No time to blog - we are leaving for china tomorrow morning.

We just got back from Russia yesterday and our trip went really well. Our first show was at Williams College in Massachusetts. We played ok, a bit sloppy and everything was too fast. That is typical of the first show of a tour.

A student named John drove us from the Albany airport to campus. He had recently spent six months in Ghana. As a chocoholic I grilled him with questions about chocolate. Like why do US companies always get their chocolate from Belgium and Switzerland? It's not like cocoa beans grow there! He said it was purely because of tariffs. A little something they like to call "Free Trade". Tariffs are imposed in such a way that an American company pays something like 4% if they get their chocolate from Belgium but they pay something like 40% if they get it from Ghana. I probably have the numbers wrong but you get the idea. Buying Fair Trade chocolate (whether from Africa or South America) is a way to fight this unfair system. I had a strong feeling suddenly that even when countries struggle for generations with democracy and empowerment and ending their poverty, a country like ours can totally undermine their efforts with a flick of the wrist.

We played a lot better in Helsinki. We had some time there which was nice. We got see more of it than last time. Official languages in Finland are Finnish, Swedish and English. Not exactly the most similar languages. Finnish in particular is almost unrelated to other European languages. And then most people speak one or two more. It was like walking around in a country of geniuses. 

Russia turned out to be really fun. Everyone involved with both festivals we were playing were so friendly and made everything so easy and fun. Moscow was a very strange city. Like Mexico City in that it was so huge that no one could ever see all of it. Very crowded with busy people. Architecture was a mish-mash of tsar era (some Western European looking and some more unusual to me, like onion domes), early Communist era (still looks old but very imposing), later blocky Communist buildings that I expected to see more of, and newer capitalist stuff.

The Moscow building that is shown on American TV the most is of course that amazing cathedral next to the Kremlin. It's smaller than it looks on TV but a hundred times more beautiful. Our friend who was taking us around told me that the Tsar who commissioned it (one of the Ivans) thought it was so beautiful when it was done, that he had the eyes of the Italian architects who made it gouged out, to prevent them from ever making anything else, thus keeping his building to be the most beautiful in the world. Somehow that story chilled me to the bone.  

I dont know if it was just the result of americanization or globalization or what but we felt no cultural distance with Russians at all. Everyone was easy to get along with and most people spoke English. They learn it in school. I never would have guessed. We made lots of friends. Don't understand how our countries could ever have wanted to harm each other. They even had my beloved sunflower seeds there!

And the show (the AVANT Festival) was spectacular. I would never have guessed that many people had heard of us there, but the audience was singing along and going totally nuts. After all the negative descriptions of cold, soulless Russians that I had been fed during my Cold War-era childhood, it was an unforgettable experience to be so warmly welcomed.

We had more time in St. Petersburg. The city looked like it was all built at the same time. I've never seen such a beautifully uniform and undestroyed city, or rather a city where you could walk for so long without seeing any building that wasn't hundreds of years old. 

The festival was called the SKIF festival - one day before we played I discovered that the SK stood for the late Sergey Kuryokhin, a composer who I actually met once when he visited my college in about 1990. 

He came to my music composition class as a guest lecturer. He just sat down and told us to improvise. We all played while he just sat there and said nothing, and we wondered what he was after. It sort of died after an hour or so. At that point he quietly said "That was totally stupid" and the class was over. I thought to myself "this guy takes himself so seriously." Then that night was his concert - "Pop Mechanics". It was the craziest, funniest thing I had ever seen, a string quartet playing quotations from the repertoire, a choir, a rock band, and two cows, all on stage at once. I felt like I really learned something from that bizarre clashing of experiences that day, so it was such an honor to be asked to play this amazing festival created by his widow and dedicated to his memory and nutty aesthetic. We went out for a delicious Georgian dinner with his widow, the founder and organizer of this festival, and she laughed so hard when I told her that story.

The lineup for the festival was completely insane. Every band was different from the next, from different countries, and most of them obscure enough that they had hardly ever played outside their own country. Some of the bands I loved there were the totally unique Pivot (http://www.myspace.com/pivotpivot) from Australia, with whom we'd played in Aus years before and Shogun Kunitoki (http://www.myspace.com/shogunkunitoki) from Helsinki who had just come to our show there a couple days before. 

Stella (http://www.myspace.com/stellatallinn) from Tallinn Estonia completely blew my mind, I'd never seen anything like it. All women in the band except for the guitarist who looked like a young Arvo Part, they did some kind of dance/pop music that is just impossible to describe unless you see them. The singer sang so loud, never stopped dancing or smiling or high-fiving the audience for an hour. 

At about 3 in the morning it was Baaba (http://www.myspace.com/baabapoopemusique) from Poland. The interplay between the four of these guys was just beyond belief. Their improvisation felt like it could go anywhere at all an any time, and in fact it went everywhere. So much musical skill and at the same time such comedy. I couldn't believe my eyes when the drummer Macio set up - his drumkit was identical to mine that day - kick/snare/hihat/ride/cowbell. I felt so related to the way he played, always bending and melting the beat and completely unpredictable. I was congratulating him after the show, when he said he watched Deerhoof earlier in the evening feeling that same uncanny feeling, like we were brothers even though we had never met.