Synth.nl visits Electronic Circus 2011

Last weekend I visited the Electronic Circus Festival (EC) in Gutersloh Germany. I went there this time together with fellow musician and friend Remy Stroomer. Every year the EC team organizes a nice pre-festival dinner with the artists and we decided to go there this year as well, so we already arrived on Friday. We had a very nice dinner at a Greek restaurant were I met some familiar faces but also some new ones. Next to the EC team (Hans Herman Hess in the picture with me on the left) I had some time to talk Glenn Main Hendriksen, Bernard Poulard and Steen Chorchendorff Jørgensen. After the dinner I went to a small pub together with Remy Stroomer and we concluded this nice evening.

The next day we went to the circus early and we arrived about the same time as Ron Boots from Groove Unlimited. We helped Ron unloading all his stuff and started to build up the stall from where both Groove and myself sold CD's during the day. In the picture you see Ron in the middle, his wife Monique on the left and myself on the Right. When the stall was ready I had the pleasure to meet Michel Huygen who is also known as Neuronium. We had some very nice talks during the day and we are still in touch even after the festival now. It is always great to meet a lot of interesting people during a day like this. Also Gandalf was present and I did meet him, but there was not much time to talk for me. Later on the day I agreed to play a little video I made for the promotion of my album and I wanted to test this on the beamer that the Wave World guys brought a long.

It was nice to meet these guys as well and the funny thing is that Gert van Santen actually lives a few hundred meters from my house and I met him there for the first time. I had a lot of trouble to get the beamer working and in the end it turned out that the HDMI cable was broken. Luckily the Wave World guys brought their own cable and we could fix it. Glenn Main Hendriksen didn't have anything with him with HDMI though so we agreed that I would play his video and backing track from my notebook. He gave a great concert I think and luckily my notebook didn't give any trouble. I must admit that I was quite nervous for that. I also saw part of the Wave World concert later on. Great to see how these guys go all the way with costumes and make-up and everything. Great show.

Then it was time for my video. Unfortunately the timing was not great for that. People already had to wait a long time before the Picture Palace Music concert was starting. Also they build up a big modular wall in front of the screen. Ah well. I was happy that it played and I hope someone will look up my album because of it. I even did sell some CD's after the concerts were over which is quite unusual. I will play it again at the E-live festival on a better moment I hope. But the disaster stroke for me. I agreed with Thorsten Quaeschning to start their video on the laptop that was next to mine. And then something awful happened. After switching over the HDMI cable to their laptop, it all looked fine, but when I pressed play after Thorsten did his count down the video player just crashed and the video froze. :( I felt very bad at the moment, but we just could't get it to work anymore. We rebooted the notebook and there was even a password on there. Luckily Thorsten was cool about it and came down from the podium to fix it himself and they just played on like nothing happened. So this last hour was a bit stressful for me to be honest. Luckily the concert was great and there was an after party with some beers to relax again.

All in all I had a really great day. Thanks a lot to everyone involved in the organization of this marvelous event and to all the nice people I talked to during both the dinner and the event itself. It is surely a day to remember. Too bad these days always fly by. I'll be back for sure next year! Now I'm looking forward to the E-live festival on the 15th of October! Maybe I'll see you there?