Smooth Sailing at SHIP, Riding High on Waves: Our September Recap

© Valerio Baranović

September was one of those months: totally crazy on so many levels.

We had a songwriting camp, played two showcase festivals, a coffee festival, a protest and ... a treehouse. We released a song exclusively on YouTube and had to deal with the fallout from the Austrian elections. I think we’ll need the rest of the year to recover ...

In this edition, we want to give you a glimpse behind the scenes of our ridiculous month, and share some things you don’t get to see on social media 😉

Waves Festival

Our first adventure of the month was at the Waves festival in Vienna. Playing there was a goal of ours at the beginning of the year, so this was a big one!

© Peter Romano Horn

Playing a showcase festival is a difficult thing for a band.

You don’t know who is going to show up, especially with so many other great bands playing, often at the same time as you.

The crowd is a mixture of music professionals and music fans, most of whom will never have heard of you. Also: The professionals are not there to dance – they are there to analyse.

It sometimes feels like half your audience looks like this:

But we don’t let that bother us!

Our job is to give the best damn show we can – and we did! Our manager Paulina also did an outstanding job of bringing people to the show and we ended up with a full house!

We had a fantastic time at Waves. Big shout out to the crew and all the people who helped us out on the day.

First crazy thing of the month – check!

Coffee Festival

Next stop: The coffee festival at Marx Halle.

This was technically Part 2 of our Waves adventure, as Paulina managed to get us a slot playing a short acoustic set for some of the music professionals doing a tour of Vienna.

We switched up the set and several members of the band changed instruments. Dan to acoustic guitar, Philipp to cajon and Ralf to the lap steel guitar:

Once again, we were really well looked after and had a lot of fun playing our songs in a slightly different way for a highly-caffeinated audience 😀

Second crazy thing – done!

SHIP Festival

This was one of our biggest ever adventures  – a showcase festival in the beautiful seaside town of Šibenik. SHIP is the only showcase festival in Croatia and this was it’s second year.

All we can say is – wow. What a place for a festival!

© Valerio Baranović

However: When you are lucky enough to travel internationally to play music, there is always so much to figure out logistically and financially …

How do we get there? Train, car, our famous tour bus Joe? How do we get the instruments there? Where do we stay? How much money will it cost us? Will Dan be allowed back in the country?

This is where having a great team makes such a difference, and we are so grateful for that.

Our manager Paulina was by our side as always, along with Pati from Feber Wolle Records who very kindly drove us in his van. We also had our sound engineer Myron and a brand new drummer Stefan.

(Don’t worry, Philipp is like a bad smell and won’t go away, he just couldn’t make this particular gig).

Our show was in a fortress. Yep -  a goddam fortress!

Such a stunning location for a concert, and once again, we were treated so well by everybody at the festival. We connected with a lot of people from the industry and had an absolute blast (particularly once Ralf found the restaurant which served unlimited Croatian schnapps).

© Valerio Baranović

We were terrified of returning home to Vienna as we were travelling back during the height of the rain and floods which hit Austria in mid-September. However, 9 hours later, we had made it back safely with only a minor detour to avoid the flooded motorway (!).

Third crazy thing – done! 

Other crazy things in summary

If you haven’t yet, please take a listen to our protest song “Widerstand” which is available only on YouTube. We hope it helps you overcome the terrible election results …

We played the demonstration against the far right on the Thursday before the elections, which was a very empowering experience and our first ever performance at a protest.

Remember the treehouse from the first paragraph?

More about that next month – we’ll be there for a band retreat in October and don’t want to spoil the surprise 😊

A goodbye, but not for long...

Thanks so much for reading and for your interest in us as a band and our music. We really appreciate you took the time and hope you had fun with the extra content!

Lots of love,

ERNST 💗💛💜