The Journey Itself Is Home

I have had really exhausting couple of days. Two long bus rides in a row. Even though it is kind of cosy sleeping on a bus, you don’t sleep deeply enough to function properly the following day. I woke up four or five times tonight. I did have fascinating dreams though - but I have forgotten them now.

I just spoke with Mark, who told me that he dreamt he was fighting a ghost. Maybe the bus is haunted!

It is very hot here in Austin. It is even hotter than in Madrid in July. I hope it won’t be like that when we play tomorrow night.

Somebody asked in one of the comments here what happened to Wanderlust on the Virgin Festival. The answer is that we had a technical problem, the beats weren’t in the right place so everybody got thrown off track.

The same happened in a few songs on last night’s concert in the Fox Theatre in Detroit. Earth Intruders was just WRONG and the beats weren’t right in Joga. I’m not sure why, maybe because there was a new Moon in Virgo!!!

Many of the songs were OK though. Björk sang Desired Constellation for the first time on the tour and it was a treat!

We are in Nashville now. It is rather hot and I don’t feel like going out. Tonight we continue our journey on the bus (yes, we are back on the sleeping coaches) to Austin. It is a sixteen hours drive, no less!

Jen Goes Digital has written it for me in her comment to my last entry:

“Well first there was something wrong with my harpsichord in Toronto. Peter van der Velde and two other stage men stood around looking under the lid like it was an automobile. I never even played it tonight. That’s ok, I faced the crowd all night. We changed the intro back to the way it was in Glastonbury. We stopped marching out to Brennid þið vitar, ever since my ass-slapping incident in Scotland. After I gave the thumbs up that my keyboard was okay, Bjork slapped me ten. During Declare Independence, I took one of the Wonderbrass girl’s flags. I ran around the stage with it like a crazy man. I took it over to Damian. He let me touch the reactor table. I changed the way Declare Independance goes. It was the ‘Declare Jonas Sen Mix’. I kicked ass on Oceania as per usual and on Cover Me, even though Bjork was singing over my shoulder and sharing my song book. Good thing, she caught the pages as the wind turned them too soon.”

Hmmm…

Ten minutes before walking on stage last night, on the Virgin Festival in Toronto, I was told that smoke was coming out of the electronic harpsichord I usually play on. I would have to play everything on the Yamaha CP300.

Björk said to me: “Well, Jónas, it is Bruce Willis time.” Meaning: Stay cool under pressure. I usually like to prepare when I have to play songs on a different instrument from the one I’m used to. So the harpsichord blowing up just before walking on stage was kinda stressful.

It went quite well though.

To celebrate I couldn’t help dancing. Maybe I was a bit wild. Probably why Björk said to me as we were going back to the dressing rooms: “You are mad!”

We are in Toronto now. Most of us arrived yesterday after a long flight from London. I didn’t look forward to more than seven hours in an aeroplane, but was surprised by how pleasant it was. The seats were comfortable and the DVD player in front of me was perfect. I saw three movies, the best by far being Shrek 3.

I have been flying a lot these past weeks and I’m constantly amazed how the foreign planes are more comfortable than the Icelandic ones. I have to say that the amount Icelandair charges you for a plane ticket is outrageous considering the misery they make you endure on long flights. The seats are uncomfortable, there is no leg space and if you don’t have a laptop and want to watch a movie, you have to watch the same thing as the rest of the passengers.

Toronto seems nice. I had some Thai food with Mark, Númi and Sylvía yesterday, and then we took a walk on Yonge Street to keep us awake (we had a bad jet lag). The night was strange, I lost consciousness around eleven, but woke up at 3, 6 and 7.30, feeling very disoriented.

Tonight I’m just staying in my room, watching CNN. I notice that the TV commercials are very different from those I have seen on local stations in England. British TV commercials are often extremely funny; the ones on CNN aren’t.

There is something to be said for British humour!

Just when we had finished our last song on the Connect Festival in Scotland yesterday evening, and were about to walk back on stage for the encores, a woman (I won’t tell her name) slapped my ass.

She is not my girlfriend.

I just laughed. But then I wondered: Could I do the same thing to one of the brass girls? Or to Björk?

I seriously doubt it.

Women can do certain things to us that we can’t do to them.

But I guess we can do other things to them which they can’t do to us.

Fortunately I had some time with MEN ONLY back to Glasgow, namely Damian and Matt Robertson, who did all the brass arrangements for Björk. They were going to London, but gave me a lift to save me from the ass-slapping females. When we had about five minutes left before coming to the hotel, Damian - probably to bolster my hurt male ego - played a CD with the James Bond theme. Hearing the music associated with the biggest male chauvinist pig in the world of cinema made me feel OK again.

Seriously though, we now have a break for a few days, for our next concert will be on Saturday in Toronto.

I loved the concert yesterday. The crowd was fantastic! I think we did quite OK and I especially admired Chris Corsano for playing wonderfully, even though he had only slept for a couple of hours. He was supporting Sonic Youth in London the night before (I do envy him).

Below is a photo I took with my cell phone from the stage facing Inverary Castle:

In The Meaning of the 21st Century, James Martin says: “There is such a difference… between Bach and computerized Bach, or Renoir and computerized Renoir, that a music lover would not want to listen to computer-composed Bach, and an art-connoisseur would not want to live with computer-composed Renoirs… The most interesting humans will remain unique, imitable only in crude ways… An interesting challenge is to develop the best synergy between deep non-human like intelligence and human intelligence. How can the human-NHL combination be designed to achieve the most valuable results?”

Well, I feel that in a sense we are doing this on the tour. Björk mixes acoustic instruments with electronic ones, and she mixes living performers with computer systems. I once wrote here on the blog that after beginning this work I sometimes feel that I don’t quite know where my body ends and the MACHINES begin.

It’s the way of the future, I guess.

Of course, we, i.e. mankind, are already doing this with chemicals, to get more out of life. Martin puts it this way: “Today, when Hamlet ponders, “To be or not to be”, we might say, “Oh, come on! Give him Prozac.”

We will get a lot more of that in the coming decades, when trans-humanism really kicks in.

I have been systematically relaxing since our concert in Paris, which I didn’t enjoy enough because of nervousness, even though it was a good concert in itself. So I have been refraining from watching 24! Instead, I have been reading, taking walks, meditating, etc.

It paid off tonight, for I felt wonderful on stage on the Electric Picnic festival in Ireland.

Afterwards, some of us took a private jet to Glasgow, where I’m now. Being on a private jet was a new experience for me. I felt a bit claustrophobic, but had great fun nonetheless. Damian took this really stupid photo of me after we had landed: