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We went yesterday evening to fruitstock'06. That is a music, fruits and innocence festival, but they also sold beer. Quite a lot of beer indeed! It is held in Regent's Park in London, quite near Baker Street, literary home of Sherlock Holmes!
I had misestimated the weather and arrived with my old sneakers, just in case the grass was wet or something like that but found that
a) there was not such green wet grass, after the extremely long heatwave we've had/suffered
b) it was extremely hot (even hotter because of the sneakers)

Luckily all my sufferings were payed when we went to the extremely long queue for buying drinks. There was a small counter for the thirsty people, and I'm going to do a little non-scientific estimation: the counter was about 6 metres long and there were like 4 people in a one-metre long row. 6×4 = 24 people in one row. There were approximately 6 row before reaching the counter, so that makes 144 people waiting to be served by just around 8 people (I can't tell that exactly since I never managed to see them all… but maybe they were less). That means that each barista had to serve 144/8 = 18 people.

And that explains the long time we spend there. It allowed us for missing almost all Nouvelle Vague live and the beginning of Norman Jay's one.

Once you got the drinks (at least they gave you like a carry-drinks thing) you had to find a way back to where your friends are, passing over hundreds of people sitting in the grass, picnic style. And I was feeling very sorry about having to spill beer over them, as we had to do all kinds of contortions, bends and twists for not stepping over the belongings (and feet) of the people, and obviously sometimes some beer went out of the glasses, and thus fell over the people. But I realised there was not any way of arriving without spilling beer over the people and sometimes stepping over their mats, so I had to do it. Next time maybe the organization could try to stablish some kind of paths so that everybody can walk over them without annoying anyone else, and without having to feel how people spills beer over your toes.
That last reason was the one which relieved me of having arrived with sneakers and not with flipflops - I hate the feeling of cold drink slipping between my little toes X(
Then the sound system was not as loud as it should have been, I think. It was complicated to listen to what they said from the stage - unless you're in the very first row but it was impossible to get there, and the artists weren't that interesting (although it was nice to listen to Gipsy Woman!).

I didn't enjoy the other activities which were proposed, mainly because I couldn't see/find them (so many people was there) but they looked interesting. Oh and another fact I liked was that when we left the place we noticed there were security men preventing people to enter until more people had left, for avoiding the crowd to grow too big. That is extremely good thinking!

On the other hand the ambient was quite relaxed, there was nice people as the organisation had described the festival, so it wasn't a bad evening. I like the idea of having festivals in parks in London (although I feel sorry for the grass as well), and to be able to just take a bus or a tube home when you feel tired - and be at home in 20 minutes.

Fruitstock is still on today so if you read this on Sunday the 6th you can still visit it! But bring your drinks from home and avoid long queues!

Lo dicen ellos, Chico y Chica, en la entrevista para Jenesaispop. Ay qué dolor de mandíbula dan…
Relacionado: ¡El fin del mundo!

A estas cosas siempre llego tarde. Ya hace unos meses que oí hablar de MegAAfonía, un grupo (un dúo, si no me equivoco). los dejé en la lista de "cosas para oír". Ahora estoy entusiasmada con La Canción: "Han tapiado la puerta del Razzmatazz con todos dentro y nadie se ha dado cuenta". Sí, ese es el título, ni más ni menos.

Conseguí unos cuantos mp3 y he estado oyéndolos, y la verdad es que molan :) Las letras son desde divertidas a inteligentes, el sonido me gusta por el tono entre retro y popero que tiene, y su imagen, con dibujos rollo psicodélico y colores a lo CGA me tiene cautivada.

Y como estoy encaprichada con La Canción, me centraré en esta última, con joyitas como:

Hostias, otra vez los Planetas,
maldita Sala Uno,
y los de siempre en la tarima.

Tapiaría la puerta del Razzmatazz,
con todos dentro.
La tapiaría, la tapiaría y nadie se daría cuenta!

¡Me siento tan identificada!

Ya para finalizar, una nota peculiar: me da la impresión de que utilizan Reason para hacer las canciones. He de investigar para confirmar mis sospechas, pero definitivamente huele a Reason.

¡A disfrutarlo! (En el caso de que alguien eche de menos una revisión un poco más seria sobre el grupo, aquí la de eurocero)

Would you please play a fucking riff for me?
Oh, excuse me… :D

INXS Live Baby Live tour, (Old) Wembley Stadium, London, 1991

Best. Band. Ever.

(Sorries to Coldplay and U2 fans!)

I just logged to Schism Tracker forum some days ago to report a problem with the CVS version and noticed that Xenon, the spanish musician which I have always seen at BCN party, was also registered in the forum and contributing to Schism with a port to BeOs (or that I understood).

Then I looked at his signature in the forum: "10 years of tracking!".

"Ok" I thought, "10 years! he must have started really early". Then I realized it's going to be 10 years since I did my first tests in Scream Tracker very soon. I can't remember exactly when was the day, but it was something around the end of May and beginning of June of 1996.

Ahhh!… nostalgia arises, those were the times. Just hours and hours spent in front of the pc, with a pair of cheap headphones (even more, the left one was a bit fucked up and the bass sounded distorted). While the other girls were busy trying to flirt with the (so called) most handsome guy in the class, I was trying to find a decent way of saving my songs to a tape and then being able to listen to them anywhere, everywhere.
Tracking in mono and listening later in Cubic player (as that one supported stereo). Creating a little library of samples, ripped from modules from the pcmania cd (later on, I discovered that most of these samples really came from lots of amiga and pc demoscene musicians, such as falcon, purple motion, jester…). Exchanging messages between more people in the samples messages… That was funny.

Then the superprofessional people entered the scene. People started recording their songs with real labels, thus getting serious with the sound quality. Not only they were worrying about their songs, but they also criticised every other song which didn't sound good. If it hadn't been professionally masterised, it sucked. No matter the melodies. It sucked.

At the beginning I just didn't give a fuck about that. Who cares, I'm not studying for being a musician, I'm not going to earn a single penny with music, I just want to have fun with this. Then I somehow became serious about that, I tried to understand cubase and all that, but it was quite impossible to do anything without a midi keyboard and the computer I had (a pentium II) wasn't able to cope with soft synths. So that and the fact that the demoscene musical scene was as annoying as it always is for newcomers, made me quit the music for a while. I didn't do anything for almost two years.

Then I rediscovered demoscene and did some more songs, learned new styles and techniques: chiptunes, how SID works (even if I never finished a song, but I had several attempts in goattracker), listened to and understood md, dune, and all that kind of intelligent dance music tunes, etc… I also started playing a bit with Reason, with the new laptop I got, but…

…I really don't feel comfortable or inspired. I have the feeling that I have already made all what I had to do, and any new song I do sounds to me like my previous songs. I think I'd better celebrate the 10 years with a good pause. Or do you have any suggestion for these moments of mental vacuum? :D