The Journey Itself Is Home

The words just whispered by J.Sen and voila: Ragga has sent the pictures over to the MWC who in turn turned to me be to blag a little about the night and the picture.

Heaven I don’t know what do say, except that this looks like a terrific group and even terrifying!

Here you go, Coachella!

Nothing much was happening today. I had a nice practise session at Björk’s place, otherwise I have been relaxing in my hotel room. It has a magnificent view over the city. I could sit here and watch the scenery for hours!

Ragga Gestsdóttir has taken some excellent photos of us, i.e. Björk and the band. I’m hoping she will post a few of them here as she takes much better photos than I do. One in particular, taken just before we went on stage in Coachella, is fantastic.

We are back in New York. The drive from Palm Springs to the airport took three hours, but we were never bored as Björk’s little daughter kept offering us snacks. And we listened to a cd of Kardimommubærinn, a popular play for children that is also hilarious for adults. It is about the peaceful town of Kardemomme and three robbers, Casper, Jasper and Jonathan who live just outside it. They regularly steal things, but when they kidnap aunt Soffia they take on more than they can handle as she seizes control and begins to teach them proper manners. In the end the robbers are arrested, but decent treatment in the jail by the kindly constable Bastian changes them into good persons, and in the final chapter they become the hero of the day when they extinguish the fire in the tower of the town.

I’m going to rest today, but tomorrow I’ll start preparing for Radio City. We will have no rehearsals (except the soundcheck) and I guess I’ll only find out what songs we are performing the day before the show.

We did Coachella last night. Great experience. I have never played in front of such a huge crowd before, some seventy to ninety thousand people.

We were in Coachella from about seven PM. Had a dinner in a large tent and then went to a kind of a VIP room, which was on the periphery of the sector. Scarlett Johansson came by, she was very nice. I think she did helluva job at SNL.

The brass girls told me that another famous actor was hovering just outside the VIP room. He told the girls to say Hi to Björk. This was porn star Ron Jeremy!

I must confess I felt I was about to faint when we walked on stage. Such an enormous audience! Almost the entire population of Reykjavik.

The show went OK, though it will get better and better as we play more. This was our first real gig, the concert in Laugardalshöllin in Reykjavik was more of a final musical dress rehearsal. There we didn’t have lasers and we didn’t have our flags. So all things considered I think we did well. And Björk was simply adorable.

The idea of each of us having our own flags comes, of course, from the song “Declare Your Independece”: “Raise your flags, higher, higher!” Mine features the Qabalistic Tree of Life - on the side, unfortunately, due to a misunderstanding. It still looks cool, though.

It was a great evening. And now I have to stop writing as I have a plane to catch! We are going back to New York today.

Finally I am allowed in here to share and blag about my experience at Coachella. I arrived late, bien sur, why should I be punctual.

Just about the time I came on stage they were into Declare Independence and I manage to shoot this one shot from the top of Jónas’s head out over the wonderful audience.

I think I have not mastered this new technology of blagging so I will continue to blag my whole way through these upcoming and exciting times.

I have been asked what instrument I play on the tour.

One is an electronic harpsichord that Björk owns. It has two two manuals and is a sampled instrument. It is of an unusually high quality. It has four types of church organ sounds, three harpsichord sounds, a celeste sound and some others that we don’t use. I also play an electric piano.

On the SNL show I used the celeste, but played an octave lower than in the original version of the song. In that way it sounded a bit like a toy piano. Tonight I’ll play the same part on the electric piano, but will use a kind of a marimba sound that the other instrument doesn’t have. I prefer it to the celeste, it is more earthy. We’ll see how it works.

We have been rehearsing for the past two days and I haven’t had the time to do anything else. And yet, much of the rehearsal time has actually consisted of waiting. Many people work for Björk, and not just musicians. There are things to be arranged, gear to be set up, etc. One musical performance conists of so many elements and the technology behind it is extremely complex. It takes a lot of work to make everything run smoothly.

When I first started rehearsing with Björk and the band in Iceland I felt that the distinction between myself and THE MACHINES had become blurred, like something seen in a Giger painting. I began to ask myself where the boundary between my body and the computers lies. I’m not so sure I know the answer!

We have “ear monitors” with a metronomic click sounding in our ears to keep the band’s playing together, plus everything else we need to hear. In some songs I want to hear as little from the drums as possible (even though Chris’ playing is damn good!). In other songs I want to hear the drums clearly but less of the brass. This is so unreal… yet amazing that it is possible.

We leave for Palm Springs today. Into the desert! That will be a first for me.

The weather yesterday turned out to be great and I went out for a walk in the afternoon. The walk lasted a lot longer than I intented because I got completely lost. But I didn’t mind. I have noticed a strange, lovely smell here that I don’t recall having come a cross anywhere else. It is difficult to describe, but it is kind of fruity. It probably has to do with the local trees and/or plants.

We DID have a small rehearsal in the evening. A laser show will accompany the music and though we didn’t play to the lasers last night, I did see some of it before the rehearsal started. We don’t get that in the classical world! A performance of Beethoven’s Ninth with a laser show should be fun.

Or maybe not Beethoven, but Scriabin (1872-1915), who wanted his music to be accompanied by colors in some form. Scriabin was an occultist who intended his music to be a bridge between this world and the next, a multisensory, mystical experience for his audience.

Since I mentioned smells: How would Björk’s music smell? Should we use incense in our concerts, in addition to the lasers?

Another matter: Some of us (maybe all of us) have had some problems with the time difference between New York and Reykjaví­k, and California and New York. The gig at SNL took place at midnight, which is four o’clock in the morning in Iceland! At Coachella we will be on stage about the same time, which is three o’clock AM in New York.

A few of us were already yawning at ten thirty last night. I should force myself to stay awake tonight so that I won’t be sleeping by the time we play in Coachella!

We arrived in California last night after a looooong trip. We expected warm weather and some of us were almost dressed in a bathing suit. So it came as a surprise that the weather was of the kind you would expect in Reykjavik, rainy and rather cold…

The hotel is nice. The room I got though was very odd in some way I can’t quite define. I really didn’t like it. So I asked for another one and got a much better room.

If you believe in otherworldly stuff (and some of us do) it is easy to come to the conclusion that hotels are psychic cesspools. All kinds of individuals pass through them and they often do tragic things to themselves.

A man I know quite well told me that he once asked his friend, who works in a hotel, what was the worst thing about his job. His reply was: “To take out the bodies.”

Apparently suicides in hotels are quite common. The atmosphere where someone has killed himself/herself can’t be healthy. No doubt we will be staying in such places some of the time.

On a less sombre note: No rehearsals today. So I’ll take a long walk around. Los Angeles seems to be an exciting place!

For technical reasons I have been unable to blog until now. I’m so sorry!

We came to New York last Wednesday. I haven’t been here since I was fifteen - what was I thinking? I have been walking around Manhattan for the past few days, there is so much to see. The vibes are just GREAT.

I remember feeling that I had walked into some movie the last time I was here. That feeling was reinforced when we had our first rehearsal at the NBC studios last Thursday, for the Saturday Night Live show yesterday. The walls are lined with signed photos of famous actors. I even saw two of Alec Baldwin, who has been in the news lately for an abusive message he left on his daughter’s cell phone. Maybe a course in anger management would be a good idea for him.

Yesterday we arrived at the studio around four o’clock. Björk was kind enough to bring me a bag of socks I had purchased the day before, but left at her place when I was practicing there. The socks were behind me on stage during the two performances at the show. Henceforth, they will be my lucky socks!

I think the show went quite well. It is not easy to perform live in front of millions of people. But all things considered, I was surprisingly calm. The same goes, I think, for my fellow band members, and for Björk herself.

I didn’t sleep too much tonight. Too excited! And today we go to California for the Coachella festival next Friday. That should be fun. As it was so eloquently put in one of the memos we received recently: “Lets load them wagons and head out West. Ye ha!”