Antillectual

Tomorrow we will leave for our longest run of shows through Europe. 24 shows in 24 days, going to Hungary for the first time. Our excitement is simply un-expressible. We hope to see you at one of the shows; either our own, or supporting Boysetsfire and Letlive.

Some people have been complaining we don’t do enough shows in our own area. So the last thing we will do before we leave for a while, is announce a coming-back-show in Nijmegen on July 18. Five years after our first official show with Riekus at de-Affaire (aka de Zomerfeesten) in Nijmegen, we will return at de Valkhof again. It’s a free outdoor festival and the weather is gonna be ace (we arranged that too), so no excuses not to show up!

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Last week we returned from a very impressive trip to Russia. We played 7  shows spread out over the western part of Russia. I wrote a little report of the trip, find it here. After the trip we had 2 awesome shows with Iron Chic, for now we have some time off. Tim is doing a solo tour, albeit with a band. Time for Riekus and me to finally get our administration up to date, work on new songs and of course prepare the shit out of our upcoming tour with Boy Sets Fire. We are still looking for shows in Germany on June 8, 12, 17 and 19. Please get in touch if you can help us out! Our next show will be in Harlingen on May 29. In the mean time, check out our new T-shirt design in the webstore.

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This weekend the Groezrock festival will take place in Belgium. Despite the fact that we are not on the official line up (booh!), the 3 of us will be at the festival. We hope to see a lot of friends from all over Europe/the world and have a talk and drink together. Our list of recommendation for this year:

Tim and Willem will play an acoustic set at the Acoustic Punk Meeting at the camping site on Friday night together with Sweet Empire, 7yearsbadluck, Bad Ideas and many many more.

Our friends from Astpai will be playing the MacBeth stage (the one we played last year) on Saturday the 23rd at 13.50h. This stage is backlined by our friends at Just Like Your Mom, Toursupport. Come and support!

The merchandise market will host a lot of our friends:
Typewriter Distro (The Books!)
Shield Recordings (our Benelux label)
Effervescence Records (our French label)
No Reason Records (our Italian label)
I guess you can even buy some of our commodities over there …

In support of the European scene, consider “billboarding” your favorite European band (or us, and we’ll get you a drink!) on your T-shirt at the festival. The Gaslight Anthem and Pennywise don’t need the attention … You can find us wearing Rentokill, In-sane and the Living Daylights shirts.

See you there!

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Our Italian tour is past halfway, we played the most southern show yesterday, in Cosenza. So we are heading north again as we speak. It is great to go to places where we have never been before and where not many foreign bands go on tour. Upside: the people that come to the shows love to see bands from other countries. Downside: the local scenes seem to be smaller than in places where touring bands go all the time.

For this trip Tim, Riekus and I are getting great help from Thomas (who does our merch most of the time) and Kirsten van Etten. Kirsten is a graduating photography student. For her final exam she will be doing a documentary about our tour, including an exhibition where the photos will be shown. I hope the subjects of the photos will not influence the results of her exam, we usually don’t make pictures look good …

While conquering the unconquered in Italy, we are also working on some shows this summer (more on that soon) and getting the tour with Boy Sets Fire together. Added to the line up is LetLive and also a new show in Saarbrucken. Check the shows section for shows and “availables”. See you soon!

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Since we posted that song with Chris Hannah, there’s been quite some buzz around the online punk community. First of all, a lot of great responses ranging from “holy shit” and “awesome” to “why hadn’t I ever heard about this band?” (us, not Propagandhi). Secondly, quite some Propagandhi adepts decided to check out our music. Thanks for that! Besides all that, there’s also been quite some discussion. On our own site, on Propagandhi’s facebook page, on punknews.org and their own podcast.

Feel free to check out the song and an excerpt from the punknews podcast:

The song

The podcast

Anywho, we’re flattered to hear so much discussion about this song going on, and we’d like to clarify some misunderstandings about it’s contents.

This song is partly about skate culture indeed. But the skate culture is an example of (or a metaphor for, if you wish) subculture and counter culture in general, including the punk/hardcore scene. These cultures came into existence because people didn’t feel welcome or didn’t want to participate in mainstream sports or culture. So indeed, this song is about distinction rather than unity. But that can be a good thing! Second; the fact that subcultures partly exist by the grace of gadgets, fashion items and other commodities doesn’t mean that this is desirable nor that subcultures can not exist without them. That’s too easy and fatalist in my opinion. It’s not a given and we can change it if we want.

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