I’ll be doing a few shows this summer:

June 20 – Oslo / Norway – Koma Festival
June 28 – Calgary / Canada – Terminus Festival
July 20 – Köln / Deutschland – Amphi Festival
July 27 – Paris / France – Dark Castle Festival
Aug 01 – Las Vegas, NV / USA – Defcon 21
Aug 31 – Athens / Greece – Second Skin Club
Sept 04 – Columbus, OH / USA – Skully’s Diner
Sept 05 – Wilmington, DE /USA – Mojo 13
Sept 06 – New York, NY / USA – Triton Festival
Sept 07 – Montreal, QB / Canada – Piranha
Sept 08 – Toronto, ON / Canada – Neutral
Sept 10 – Detroit, MI / USA – Token Lounge
Sept 11 – Chicago, IL / USA – Cobra Lounge
Sept 12 – Phoenix, AZ / USA – 910 Live
Sept 13 – Austin, TX / USA – Elysium
Sept 14 – Los Angeles, CA/ USA – Complex
Sept 15 – Dallas, TX / USA – The Church
Sept 17 – Mexico City / Mexico – TBA
Nov 16 – Dresden / Deutschland – Ballroom Passions

More dates coming up!

Yesterday I posted this on my Facebook page:

I am looking for an opening band for the upcoming North American tour. If your band (2-3 performers) wants to be the main support for 3-4 weeks in April 2013, then please contact: booking@faderhead.com. This is a buy-on slot, but the buy-on is essentially a tourbus share, so you won’t need transportation/hotels, etc. – If you think you can go hard with The Lord and me for a month, hit us up!

Basically I am asking if anyone wants to pay to support us on 20 shows in April 2013.

This is a very normal thing and almost every support band you see on a tour is a buy-on band unless they are very close friends of the main act or are at a similar level of public recognition so that the tour is beneficial to both acts. And then you mostly have a 3rd band that buys on.

Within a few hours of my post I had a bunch of emails from random people saying “You capitalist pig! Charging bands to play is a crime!” and from some bands who are completely misjudging the costs of touring by thinking that the whole buy-on will be costing “around US$ 500 for 20 shows“. The real cost for a buy-on slot such as this is US$ 300 per show.

Why? It’s quite simple, because that’s just what it costs to travel. To express it more clearly, I took out my pen and paper and made this little infographic to illustrate the subject matter:

As you can see from the piechart at the bottom, the costs for tourbus and gas combined are approximately US$ 17500. And since there is room on the bus for more people than The Lord, me and our crew, it just makes sense to offer the remaining bus space to a band who wants to raise their profile by playing more and bigger shows than they usually could on their own. It’s not like they could play 20 shows cheaper in a van themselves and The Lord and I are buying mansions with the buy-on money (I wish!!) …

Tour buy-on’s are real because they help the newer bands gain a following from a more established band’s fanbase while they help offset tour costs. In more commercial scenes that means you pay big bucks on top of the tourbus-share/fee.

If you want to do that or not is up to you of course.

Monday in Berlin we spent 2h at soundcheck trying to figure out where some annoying high frequency hiss was coming from. It was detected by local soundtech Alexandra and confused everyone because we were using the same sound/video-backing files that we used for 13 shows in the USA and on last weeks show in Köln/Germany. Nobody ever noticed a very noticeable and annoying hiss. To make things even stranger: Alexandra even said that she didn’t notice it on the first part of soundcheck herself.

We made sure it didn’t come from the cables, the DI boxes, the software (no hiss when playing “empty” parts) or the audio interfaces. At some point we started believing in a ghost!

So we unplugged and replugged, tried the files in Ableton (the standard software we use), in Traktor, even in iTunes and Quicktime Videoplayer. The hiss remained. In the end we decided to just leave it and of course nobody ever noticed.

Today I checked the original Cubase project file and I found a saturation plugin in the master channel that created the hiss. That plugin helps make things punchier but in sparse/low level parts you hear a noticeable noise. I removed it and everything was quiet.

The hiss was in the sound/video-files. It was always there. In all of the 14 previous shows. Nobody noticed. Sometimes it’s so obvious that it hurts.

Instead of making behind-the-scenes videos for every single one of the events, I decided to make a snappy 4-in-1 overview video of the festivals I was at this summer (WGT, Summer Darkness, M’Era Luna, E-Tropolis).

Oh, and there’ll be a download-only EP called “The Way To Fuck Clubs” released on November 11, 2011 (11-11-11). I’ll give you lots more info on that soon!

For now, I hope you enjoy the festival video! :)

… and it was so much fun! I brought The Lord as well as Daniel & Joe Meyer from Project SAM as my live crew – and apparently people wanted to see us, because Agra was packed when we started (while it was half-empty only 30 minutes earlier).

The show was definitely a highlight for me personally, because we managed to get a lot of people partying, which is not something you can expect at a big festival venue like this where people walk in and out or are just waiting for the next band. I surely didn’t expect a big moshpit (even with girls in it!) … :)

I got pretty scared 4-5 songs before the end, when my in-ear headphone fell out of my right ear while I was standing right next to a side-fill (one of the huge speakers that are directed to the stage). It totally fucked up my balance and made me feel like I was about to puke. So for the last 4 songs I was literally just trying to not fall down and somehow make it through the show. Luckily I had a group of total pros with me so Daniel, Joe and Marco picked up the energy and kept firing up the crowd and we finished the gig without me fucking it up for everyone.

Thanks to everyone who came out to party with us and make this the biggest show in FH history so far! I was really, really happy about the reaction we got! :)

A huuuuge “THANK YOU!” to the person who found my molded in-ear plug at the afterparty club and gave it to someone of our touring party! I owe you!!!!