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Friday/Saturday Feb 22 & 23
The adventure this weekend began with a solo trip to Amsterdam. I went to check out an audio/visual festival called Sonic Acts that Ed had recommended. In particular, the group to see was called Signal. I arrived in time to see two other performances before they began, and they were both quite abstract. The first one was two grey haired guys playing ambient noises on a large collection of hardware while a film recording of a garden played with no apparent change the whole time it played. They must have been good, because there was a large round of applause when they finished. Or maybe people were happy it was over. Either way, the next act was even more out there. Leafcutter John was a long haired guy and his girlfriend from London. They began by squeezing and crackling a water bottle in front of the microphone with a big echo/delay. Then some crazy screaming sounds and later they strummed a slinky with a microphone attached. More applause at the end.
When Signal finally came on, I understood why Ed had told me to go. Although they played what most people would call noise, the squelching, static, banging and lack of notes or tones added up to an incredibly pleasing noise-scape. This was supplementd by black and white, barcode-inspired visuals that were synchronized to the sound. The result was stunning and mesmerizing and everybody was bobbing their heads. Adding to the scene, these three German guys (Signal) wore matching white jackets and two of them were definitely about 50. Totally worth it.
At 11:00, I ran out of there to get in line for Escape, one of Amsterdam’s fanciest clubs. I had tickets to Tiesto. Now normally I wouldn’t go to this kind of DJ, but I’d heard too much good stuff about him to pass up the opportunity. The timing (with Sonic Acts) was perfect. I met up with some Greek girls from my class who I knew were attending too, and we had a blast dancing to the best trance I’ve heard. I don’t love trance, but this was as good as trance gets. Even bigger than the sound was this guy’s ego. Instead of a DJ playing before the big act, they had a huge curtain set up, onto which footage of a big festival that Tiesto had DJ’d at was projected. He was also on the 10 plasma screens that were at the sides of the dancefloor. When the time was right, they dropped the curtain, and there was Tiesto at the turntables, pumping his fist, already in the mix. Quite a show!
I took the train back to Delft at 4am, and fell asleep on the train. The scariest part of it was that when I woke up, the train was going in the opposite direction from when I had fallen asleep. All sorts of thoughts went through my head, but a fellow passenger assured me it was ok. I hadn’t missed my stop, I had just slept through a stop that was a dead end (from which the train had to pull out the other way and continue backwards).
After about five hours of sleep, the adventure continued with a trip to Den Haag. This city sits near the coast, about ten minutes from Delft in the opposite direction from Rotterdam. It is the seat of the government and administrative center of the Netherlands, and the International Court of Justice is based here. Again, it was a group of about eight international students that I went with. We trekked around the city by foot for about five hours in total, taking in the atmosphere of this old center. I had forgotten my camera again
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