a visitor from Australia

Last wednesday it was too cold. The newspapers in Berlin include a bio wheather warning; most of the time it tells you, that today's wheather can make you sneeze or gives you a high blood pressure: meeting people can have this effect as well. With winter finally ariving, the chance for blasting headaches increased. That I know. And there I found myself waiting in a foyer, where winter was welcomed every two minutes, being the frequency of people walking in and out. It was not the newspaper that started to give me a headache. And thus I missed my appointment with my Australian guest.

This evening I was at Wendel, the venue where on february 4th and february 7th you can hear what an Imaginary Homecoming sounds like. With Martin, one of my big helps in these weeks, I was preparing the CDr, that will become available next monday. On it recordings exclusively made for this release. The Cdr will cost you 25 Euro. The acquisition of it is your ticket to six days of festival. Our Australian guest, well one of them, the other is hunting sounds somewhere in the North of Italy, came in. Easy to recognise because of his tanned face, which made me realise that there is also a world outside the Berlin townwall; one tends to forget.

Rob told about his 6000 kilometer ride from the north to the south of Australia, showed maps on the web, looked for that specific location where he had recorded the wind. He talked about his time out there in regions where hardly a sound was heard, and when there was some, it came out very articulated, as a piece of glass that reflects a ray of sunlight.
Rob is an enchanting racconteur. In five minutes he made me visit aborigin communities, made me listen to their secret language, full of strange clicks. It was dry and sunny, stones and walking around, meeting people in a land with a wide horizon. No, he didn't play any excerpts. Which made me wonder if a concert with only imaginary sounds was possible, sounds that you would hear with your inner ear?

Rob will play his bush sounds on saturday.

programme