LPM 003 – viva la felicita

Day 3 was chaotic again – as expected. We woke up too late, injected some dual core espressi, and fought our way through the friday high noon traffic mayhem all the way to the St. Peter’s Dome. Finding a place to park was almost impossible and took us almost half an hour. Finally we were there, on the big plaza, shooting some clips, getting nods and smiles from chinese tourists and confused looks from others who saw us in our costumes.

We returned to the basement as soon as possible to tune into the final phase of cutting, editing and preparing for our set. This took a long time and our camera seemed to be fucked up at last – it decided spontaneously whether to spit out or just eat the dv tape – we had lost control. Eventually all material got digitized and we started to get a bit releived when Bram returned from a short walk around the block to buy coffee and mumbled something about our car not being where we parked it. fRED and Bram went back to the place and indeed – the Audi was gone!!!

Panically we talked with Michael, our kind host, who phoned the police and fRED, Bram and him went to the police station to find out that the beloved automobile had been taken to the deposit because of parking in a prohibited area (which is funny because there were so many other cars in that street which didn’t get pulled off) – so two hours later and 120 EUR lighter the car was back in our property, but we lost hours of preparation time and hundreds of nerves…

We drove to the Linux Club rightaway, dressed up and ready to rock, but we still had a few hours to wait until we would spit out our flickering mayhem, so we spent the next hours socializing and watching the showcases and workshops.

There were quite a few interesting talks: about the node based open source media programming environment Pure Data, which seemed to have developped a lot within the last years and comes closer and closer to the power of Max/Jitter. The French crew talked about vjfrance.com and the Italian base presented ‚vjing tube‘ – a fancy web 2.0 portal for VJs to share and discuss their videos. There were many audiovisual showcases which we liked, but whose artist names we totally forgot – and some other arty farty noise performances that bored us a bit. artificialeyes.tv rocked the house with their VMS projectors and their decadent pile of macbook pros.

Late at night, paki, who was responsible for the schedule of the festival, was already trapped in fear and loathing because he had to cram dozens of artists into the final hours of the night. We had been waiting for so long to show our prepared live set and didn’t want to leave Roma without having shown a single frame. He told us that our set would be „after 3“ and we decided to take a walk down via Ostiense to get our obligatory caffeine dose. There, we sat in a small bar, together with Soni Riot and some other known faces, enjoyed our caffé, listened to Village People and got into a better mood.

Some time around 4am we finally went on stage, really nervous and with a handful of vodkas in our brains, and shot our set out onto the beamers, blinded by flashes, confused by the chaotic „technical support“ – our set had turned out to become an audiovisual set together with Bram – and after almost an hour shwich felt like 10 minutes, the mayhem was over and we packed our stuff and emptied the vodka bottle quickly. Outside we smoked and tried to remember how the gig went – it had been a big chaos with lots of difficulties and we were both happy and really pissed off at the same time – confusion!

Later that night we enjoyed the live set of Soni Riot and chatted with artificialeyes, the „pirate“, Dr. Nojoke and some other drunk veejays until the sun had risen. Bram and fRED wanted to drive to Berlin rightaway but after Flux had laughed and looked at them in agony – the plan was cancelled and we drove back to our accomodation location to fall into a short, noisy and dreamless sleep.

On the next day, we packed everything up and started our long trip back home at noon. Amazingly, 15 minutes later we were already on the highway – and on the first gas station, we poured fresh orange juice and caffé into our heads and headed up north. We took Olli with us, the audio-part of Soni Riot and after eleven hours of schmoove cruising through Italy and Austria, we finally arrived at Bergen, Bavaria, where Olli invited us to a nice italian restaurant where we had huge pizzas (we had zero pizzas in itally – funny eh?). fRED, who had been sleeping almost the whole day, drove the final lap up to Berlin and around 6am we arrived in Berlin to fall into our beds…