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 all that mess out. Then on our way to the Ljubljanica we pass by the portrait of old Joze Plečnik, looking all severe in its bronze coldness and frowning brow and clean-cut goatee. Are we in the Balkans or the Mediterranean or Mittel-Europa or a Slavic country? Somewhere on top of a brutalist tower built by architect Ravnikar in the eighties hides the Club CD. The ground floor is an enormous soviet congress centre with seemingly endless corridors and ceremonial halls lit by abstract sculptural brass chandeliers. The show is sold out; a group of ten schoolgirls came from the Slovenian-Italian border near Gorizia, they won tickets by singing a french song at a contest: « le lion est mort ce soir ». Moriarty’s Mitteleuropa tour: Ljubljana, Slovenia, May 8th 2012.
