Amsterdam

Prior to going to TodaysArt Dan and I spent three days getting drunk in Amsterdam, the first night was pretty quiet as I'd been travelling for well over 12 hours and wasn't really up for a big night. We were staying in a hostel room with a million other beds inside and in the bunk underneath mine was a very strange young man who muttered to himself rather menacingly everytime anybody else made a noise. Ah the joys of dormitories.

Our hostel was next the the museum square so it would have been rude not to have visited at least one of them so next morning we had a look in the Rijksmuseum. It was a lot smaller than I was expecting and looked from the outside. It does hold some fantastic paintings from the Dutch golden age, much amusement is found looking at those slice of life paintings trying to find people shitting in various different places. Not that the shitting was my favourite part of the gallery no, this was the the father and son portraits (I think by Rembrandt), an austere father and smug fat dandy of a son looking rather pleased with himself couldn't have offered a greater contrast.

After the museum we wandered around the city with no set plan and eventually found ourselves in a pub probably a bit too early and this set the scene for the rest of the time in Amsterdam.

That night was spent drinking in the red light area, which is a little bizarre and leaves you feeling like a naughty schoolboy as you pass ladies standing around in their underwear beckoning you to come in, I had no intention of doing so, besides I was on a budget. :)

We ended the night in a rock bar and then a crappy pop music bar where Dan and I discussed how much we liked Lady Gaga, ha ha. Well I did anyway, Dan says I am not allowed to like music no more.

The next day went along similar lines, although we had vowed not start drinking so early. We visited the Anne Frank and Van Gogh museums and then ended up boozing in the red light area. We visited the "world famous" Grasshopper Cafe, didn't smoke any of that Marajuana stuff and instead paid nearly €8 for a crappy pint of Heineken. Strangely the bars seemed to close an awful lot earlier than they had the previous night which left us wandering around looking for somewhere else to carry on and add to the already copious amounts we had already necked.

TodaysArt, The Hague - Saturday

Saturday was a much more pleasant day than Friday which meant we spent some time testing out the local grog in the street next to the Vortex wooden pallet thing. Dan wondered why there were two containers in the street, his question was answered rather quickly as out came Nik Nowak's Panzer came crawling out playing reggae tunes out of its massive speakers. I expected this is how the performance would carry on but instead of reggae we got strange musique concrete created from noises made by the tank struggling to drive over a few bits of wood.

Dan complained that the tank wasn't big enough so we decided to go and check out the Braun Tube Jazz Band. The Braun Tube Jazz Band isn't really a band, it's a Ei Wada bloke and lots of cathode ray TVs, it starts off buy going du dudu du dud du dudu dudu dudu as Ei Wada places his hands on the screen and this kind of doesn't change but it does get faster dudududdu dudududududud dudududududududududu. It did eventually form some kind of a tune and was a clever idea but tonight were were less up for the avant garde and more up for dancing about like idiots.

We missed the main performance by Pantha Du Prince and instead found people playing extremely repetitive but very cool techno inside one of the containers. Eventually the container started to get a bit too full for my liking so we walked over the road and had a look in the Theater aan het Spui's main hall where the Anarchy Dance Theatre had just finished showing their projection mapping person tracking dance software off, the stewards wouldn't let me have a go on the stage, I suspect they didn't want no fat blokes prancing around.

Inside the foyer of the theatre was a performance by Gert-Jan Prins that went guuuuur duuuuur whiiiiiiiiir skkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk grrrrrrr guuuuuuur out the his home made instruments. Behind him there was a twitter fall projected on the wall and I tried to get some sweary words put up behind it but obviously they are not allowed and they didn't appear, or maybe they did after I'd left. I was quite enjoying the funny noises but Dan wanted to do something else so we changed venue to the clubby part of the festival.

Up next was Roll the Dice who had amazing ants attacking other stuff visuals projected onto a fine cloth in front of themselves, their music was very very droney and although it is very good it kind of sent my off into that half awake falling asleep on my feet state. It finished and Dan poked my very hard shouting "YOU NEED RED BULL".

We went off to get Red Bull. This gave me a very silly second wind and the rest of the night flew by, Einoma and Phon.o were both great but the best act of the festival for me was Ikonika who made me dance around like a idiot to her housey sound until the kicked us out of the venue.

TodaysArt is very cool, maybe I will go next year. ;)

TodaysArt - Friday

TodaysArt is a great festival in The Hague, Dan and I arrived on the Friday after a heavy few days in Amsterdam and was met by a swirl of wooden debris that had been turned into a pavilion/stage area where the locals had gathered to drink cans of lager whilst listening to soundscapes and other strangeness that you don't normally expect to hear in the middle of a city centre.

After collecting our wristbands we grabbed a couple of beers only to be told that we weren't allowed to take them into the Lucent Danstheatre itself so we necked them and were all fizzed up while waiting for the first act of the evening to appear.

A short introduction to the festival was followed by a performance by Ben Frost, Daniel Bjarnson and Sinfonietta Cracovia with a soundtrack for Solaris. Whilst interesting I felt that the music stayed on a plateau and never reached a peak that I come to expect from Ben Frost, I was also a bit disappointed with the visuals provided by Brian Eno, again they never really went anywhere and were slow to change, in fact at first I couldn't tell whether they were changing or whether my eyes were playing me up.

Performance over we headed to the City Hall Atrium to see Canto Ostinato Audio Visual, very pretty electronic/harp music this but again appeared to me to be directionless, the visuals here however were much more impressive, I don't know if it was intentional or not but the lights flashing of the golden harp of Gwyneth Wyntek was quite mesmerising.

After this the alcoholic days leading up to the festival were starting to take their toll and I needed a sit down so I walked across the road to the cinema to see Same Same But Different - a series of short films exploring reality, mimicry, authenticity and originality.

I left Dan to watch a film about Iceland and walked back across the road to catch the absolutely amazing set both in terms of sound design and audio visual design from Ryoichi Kurokawa which just wasn't long enough.

After a brief look into see Bruno Spoerri making funny noises which wasn't my cup of tea, I had a couple of beers and took in the interesting selection from the The WORM No-Stars, then went to see the slightly bonkers but very very good live vampire/superadvancedhumans soundtrack by Slant Azymuth.

By now the clubby part of the festival was starting to hot up, I didn't catch his name but the kid with Shigeto playing hip hop had got the crowd warmed up and Shigeto hisself kept the party going, by the time he started bashing his drum kit I was on the wane and shortly afterwards decided to call it a night