rise & set

"oh what a difference / a day...makes"

and on as the song goes...

after our friday night semi-disaster, and with some perspective on the whole affair, saturday evening blossomed into a magical night. our show took place in Karow, a wagenburg just outside of berlin. a wagenburg, as i'm told and as it appears, is a rural mini-village of people living in wagons...kind of a romanticized nature-filled european style trailer park, but minus all of the offensive americanisms and instead filled with hidden pathways, hanging lanterns, quiet bonfires, trees, dogs, candles, and music. not quite this.

we set-up in the back of raised truck, doors swung wide open and, inside, a dj booth and behind the decks, almost a record store's worth of vinyl! crazy records. to the left of the stage/truck thing, was a rigging and a trapeze and before the music got to raucous, a woman did a great trapeze acrobat piece to some swanky 40s cabaret music. after that, the djs got down to business with a bumpin' mix of baile funk, dancehall, hip-hop and reggaeton. hot.

we slugged back a couple of big becks bottles and prepped our gear. the sound system was a bit overloaded with our technicals but when we started our set, lots of excited and wide-eyed volks assembled around the truck to see what we were going to hit 'em with. it was a more fluid & psychedelic set than we've played but it seemed appropriate for the party...there were a few anti-anglo kids around the campfire who hollered a bit at us during the set, which was fun/ny, but most of the peoples were really into it. much dancing + lengthy attention spans. they stayed with us! haha. i like that.

so, us cancons + a few all-night berliners, stayed amidst the fracas after the no-1 set and danced til dawn to the ever-shifting array of musical selections. the music got more fun and crazy as they night progressed and by 5:00am sunrise we revelers were crashing about, shouting, raving (no not that kind, kids), & generally gettin' hella crazy spinning round to an amazing mix of gypsy folk and surf rock! there were lots of handclaps.

just behind the dance floor, the wagenburg opens up onto a massive field...and it was so beautiful to watch the sun stream out across the open space...

we drove home hungry, rambling sleepily about how tasty it would be to have a big ol' fashioned n.american breakfast (even pregnant mama lia was craving hashbrowns!) - but really being too sleepy to follow through on the dream...so all we ate were dreams.

sunday was mellow yellow. we hit the best weekly flea market in town - the boxhagener platz - for some strangely incoherent busking + t&n set up shop to sell their wares. folks convened by mid-afternoon and we broke from our semi-busking set-up for a delicious veggies & halloumi lunch break.

afternoon swooned into evening and the crew dissembled for various spots of downtime. i made it down to a pub round the corner to catch the last of the portugal v. netherlands match...mit ein grosse pint o' hefeweizen, mr johnny was a happy valentine.

yesterday came and went by the side of the canal, writing to a few beats with ben, and drifting around kreuzberg watching clouds. the fusion festival is a few days away and excitement is growing...should be crazy.

morning soundtrack: cat power "speaking for trees".

love johnny

ps- just found out that i'm doing 2 x more fun shows post-fusion....july 7th w/ jason forrest and july 8th opening for DJ Vadim's latest project OneSelf! (if we collaborated, would our project have to be called no-1self??) check out the deets at www.myspace.com/no1music

well, there's always got to be one

last year it was the DC laser light show in brighton and this year it was johnny v & rupix at ye grand olde Kick32. our show last night, postponed from last week due to thunderstormy weather at the outdoor venue, sounded promising enough, as we were to play with popular Berlin DJ/MC duo Smith & Smart. fair enough. we said we'd be happy to open for them, but they wanted to play first. fair enough. whatever football match was on last night was a 9:00 start, as they have been so far, so any music and performances have to start post-fussball. also fair enough. well....we didn't really know what we were getting ourselves into with this one. en route to the spot, near the massive commercial circle of potsdamer platz and the sony centre, we took a wrong turn that shot us through a hauptbahnhof (not sure what that means) and travelled down a tunnel for waaaaaay too long. we were spat out on the other end of the city and had to reorient ourselves for a bit before we could right our way round and take the tunnel the opposite way back (we did manage to get a funny bit of video of this misadventure, though, so when i get it from rup, i'll post it up).

klar,

so a few missed streets and turns into oncoming traffic later, we finally made it to the 'venue'. no stage. fine. a bonfire. fine. random bar/pizza joint. also fine. decent PA appropriated by S&S as soon as the 9pm game ended. fine too. a few randoms huddling round the bonfire of old scrap wood. whatever...sure, fine. only thing is, S&S played a crazy ass long set - almost an hour and a half of old breakbeats and other hip-hop instrumentals and amazingly terrible 90s dance/rock/electro tunes, most of which were laced with the relatively mediocre rap freestylings of some random boys who'd been hanging about. not so fine. i'm all for promoting the joys & health benefits of good rap music and everything... but after an hour of freestyled non-content, things were seeming a bit tired. the event organizers didn't of course realize that our deal is not just yer typical dj + mc set-up and when we mentioned words like laptops, vocal efx, and keyboards...they loooked a bit bewildered and worried. ok, then. so now what? they suggestion was that we shouldn't stop the music because people would leave...but by then it was nearing 1am and me and mr r weren't exactly feelin so enthusiastic about doing our own exclusively freestyled set over some boring instrumentals. well, shit, don't you know it. that's exactly what happened.

yup. pointless to go and get all of our gear together for a non-existent audience at too late an hour in the night, when our music would be too closely bookended by chemical brothers' block rocking & les breakbeat annoyances of the prodigy (yes, those chemical brothers and that prodigy). so instead i brought up my trust panasonic compact disc player (the latest in great portable audio technology), and we played a few choons and did some rappings. our mad freestylin' friend amewu showed up to rock the mic for a bit, which is always fresh, but he cornered me into freestyling over a cd of grime beats that he'd brought. let's just say, that it's bit harder rhyming over a beat that's this fast instead of something at more my pace. when your heart ain't in it, there's not much dopeness to be had or found. but we put in our best effort, given the now dwindling fire and dwindling deutsch hip-hop kids and apres-football commercial crowd. with an ironic wink to the towering mercedes logo behind the stage, we made a quick exit. here's hoping tonight's outdoor show has a bonfire with a bit more life to it.

soundtrack: exclusive dance mixes of all yer favourite 90s hits! wow! featuring songs by snap! the chemical brothers! the prodigy! the beastie boys! dr dre! eminem! nirvana! black box! and more! Bonfire Hits Vol. 923 is in stores now! don't mizzzzzzzzz it.........

love johnny

ps- don't let the celebratory slide show (above) fool you.

the inevitable mid-tour recap

i think i've got some catching up to do. it's friday, june 23rd, two days post-solstice, and Berlin is still as hot as when we got here. that's meant consecutive 30 degree humid scorchers that leave the body feeling fatigued by day's end...plus i've been out and around the city all days and most nights, returning to a bright-pillowed sleep just in time for the sun's morning ascension, often waking mid-morning with sun spotted dreams, sliding out of my wild and strangely roaming subconscious to the sounds of smarts cars huming over the cobblestones.

hamburg

hamburg: we were supposed to play last friday night at an outdoor venue but thundershowers descended on the city and washed away our chances of playing. incidentally, that gig is now happening tonight at the kulturforum. so with show post-poned and an open weekend ahead, i took ben's offer to join his band on a weekend excursion to hamburg. it's been a while since i've travelled with a whole vanloadofbandboys but it's just the same in deustchland as it is in canada. i hardly needed german fluency to keep up with the bad jokes, word games, and endless hours of playful insults between band members. we hit the autobahn in a Highway Tiger and made the several hour trek to hamburg. on the way, however, we made a quick and amazing detour to visit ohrbooten's guitar player, matze's grandmother in the tiny town of Wittenburg. you've got to love a successful pop reggae band of boys that still finds time, en route to festival gigs, to pay a spontaneous visit to a tiny, gentle soul of an 83 year old woman. matze's grandmother and 87 year old grandpa (who was off on his daily morning bicycle ride!) have lived in the same house for 47 years. the tour van pulled in next to their miniature dwelling, overgrown with tons of flowers, a vegetable garden, huge cherry trees overhanging the house heavy with green fruit, and a back garden with chickens. the rooster even started his cockadoodling upon our arrival. matze's g-ma was so surprised to see us and so thankful to have a bunch of young gents pay her a visit. she was especially impressed by ben...i mean, he is the *singer* afterall, and insisted that we stay for coffee and that we just had to return again in a few weeks so that the cherries could be ripe for our next visit. so sweet!


got to hamburg, a port town filled with loading docks, shipyards, cranes, seafood and no buildings higher than four floors. i walked around the port with tilman (ohrbooten sound man & hip-hop beat producer, but more on that later), while the band had a meeting with their booking manager: a quintessential über-german rocker with the requisite 5 piercings in each ear, hands heavy with rings, full arm tattoos, white blonde hair, piercing azure eyes, and beautifully tailored pinstripe trousers, shirt and slick italian leather boots. running around in an abandoned warehouse, he could almost have been a nexus 6. the ohrbooten rocked a street festival mainstage (kinda like this) in a massively entertaining & headlining performance that had every age group there dancing and singing along to every tune. johnny v. was kindly invited up to join in the proceedings midway through and i rapped a few freestyle bars to an appreciative and raucous, if uncomprehending (!), crowd of hamburgers. sunday morning we re-assembled the troops and spent a few sunny afternoon hours busking and playing to outdoor cafe audiences willing to be distracted from the world cup for a few minutes (but only a few!) by our/ohr spontaneous reggae and hip-hop serenades. many new ohrbooten fans were made. soundtrack (special tourbus edition): digable planets 'reachin', the cat empire, and some german instrumental rock (unknown mixes, artists, and years).

ohrbooten - the film: returned to berlin just in time to haul gear back into the old psychiatric hospital / military institution that houses the ohrbooten's rehearsal space (the building is filled with bands jam spots, most of whom are riotous death metal groups who stay up all night jamming on one riff for 12 hours) and then we zoomed straight on to ole's house where friends and fans were gathering to watch ole's recently completed doc film on...who else...die ohrbooten. ole's girlfriend julia cooked up amazing malaysian food for the party and we revellers settled in for 80 mins of ohrbooten backstage magic. now having spent 2 days straight surrounded on all sides by german langauge speakers, i was feeling like i was getting the hang of all this deutsch stuff, well and also feeling like i had no idea what the hell was going on. needless to say, the film was fun and funny but most of its linguistic subtleties were lost on the CanCon kids in attendance. the post-screening acoustic jams lasted well into the night (again) and the weekend was complete. soundtrack: hmm...guess what- ohrbooten.

foto shock

foto-shop: the tiniest venue in berlin. a 3 metre square room. a ladder to ascend to the '2nd floor' gallery, and a small window in the front wherein mr rup and yours truly, j.valentine, were stationed to perform for the assembling masses. it was a blindingly hot day/night and i'm glad we decided on white outfits. haha. it was a vernissage for a group photo exhibit and peeps rumbled around the tiny room bumping into walls and each other and squeezing their way up and down the few-runged ladder. r & i somehow managed to squish into the window space and set-up to rock le party. it was so hot in there that the party peeps took to the street, so we inverted our flows and spun round to play out to the street, through the window. it was a really fun show, lots of yelling and screaming and folks hollering at us (just the way we like it thank you very much) and it was funny rapping from inside our little glass cage. the best part, as it always seems to be, was the post-set freestyle session in which we incorporated a long list of words stuck on the glass (check the pic...closely) that we had to read backwards, in german, and throw into our flows mid-thought! damn. that was a crowd pleaser.

tired, sweaty, happy, all in white...we bid 'em a warm farewell und g'night. soundtrack: ben's mom's car's busted radio speakers that have so much distortion on them that even an acoustic folk song sounds like it has the hugest lowest end sound system frapping the speakers and rattling the entire car's interior...

wings of coincidence

Lia and I had a roaming long conversation on Saturday afternoon which led, in a roundabout way, to the Siegessaulle - a romantic icon of the city's magic and a centrepoint monument in the heart of Berlin that is surrounded by the lush green of the Tiergarten on all sides. I don't even remember the historical significance of the statue anymore, but it has been permanently etched in my own romantic consciousness by Wim Wenders' beautiful film Wings of Desire.


So here's the thing.

As it turns out, Lia has never seen the film. In and of itself this ain't much but, given that she was in the film, it's pretty crazy! I just learned that Lia's mom is an accomplished Germany actress and that she had a part in Wings of Desire. And, as a result, so did Lia.

There's a scene in the film where one of the characters decides to give up being an angel in order to become human. He crashes to the earth and is found, lying in the street, by bunch of young girls who ask him what he's doing there. Kind of reminds me of this...a bit.

Well, one of the girls who finds the fallen angel is a 10 year old Lia. Pretty amazing.

This tiny little globe of ours is ever shrinking in fascinating ways...

J.V.

berlin is hot

...30 degrees hot. so hot. summer arrived with us hot. i stayed up for a full 24 hr cycle travelling here and played a show the night i arrived. ausland is a tiny sub-basement concrete spot in the uber-hip hood of prenzlauer berg. we played there last summer with the DC crew. this year, however, i didn't count on having the berlin no-1 debut coincide with the mammoth opening of the World Cup. driving around the sweltering town with ben, i began to see just how mad the town already is with fussball fever. every and any available locale with beer in a fridge and electricity to connect a tv was filled to capacity with football watchers...and interestingly there are signs of resurgent german nationalism as kids run rampant with painted deutschland-flagged faces and flags hang out of windows everywhere...needless to say, with germany participating in the opening match, the turnout for our gig was somewhat...shall we say...understated...

it was kind of funny that, given our happenstance hook-up with vancouverite band Inhabitants, and the near simultaneous arrival of the extended canadian commercial drive contigent comprised of rup & alison + tarran & nayana...the cancon percentage at the gig was high. our friends ben & (a beautifully plump 4+ months pregnant) lia gathered their troops to support too, so it was an enthusiastic, if smallish, crowd/crew...and mostly it was just cool to see everyone in the same city and to connect with these berlin kids again.

i was on my last legs by the time inhabitants finished their set, but the no-1 must go on...and i braved my fast fading energy and travel fatigue to rock it out with mr rup at my side. my voice was almost gone by mid-set - a combination of tiredness & overextended enthusiasm - but we made it through creaking & cracking our way to a 3:30am finish.

slept a full night's rest, even as the sun roasted my bed through saturday morning. woke to midday rays and radiating heat. and felt rested. zero jet lag. i've been looking over my shoulder since - expecting it sneak up and steal my daylight hours away - but so far i've escaped its clutches.

saturday morning ben was off with ohrbooten to rock an out of town show, but lia & i headed off to a big busking/street theatre festival going on in kreuzberg over the weekend. saturday was mellow mix of waiting around for people to arrive (or wake up at 6pm...ahem...r&a, t&n) and gradually taking in all of the random and variously talented acts performing at the fest. saturday night finished out with a bizarre and elaborate fire show that was massively attended: 2000+ folks outdoors, standing in a huge semi-circle...but the show itself lacked much of anything other than length and size. note: vancouver fire performers de la nukleus collektif found little to amaze them...if that helps explain thangs.


sunday most of the kids were ready and rested and we all converged at the busking fest for day 2 of input/output. ben got back from his gig and brought most of his band and their portable amplifiers and instruments down to the park. we set up our gear underneath a towering cottonwood tree and assembled an assortment of percussionists, musicians and mcs and hit the rhythmic ground running. people drew round in a big group...and our group included guitars, banjos, drums, raps, didg, melodica, beatboxing, and a whole lotta handclaps. some good freestyle sessions ensued and that's pretty much the way the day played out. we rocked a solid hour that felt like a minute. took a break and retreated to shade. ate, chilled, and set-up in another part of the park to repeat the proceedings as the sun went down. a full day of sun and music on sunday, not to mention a full moon. that's pretty well fine by me.

monday was a true holiday in spirit and essence. phone calls and quick shopping trips arranged vehicles, people, and food for a lake-side daytime picnic. a short stretch of autobahn brought us to the shlachtansee (loosely translated as Slaughter Lake)...a quiet lake barely 20 mins from berlin - and conveniently accesible by yer good ol' local s-bahn train for a paltry 2 euros. with picnic feast in hands, plus the requisite acoustic guitars and slightly torn blankets from that trip to india five summers ago, we staked our claim on a good size patch of sunshine, whereupon tarran (the tailor) set to hand stitching his shorts, while wearing them, and assorted other cancons and berliners slid down the sunshiney slopes for a hot afternoon dip in the aqua. i haven't gone swimming in a lake in years...and it was blissful. almost lost a contact lens in the water though, so slightly less blissful as a result.

what else to do post-picnic, then to climb the high mound of post-ww II rubble that is the Kreuzberg (loosely transl. as the king's mountain...haha), and take in a 3 hour sunset overlooking the entire city. the sounds of the evening's world cup match (Italia vs. Ghana) howled up the mountainside to us from the italian resto down on the bergmannstrasse...and we were becks gold serenaded by two guitar players matze (of the infamous ohrbooten) & a fast fingered kid in a black hat who called himself a guitar pluckin' "pope of speed" on the geetar...funny. he was like that informecial guitar-selling Zorro guy on late night...who's that guy? oh yeah....THIS guy. totally like him!

anyway, post-sunset we descended to the italian joint but if was way much loud + toojampackcrowded to make it in so elsewhere we ended up. as it was inhabitants kids last night in berlin, we met up with an absinthe glowing p.schmitt to bid him farewell...and by then it was late late night. sleep called again. it asked me to find it.

soundtrack of the moment: 1 part Blackalicious ("My Pen & Pad") + 2 parts Mos Def/High & Mighty ("B-Boy Document '99") + 1 late night headphone session part Jose Gonzalez ("Heartbeats"...which of all good things, was on the satellite radio on my British Airways flight to London. i had his whole album Veneer playing on repeat across the atlantic, interrupted only by a viewing of Michael Haneke's amazing film "Caché". )

which brings us to

n o w

it be Dienstag in Deutschland. le deuxieme no-1 show is tonight at the 'tiniest venue in berlin' (ha!)...yes...we will rock le petit gallerie d'art contemporain - Foto Shop - tonight at 20:00h for a little group exhibit vernissage. should be fun. rup & i will be the guys in white.

" V.I.P."

foto shop gruppenausstellung
vernissage die. 13.6.2006, 20h

live: - no-1 / montreal /CA ... an outdoor-backstage event!
dj peter grummich + friends

more again soon. je promise.

love johnny

berlin bound

t-minus 4 days and counting...til we arrive in beautiful Berlin. and when do we arrive? well, my friends...

just in time for this, a variation on this, and...um...for this?

ah yes, but our real reason for going is of course to bring some good hip-hop music to deutschland and spend some time with these wonderful people.

i hope you can come und check the first no-1 show in Berlin - this Friday, June 9th at Ausland in Prenzlauer Berg!

it will be a great non-football'in weekend kickoff featuring mr. johnny valentine as no-1, mr. rupinder sidhu as the beatboxbrokenparts masta, and the good good sounds of les garcons du Inhabitants + ooh...maybe a lil' guest feature of twisted folk electron banjo'd sounds by tarran the tailor. look out now! berlin here we come!

check back regularly for photos, pics, and show updates. to hear some choons & check our show itinerary...hit up www.myspace.com/no1music

see y'all soon!
love, mr youknowwho