Soundcheck: echoes on an empty square like thunder. Antidote: an acoustic concert inside a bookstore, crowded with a few hundred people, kids and teenagers and parents and grandparents. To everyone’s surprise, at the end of the show, a woman named Renée, maybe eighty years old, stands up and sings out loud with charlie on « enjoy the silence ». Outside it’s drizzling rain over Ibrahim...
Skiing on the asphalt. A big circus tent standing by the side of a river, tucked deep in the french countryside. A castle built for a beautiful lady in penitence, in the bedroom a hidden window behind the chimney, from where she peeked into the chapel and secretly attended mass during fifty years. Cold stone walls and cold, moist blankets in the squeaking bed. in the nightly park the din of the...
A gig in central France, in a big barn among donkeys and horses and bales of hay. Last year, just minutes before a famous french singer was about to start his show, a baby donkey was born in the stable behind the stage. The singer rushed on stage and hit his head hard on the door frame. The passage now bears his name.
Moriarty on tour: Festival L’Air du Temps, Lignières (F), May 18th 2012.
Industrial landscape tucked between the Léman and the Valais mountains. Every ten minutes the swooshing and rattling sound of a passing train fills up the room. The place is packed with people coming from higher up in the valleys, Sion and Martigny. And Lausanne too. Around 1a.m., the hôtel des cheminots is dark and silent, a client shouts across the corridor. The music goes on on the balcony...
Driving across the « Rösti divide », from Zürich to Valais, where saxon and latin cultures overlap but don’t always mingle. Moriarty’s Missing Room tour: Switzerland, May 9th 2012.
Rote Fabrik. Rain and half-circle rainbows on the Zürich lake. Rosemary takes a dive but it’s too cold to swim, the water feeling like a million needles piercing into the skin. Nadja Zela opens the show with her beautiful guitar sound and vocals. The swiss-german audience slowly builds up and, unlike what Fritz Zorn might think, they are wild. a young man tells us he hitchhiked all the way...
Flying from Ljubljana to Zürich, above snow-covered peaks and through endless sterile aiport corridors and waiting lounges and duty-free cigarettes. Moriarty on tour, May 2012.
With the great Martin at the wheel we drive smoothly from Vicenza to Palmanova d’Udine and its strange metaphysical hexagon feeling like a sunburnt piazza in southern Spain. At the Slovenian border the carabinieri take twenty minutes to check everyone’s ID, just in case. They have a look at the instruments piled up at the back of the bus but wisely decide they don’t need to take...
Moriarty on tour: first gig in Italy; Basilica Palladiana, Jazz cafe Trivellato, Panic jazz Festival, Vicenza (Italy) 7.5.2012.
Rain showers, Adriatic wind gusts, slavic-italian dialect spoken on the streets, dark dense espressi, sunlit clouds hovering beyond the horizon line and the cargos, somewhere over Italy. Moriarty’s Mitteleuropa tour: Travelling from Ljubljana to Vicenza; stopover in Trieste, Italy, 7.5.2012.
Budapest airport shuttle; a woman came and put her hands underneath rosemary’s back and muttered some secret words to heal it and heat came from her hands. The streets of Budapest, too, radiated blinding sunlight. We reached the A38 ship, an ex-stone carrier cargo moored on the Danube river. The engine room became a backstage for the musicians. In the audience, hungarian, french, spanish...
Moriarty on tour: Budapest-Ljubljana. 6.5.2012.
Palermo, Sicilia, April 15th 2012. Teatro Garibaldi, after having been abandoned for years, is opened and occupied by a collective of 60 artists, protesting against misuse of public funds and deep malfunction of cultural policies in Italy. At midnight, just minutes before they’re supposed to hand over the theater to the authorities, stage director Emma Dante appears in front of the hundreds...
Moriarty on tour, La Rochelle, Théâtre de la Coursive. A walk through the botanical Gardens and the Natural history museum, in the company of Zarafa the Giraffe.
Moriarty on tour in Belgium: Tournai, March 2012. Tall towers of the cathedral, industrial modernism of the Maison de la Culture, reminiscent of londonian architect Goldfinger. « Too much and the white Nots » drove all the way from Brussels to open the show. As we were standing in the middle of a street, shooting a picture of Notre -Dame de Tournai, a black alfa-romeo turned around the corner and...
Somewhere in Paris or in Rome, March 21st 2012. (photo by Zim)
Moriarty playing low-noise concerts for five to ten-year old children…It’s a gray and rainy Sunday, the magic mirror spiegeltent is dwarfed by the titanic void of the Grande Arche. Inside, the little kids are pretty quiet but on the final song they stand up and rush to the edge of the stage and start jumping and dancing like in a moshpit.
Moriarty’s Paris World Tour: final acoustic concert at the Maison du Brésil (Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris), March 15th 2012. The rough concrete building by Le Corbusier & Lucio Costa resonates like a shell and builds up a tropical heat within minutes. Red green yellow black surfaces are dripping with condensed sweat from a hundred and fifty people. Japanese band Ego...
One busy day, acoustic session on the french radio, acoustic concert at the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris, together with fellow band Ego Wrappin’ from Japan. In front of the Théâtre de la Coupole, four travellers are waiting at the door with their huge backpacks… they came from Prague hitchiking for two days to see the show.
Moriarty’s international Paris tour: Maison du Japon, March 13th 2011. An acoustic show for 150 people, featuring special guests Ego Wrappin’ from Tokyo (they’ll cover Rita Mitsouko songs tonight). Grey velvety curtains, goldfoil-gilded frescoes, open spaces in a 1927 building made by a french architect in a japanese manner. Where is the « ma »?