Chicago to Bologna
I started writing this post almost a week ago, but never finished it, and more and more details started to fade away from my experience. Anyway here I am finally back from my ten day trip to Chicago and Bologna. The trip started crazy and ended crazy with two performances before and after fews hours of my flights. It was fun and action packed. The performance and presentation of my work at Transistor went very well, less stressful then I thought 
. But the three days in Chicago were totally crazy with practicing for Bologna, and that too almost after an year. Nadav and I tried to practice as much as we could during the day and evenings was booked for get together with friends, which was awesome. The night before we were suppose to leave Nate cooked us the most delicious four course dinner, it totally took all my tiredness away.
In Bologna, the Italians gave us the warmest welcome, with someone receiving us at the airport, a fancy hotel in the heart of the city and someone to help us find find the local materials, for constructing our different layers of the wall. It was the best thing happened to us, we felt so pampered. And like they say the stylish italians were stylish in everything they did, from the food that was served every night in the palace during the festival to the music that was playing while we ate. They had an impressive productions and technical team, who knew what they were doing, and genuinely wanted to help you. Everyone wore black only, not like a uniform, but well designed stylish jackets, coats and shoes, they were all so handsome!! And Man! these guys know their brands and designers, unlike many of the geeks I come across here in america. I was totally bowled over when saw some men talk about the top designers and their clothes lines etc like some americans would talk bout their favorite football players . Later I found out that it was very common for general public to know bout the latest designs and fashion trends. I felt so fashionably challenged I din even know any of the designers they spoke about:(.
The venue Palazzo Re Enzo was gorgeous, it is literally the center of the city if you look it up in the map, surrounded by Piazza Maggiore, which is one of the finest squares in all of Italy. We were performing in Mangrovia which is the second largest spaces in the palace after the live media floor. The space had a crazy crazy reverb in it, and sounded great initially but after working their for sometime I realized that it actually just absorbed all the mid-highs and the highs of my sounds and so things sounded a bit muffled. But I still enjoyed working there cos they had a great sound system with which I was able to fix some of the problems.
During our stay their I met some of the most fun people and made great friends with them, which was the best part of my experience in Bologna, such warm and nice people . The festival started on the 21st and on the 1st day itself there were about 700 people in the audience, and was very very impressive since it was only going to grow in the next two days, with the last day being a Saturday, where there were close to a thousand people. The performances started pretty late every night at around 9pm and went on until 2 am. All performances there were experimental with most of them being very very loud, and I was just surprised to see how many people actually stayed throughout the festival. I really can’t imagine a concert of this scale and dynamics in San Francisco or even in New York, it was bloody craziness out there and I absolutely enjoyed it
