Samsara Blues Experiment @ Eightball Club & Live Stage
The term Samsara is derived from “to flow together,” to go or pass through states, to wander. Mostly a great revolving door between life and death and a new life reincarnated cycle of life. SAMSARA BLUES EXPERIMENT are a Berlin based band, founded in Summer 2007 by leadguitarist/singer Christian Peters.
They went through several changes in the first period but are in constant line-up since September 2008 featuring Hans Eiselt (guitar), drummer Thomas Vedder and Richard Behrens (bass). As the band name implies three elemental aspects are to notice – the blues as the fundament where it all comes from, the inclusion of spiritual influences accompanied by Indian/raga music and the experimental approach to mix up varied elements in a convincing manner.
The band’s songs are dominated by a playful dual guitar work as well as a passionate blend of heavy psych, stoner and space rock. This is provided with several nuances and transitions in between – quite retro styled, jamming, even sometimes worked out with a repetitive hypnotic touch in the tradition of krautrock.
The band produced two appetizer EP’s and intensively toured Europe as well as the US-Westcoast in order to reach for the appropriate condition to record a full album. World In Sound released the long awaited debut ‘Long Distance Trip’ in March 2010 which finally offers the band’s potential.
SAMSARA BLUES EXPERIMENT are a demanded live band in the meanwhile and participate at many European festivals, Roadburn, Yellowstock and Burg Herzberg to name a few.
The Twilight Sad are an indie rock band from Kilsyth, Scotland, comprising James Graham (vocals), Andy MacFarlane (guitar), and Mark Devine (drums). The band are currently signed to Fat Cat Records and have released three full-length albums, as well as several EPs and singles. Their 2007 debut album, Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters, drew widespread acclaim from critics, who noted Graham’s thick Scottish accent and MacFarlane’s dense sonic walls of shoegazing guitar and wheezing accordion. The Twilight Sad’s notoriously loud live performances have been described as “completely ear-splitting,” and the band toured for the album across Europe and the United States throughout 2007 and 2008. Sessions inspired by stripped-down and reworked live performances yielded the 2008 mini-album, Here, It Never Snowed. Afterwards It Did.
Their second album, Forget the Night Ahead, marked a shift in the band’s direction; lyrically more personal and musically darker and more streamlined, it was released in 2009 to further acclaim. Recording sessions for the album also produced the mid-2010 release The Wrong Car, which followed the departure of founding bassist Craig Orzel in February 2010. The Twilight Sad’s third album, No One Can Ever Know, was released in February 2012 and marked another stylistic shift, with the band citing industrial music and krautrock influences for a darker, sparser sound. The band describes their sound as “folk with layers of noise,”[6] and music critics have described the band as “perennially unhappy” and “a band that inject some real emotion and dynamic excitement into a comparatively standard template.”
HELLISH ROCK TOUR PART II / HELLOWEEN-GAMMA RAY- SHADOWSIDE
The Hellish Rock Tour in 2007/2008 featured HELLOWEEN and their very special guests GAMMA RAY, which played 95 shows in 34 countries and left ecstatic metal fans in Europe, Asia, North and Latin America in their wake. Hellish Rock Tour Part II has been announced and will start in February 2013 in Europe and go around the globe, once again featuring Gamma Ray.
Tickets Presale:
Ticket House | 102 Mitropoleos, +30 2310 264880
Tickets Prices:
Unemployed: 23€
Early Presale: 28€
Late Presale & Door: 33 €
Gavlyn (born 1993) is an American rapper from Los Angeles, who records for Broken Complex Records. Her music is inspired by old school 1970’s funk and spoken word. She is also a member of Organized Threat, a platform to allow young poets, rappers and artists to reach out to an audience. She released her first album, From The Art, in October 2012.
Ensemble Economique is Brian Pyle of Starving Weirdos and RV Paintings. His solo project (hence the slightly ironic moniker) has released various albums, splits and EPs on labels such as Digitalis, Amish, Not Not Fun, Dekorder and Clan Destine so far, before joining forces with Denovali Records in 2012.
Exploiting the freedom of isolation, Brian utilizes found sounds, field recordings, and musical performance that he later meticulously edits, layers, and loops in the studio. The effects of these processes are dramatic, cinematic and conceptually rigorous and this recording evidences Pyle as an important new composer emerging out of the long and storied tradition of West Coast experimentalism. Pyle’s practice involves a dense approach to composition akin to assemblage, but unlike electronic and laptop composition, Pyle’s studio work aims to re-establish an organicism associated with live (or, in the case of the field recordings, lived) performance that pushes the studio out into nature and nature into the studio. The result is a seamless, cinematic tapestry of beauty, filled to the brim with cacophonous melodies, meditative auditory chants, & hypnotic shambolic rhythms. This is dense music that begs for deeper inspection. Each space, each note carefully chosen and etched into glass. Ensemble Economqiue is music for the darkest nights, the pinkest mornings, and everything in between. This is vivid, haunting music that leaves a trail of gold in its wake. Thus it is no surprise that Brian’s releases so far have triggered a lot of attention and have received extremly positive feedback:
“Pyle is very good at blurring the origins of his sounds just enough so that his music does the only thing that really matters with music that aspires to mind-altering status – it evokes a palpable sense of the unknown.” Dusted Magazine
“Pyle doesn’t need much more than a solid rhythm and a brooding chord progression to create a memsmerizing piece, as his greatest talent lies in masterfully tweaking everything in the periphery.To his credit, Brian is varied enough in his approach to avoid ever seeming formulaic or predictable–it is a definite that the songs here will start off good and end even better, but it is still always compelling to hear how he gets there.” Brainwashed
“Undeniably beautiful but at the same time painfully unsettling, serving as a reminder that we’ll never know if we’re still here in only seven minutes’ time.” No Fear Of Pop
In 2012, Brian started to extensively tour with his solo project, and now has over 40 shows in Europe and the United States under his belt.
Yianneis were born into the music world in 2009 in riotous Athens, GR. Since then we keep making a fuss, a habit we grew from the very first concert and we’ll never give up. After all, we are not only six professionally trained musicians, we are also performers who love to challenge our audiences in a way that they love to talk about later on. To listen to samples of our music, you’re at the right place. It ranges from indie rock and art pop to folk and electro… oh yes, fun it is!
Our avant-garde live show is part concert, part theatrical performance. We combine the precision of a classical orchestra with the creative chaos of any original punk band. What happens on stage appears to be utterly spontaneous, yet it has been built after long hours of rehearsals, conducted in theatrical terms. The audience also plays an important role as we constantly question the limits between the stage and the people. Let us play any time, in front of any kind of crowd, big or small. We make a party that is enthusiastically discussed afterwards.
The Beetroot Design Group and the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art present the three-dimensional sculptures exhibition “The Greek Monsters”, featuring the Minotaur, the Cyclops, the Stymphalian birds and the rest of the bizarre creatures that haunted heroes’ deeds in ancient Greek mythology.
The exhibition consists of installations, sculptures, figurines, stencil graffiti (resembling a contemporary frieze), but also “invisible” monsters that can be perceived only with the use of audio–visual technology. All exhibits are inspired by the vivid ancient Greek mythology and are designed in a neo-black-figured style, especially developed by Beetroot. Next to each exhibit -instead of the typical information tag about the monster’s history and origin or the artefact’s make- a text cites an original poem on the design philosophy or practice the exhibit stands for.
On the October 8th 2011, Beetroot was awarded with the red dot communication design award as the Agency of the Year for 2011. The prestigious prize was awarded for the first time in its history to an agency based in any other place than Germany. As part of its celebrated victory, Beetroot was asked to design an exhibition that would be the main event of the red dot communication design awards exhibition 2011. The “Greek Monsters” were thus created and presented to the public in two highly successful exhibitions, first in Berlin and then in the Benaki Museum, Athens (April-June 2012).
The idea stemmed from the book The misunderstood monsters of Greek Mythology by Anastasia Tentokali, where the original myths are coupled by the monsters’ own version of their story. Beetroot created the “Greek Monsters” as a humorous response to the current ill socio-economical image of modern Greece, as this is largely presented in the media around the globe, while presenting key philosophical stands and practices in design. The Greek Monsters are used with their dual meaning both as perpetrators and victims, and ultimately as contemporary symbols against racism, generalization and exclusion. In a time where Greece is arguably Europe’s new “Monster”, Beetroot accepts this “label” but only to reverse (or even add to) its meaning: Beetroot’s Greek Monsters aim at re-inventing and re-introducing a Greek creative identity that is both timeless and global.
Chinawoman’s latest single, To Be With Others (2012), marks her first release since her move from Toronto to Berlin just over a year ago, and continues in the sultry, emotional and matter-of-fact style established in her two full-length albums. Driven by a subterranean beat, dark synths, and signature deep vocals, the new single comes paired with a music video atypically featuring the songwriter herself, in black and white, delivering the monologue in an East-Berlin motel.
Tragicomic, melody-driven, sentimental and suspended in a shadowy glamour, Chinawoman’s songs “manoeuvre between grandiose retro motifs and a surprising sincerity” (music.com.ua). Her debut album, Party Girl (2007), by some fateful unknown hand was delivered to the land of her forefathers, and her music can now be heard blaring regularly from the yachts of Russian billionaires, elitist Lithuanian tea parties, Moscow fashion runways and the ringtones of mothers all over the Ukraine.
Raised in the Russian hood of Toronto, the daughter of a Kirov ballerina and an engineer from Leningrad grew up listening to her parents’ collection of Soviet and 70’s European records. Her second album Show Me The Face (2010), indulged towards classical European balladry, making clear the foundations of her style. Decadent, dramatic and earnest, melodies remain simple but precise, vintage keyboards and synth strings offer the solitary rendition of a grand experience, and the voice always upfront delivers motifs familiar yet impossible to pinpoint from the great soup of European chanson. A genre based partly on elements of melody and style, but moreso, a signature fatalistcelebratory approach to songwriting.
Chinawoman has drawn comparisons to Nico and Leonard Cohen, Soviet era singing stars such as early Alla Pugacheva, with a voice akin to Tanita Tikaram. Her move to Berlin marked a major turning point for Chinawoman as a live act, from playing smaller shows in Toronto to regularly selling out concerts of 400-800 guests in cities like Istanbul, Bucharest, Belgrade and Moscow. Having signed with Berlin-based agency Moutique (Do Make Say Think, The Hidden Cameras, Death Cab For Cutie), 2011 became her first major touring year and began the evolution from a bedroom recording project to fulfilling concert requests by enthusiastic European listeners. The 2011 Seeking Russian Bride Tour was followed by supporting Patrick Wolf’s European dates, and found her listenership expanding west with dates in Italy, Greece, Turkey and The Netherlands.
Resistance to the charming magic of Chinawoman is in vain… she doesn’t resemble anyone living and is so remote from the world that one desires to believe recklessly: she exists. – Felix Sandalov, writer for Billboard Magazine
Her music evokes images of Soviet Ballrooms of the 80s and Douglas Sirk melodramas, and she’s been compared to Leonard Cohen, Nico, and Angelo Badalamenti. But for all the grandiosity, you wouldn’t expect that both her albums were produced and recorded in her bedroom. – Stil in Berlin
Mysterious, twisted and lush. – Kevin Hegge, Now Magazine
From the first note unceremoniously grabs the soul—that same melancholy that always finds resonance in the Russian heart—and never lets go. —Andrei Buharin (4 stars) Rolling Stone
Sabaton in the “Swedish Empire Tour” @ Principal Club Theater
Sabaton is a Grammis-nominated power metal band from Falun, Sweden formed in 1999. The band’s main lyrical themes are those of historical wars. This is heard in albums Primo Victoria, Attero Dominatus and Coat of Arms where all of the songs, except final tracks, take inspiration from historical battles or war. Lyrical content drawn from World War I, World War II and other conflicts is prevalent and includes songs about battles and leaders on all sides of said conflicts.
Sabaton is:
Robban Bäck – Drums
Joakim Brodén – Lead Vocals
Pär Sundström – Bass
Thobbe Englund – Lead Guitar
Chris Rörland – Lead Guitar
Plastic Flowers is a spacepop duo formed in January 2009 by George Samaras and currently based between Birmingham (UK) and Thessaloniki (GR). His ever growing love for ambient music led to composing and home-recording, using guitars, synthesizers, drum machines and found objects.
The band now consists of G. Sam (lead vocals, guitars, keyboards, sampling) and T. Charisis (drums, percussion, programming) and so far they have released two EP albums and three singles. A 7″ vinyl EP is coming out next February through Manic Pop Records.
