down on the what, when and where (basically talk to Brian). Brian the promoter ain't around yet but a phone call solves that mystery and we head of to collect Cory and load in the gear.

So I get a toy like Kronenbourg beer into me compliments of Andy and check into the PA situation. It's not good. What I see is the same microscopic DJ PA (i.e. piece of shit with blue lights) which the Andy and co are trying to daisy chain two extra large cabinets onto to magically create a pair of subs. I'm picturing the already taxed PA withering instantly when it gets double the load and ask if by any chance someone has a guitar amp we could use instead to beef things up. Turns out Andy has this ancient brown (tweed meets diarrhea) Yamaha keyboard amp which when hooked into aux gives us a surprisingly decent collective PA. Fuck yeah. The room itself follows the usual trashcore aesthetics but adds its own twist with a small loft at the back perfect for video projection and letting some special peeps get a better view. Really, a perfect venue.

We all set up on the floor so the crowd doesn't have room to bolt and surprisingly enough folks showed that it was full in the room. Necromondo opened with his zombie synth creep and although laptop sets tend towards mind numbingly boring, Tirdad did a decent job and I expect will be asked back to future events. We (griefer) take the next slot and other than Owen again mangling his hand I think we pull off a solid set - no major fuck ups and decent crowd reaction though it is tightly enough packed that instead of pushing through the crowd the front row gets the brunt of it. Brutophilia takes the last slot with another tight round from under the dirty gaunch though Cory manages to break the audience wall with a few well timed shoves. Must have been alright as Cory got some post gig groupie action.

So we hit the road to Brussels which is something like 45 minutes away from Tilburg. Cory decides to start on my "death list" (a list of things that need to die) which fills up most of the trip until the Tom Tom starts to toy with us in Brussels. We reach this confusing bit of old country road snarl with Owen frantically cranking his neck around trying to figure out whether we are about to drive into a train or backwards onto a one way street and in the back seat is Mel (petite blonde lady that she is) doing much the same. We happen to drive right by a pair of Belgian coppers, one of which Owen catches some direct eye to eye contact with and then almost immediately it is sirens wailing and us getting pulled over.

Lesson to the wise: no cop anywhere will ever admit to speaking English if the other option is to make you feel uncomfortable. The cop gets our passports after showing intense interest in Mel but pretty quickly seems to realize that we are just lost out of town idiots and not human traffickers trying to smuggle juicy Eastern European girls into the ghetto. After letting us go we manage to track down Nyko's place which is smack dab in a sketchy area that seems like it should be teeming with crackheads but isn't (though we get warned that we need to park away from his place if we want a vehicle for the trip to Paris). The Ripit pad is totally rad, a cool studio setup which creates some major fader envy and overall has lots of character. The four of us decide to go get some beer and snacks and while walking around the block we get screamed at by some dudes driving by in what sounds like French but which none of us can decipher beyond an implied "we do not like you". They stop, shout some more but then either decide that there are more of us than them or we're not worth the effort and drive off. The rest of the night is spent drinking, smoking and slurring though I managed to get lost trying to find the toilet downstairs in the dark and after my eyes acclimatized realized I was in someone else's room, luckily before I yanked my dick out and starting pissing on their iMac thinking it was the pisser.

In the morning Owen grabbed the car and while loading it up we noticed that two doors down was the remains of a car that had been intact the night before. The thing looked like it had been through a trash compactor - every window smashed, the body all banged and bent to shit, complete and total write off. So glad we took the advice to park a few blocks away. Brussels ain't no joke.

We're starting to pick up tour momentum now, sleep deprivation merging with dehydration and bad food as we (or more aptly cursed to be designated driver Owen) head to Tilburg. The Tom Tom skips town again and only has a vague idea where the venue is so we do a bunch of walking through an unexpectedly 60s era dreary Britian looking Netherlands city (with a touch of Prairies flatness). Isolation and / or boredom have a great effect on the development of culture and I think that the local architecture and geography may play a big part in The Netherlands having so many (glorious) freaks.

After a short confusing in town drive we find NS16 which is a cool single level yet sprawling warehouse style art space. We make the mistaken assumption that the space directly behind the venue is a good target for parking but then discover the neighbours are the only ones deserving of a key to the gate so to avoid getting locked in we have to go traverse the oddball roads in Tilburg to park nearby in a huge lot (luckily close to pizza for the post show drunken gorging).

I'm introduced to a shitload of peeps right off the bat and due to my senility, er lack of sleep I forget them right away which leads to a lot of "hey" salutations for the rest of the day (I'm a fucking idiot). Continuing with the Europeans' know how to put on a spread theme we get access to a lentil stew, bread, other stuff I skipped plus the obvious necessity missing at DIY shows on this side of the pond. . .free beer! Let's hope that France's universal healthcare includes free detox services to drunken Canadians otherwise I am going to be a sad man once I get back home. I'm pleased to note that there is a decent PA and although Behringer seems to have locked up the European mixer market (shudder) it looks like at the very least the PA won't suck (it turned out to be more than adequate).

The fest starts off weird with a fucked up leprechaun themed hiphop act thingy plus a heartfelt singer songwriter a la Trent Reznor (shudder) and I'm on the worried side of emoticon list until Cock Cobra (who is also one of the promoters) shows me what's what with a vodka and orange drink fueled freakout that ends prematurely due to it being too early - the audience ain't riled up or drunk enough yet to be willing to get doused with the ugly orange vodka concoction. I felt like a loser for not jumping in myself but I had images of 3 more days of being orange and sticky and we hadn't even played yet. We were smart enough to go on before Man Manly but lucked out in that we didn't have to follow what was the highlight of the whole event: MONOPOLKA!!!!

Holy fuck. This Russian export was previously and unfortunately unknown to me. Initially I mistook him for one of the FCKN BSTRDS when someone told me he was the hand behind the various hand drawn toilet humour posters scattered around the space so when this maelstrom of awesomeness took the stage it was a total surprise. Dirty dreaded metal wig, block smeared t-shirt, bad ass cleat bracer, contact mic'd full beer can, step ladder, beer bottles, cardboard box. 25 years or so of metal condensed down into a 10 minute cacaphonic noise set. Shit, I'm a huge metal fan but this was the most metal thing I have seen since gore grinders Tard tried to fuck a pitbull on stage here in Victoria years back. The vid on YouTube doesn't truly do his set justice but when Monopolka lifts his bloody beer soaked hands to raise a claw and beer high in the air while the crowd screems like the lunatics they are it was a pure beserker triumph over all that mundane, soulless and sanitary. Even Odal's excellent tinfoil and saran wrap nude set (complete with James of Man Manly copping a feel) was a distant second. Guy's a hero in my books.

Jumping back, our set went relatively smoothly. Owen is just starting to perfect smashing his fingers with the metal bar (arrrgh) and I think it was this night that he stopped using the super heavy machined metal rod for the full arm swing clank hits since one stray strike could cause permanent brain damage or require an amputation if you cought it on the knuckles. The crowd was close enough we could get in amongst them too which seems so necessary for PE. Cory also ramped up a bit to meet the occasion which was cool though he freaked me a bit when it looked like he was going to destroy his back while trashing the PA before reason grabbed the motor controls and put the speaker the fuck down. All in all, the weird start just acted as a salad tossing for what was pure sex in freakish noise form.

The sleeping arrangements were obviously fucked up with so many out of town acts. Ours were a little messed in that we had 4 of us but the sleeping arrangements were split into two. What made it worse was that although logistically it was fucked (gear, hooking up the next day, etc.), the two hosts were super hot local ladies with Owen, Cory and Mel all getting the sick puppy droop when they saw who's company we were giving up. On the plus side though, the Ripit crew stepped up with a place to crash in nearby Brussels.

We leave at a sane time to get to Antwerp and the Tom Tom thankfully doesn't fuck us so we arrive early. Owen and Cory go wandering and come up with a metal shirt wearing fellow Mario who guides us around to the back of the venue to load in our gear. There he points at hoist, like literally a platform which gets hoisted up to the second floor by a pair of teamster looking professional stage hands. A fucking hoist. We are truly rock stars now, I demand from now on I will only play shows where my gear is hoisted at least one story. We are then led into the venue or more specifically, the palace which includes a huge green room complete with two dressing rooms, common area with beer and food stocked fridge, room with six or seven sinks and mirrors, toilet and finally a shower which has a sign on it that says "Douche". The venue is actually a fancy ass government sponsored theatre and is totally not somewhere that we should be allowed to enter and definitely not somewhere that should have us on stage shouting about phishing scams. Huge (as in H U G E) projection screen and crazy sound system to boot. Preposterous is the word that comes to mind.

The fact we have a green room bigger than the average EU apartment isn't enough though, we have a case of Stella Artois and the upon enquiry by Cory, a case of "girl beer" otherwise known as Kriek. I sadly discovered that in Belgium that unlike the export Stella we drink in Canada, the native version tastes like beer made from ass with the ass removed. It makes Germany's awesomely named but piss emulating Bitburger taste like a skanky 12% porter by comparison. I manage to somehow avoid being completely shitfaced before we the gig kicks off which is good since stairs stand between me and the toilet no matter which way you approach them.

Brutal Orgasm open, an improv noise act comprised of male / female pair with the dude using a guitar to drive a pedal array and the woman using a sexy Korg MS20 amongst other odds and sodds. To be honest, I've got a bit of hate on against guitars in noise but the BO folks did alright. We grabbed the next slot and did our best to stir up the small seated audience but with our gear on stage and the vastness of the venue, I kept finding myself straining at the end of a cable in the middle of an isle far away from indifferent Belgians staring off into the distance. Sound was great of course and the huge projection screen awesome but if it had been an option I definitely would have preferred to play in the bar downstairs. Cory took the final slot and got a better response - whether that was because he is less about working the crowd, the audience was drunker or we just sucked I can't say.

After the show we schmoozed for a while, traded merch and marveled at the conflicting image of Wim wearing a Crass shirt while at the same time holding Deathkey vinyl. Wanting avoid the drive to Ghent we ended up scoring a pair cheap hotel rooms in downtown Antwerp in a sketchy part of town where the desk clerk warned us to be careful about where we parked. The night included a Belgian soccer hooligans headbutting Owen in the elevator, a pair of tanked old Welsh pot bellied dudes trying to bond over Canada, a drunk stroll and an elevator covered with dripping phlegm in the morning. Antwerp, we hardly knew ye. Tilburg, here we come!

Next up after Vienna was a stop in Stuttgart to shorten the driving load compliments of James / Man Manly and co. Very cool collective sort of space that was nearly impossible to find when we arrived and led to us shining lights into the windows of most of their neighbours as well as blindly walking into an unmarked building that looked a hell of a lot like a squat when viewed from the stairwell. A rather concerned second floor denizen stumbled out at exactly the same moment that James checked out what the noise in the hallway was and luckily saved us from mangling more German attempting to explain what the fuck we were doing there. A walk for beer, a trip to a Turkish gambling club for food and giggles and the night was done.

We managed to get our act together early enough to do some local sight seeing, James acting as a guide to weird Stuttgart. The trail of breadcrumbs led through some rad art spaces built around various railway buildings including a section with folks living in old train cars immediately beside a metal junkyard complete with car crusher and giant claw crane ready to disappear some gangster lieutenants.

The highlight by far though must be the soy schnitzel I scored at a local shop. I dunno about you but as a long time vegetarian the only thing I miss more than simulated eel is overly salted breaded pig flesh.

The trip to Frankfurt the next day was punctuated with a Jon Wayne lesson for James which meant that after listening to "Texas Funeral" in its entirety we could instantly bond at any point in time solely with the uttering of "Texas".

Frankfurt, now that was a unique fucking show. First we think we have found the venue, a door that appears to go to some sort of hall like art space but which is locked when we get there. So after a visit to DJ Ina's espresso bar (think cleavage heavy divas selling espresso to swarthy Roger Moores) and a piss or two in the alley Theo shows up and we get into the "space". In this case what that means is literally a stairwell, granite stairs sure but a powerless stairwell with room for a table, some speakers and most importantly, several cases of beer. After setting up the PA Theo prompted, do you want green sauce while holding a plate full of small boiled potatoes. Turns out green sauce is potato salad minus the potato so alien coloured comfort food was the order of the day.

I managed to drop our large metal bar down the stairs for a spectacular crash bam boom down the full flight to the basement prior to our set. Power came from this single super long extension cord which snaked up the stairs, through a door and then another 30 meters down the hall. I guess the duct tape on the socket scared the pranksters away as we never lost power

Set was fun considering that we were basically standing on top of whomever was there. Man Manly kicked our asses so word to the wise, make sure you go on before James. The night got closed out by our gracious host Patrice (sp?) talking in German with Mel. Frankfurt will forever be a combination of coffee smelling cleavage and dark stairwells for me.