The blog’s industrious co-photographer made it as clear as the light of day that the last and only time he saw Omar Souleyman, at the Electronic Beats festival, was one time too many for him and he’s seen and heard this all at village weddings and wants none of it. And in many ways he…
Barlove: Café Phil Vienna
Borges once said that he always imagined Paradise as a library, and he was right, only you can go one better, and picture it as a coffee house with books, or a bookstore with coffee, depends on how you look at it. And breakfast, because if it’s done right, no matter at what hour, breakfast…
Sunlight through the Snowstorm: Vienna’s Kirche am Steinhof
I have often sung the praise of the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s concert (Neujahrskonzert der Wiener Philharmoniker, a little gratuitous German never hurt anyone), which might seem odd for someone who is otherwise rather unattuned to classical music. Waltzes are however an exception, melodic and lightweight enough for the silly, familiar from Tom and Jerry…
Welcome to the Spring-Summer of our Contentment- A Budapest Concert Calendar
Spending too much time in a corporate environment does many strange things to people, one of them being the fact that you only really trust data which comes in an Excel format, and you only truly respect it if there is a convoluted macro involved. Being myself a victim of this delusion, I decided to…
Unusual Ways- Tricky @ A38
I spare a thought for whoever might have been in the possession of a ticket to Tricky’s sold out A38 gig and happened to be, let’s say skiing in a very remote village in the Alps or holed up in a tropical yoga retreat for the past couple of days or so without a functional…
High Time for Excitement: The First Names of Sziget 2018
The first announcement for Sziget 2018 has been brewing for a long and strange time. It was first slated for mid-December, then postponed rather last minute, which might not have been the best boost for the festival’s credibility in its first full year under the helms of the new management, but at least it gave…
Fickle Snow- A Morning in Városliget
Not only does snow have a smell, but it also has a very particular way of filtering light as it sneaks into the apartment on winter mornings. In all honestly, calling it light might be an overstatement, it is more a state of darkness that is incomplete, an undecided darkness, a confused darkness, a darkness…
January Fog along the Danube
Yesterday, while strolling by the Danube, and seeing, in a first phase frankly nothing, and then an odd shape here and there, it dawned on me that I haven’t written a weather complaint based piece for a long time, and since I consider myself pretty good at this exercise, such failings must be promptly corrected,…
A Smorgasbord of Odd Pleasures – Book Diary January 2018
I have occasionally attempted to immerse myself in the world of classical music more attentively, often after reading a Murakami novel. He has a way of interweaving the plot with melodic themes, not unlike a composer building up a symphony, which makes you feel that you must listen to the piece itself lest you miss…
A Good List Goes a Long Way: 2017 Edition
Musically speaking, 2017 was the year lazy won- namely, I signed up for Spotify and gave up on decades of organizing music on disparate analogue or digital fronts, an activity, which albeit somewhat pleasurable, was also frustratingly time and space consuming. This was also fortuitous from the point of view of list making, since now…