Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Dancing with myself. And Atmosphere.

So I went to an Atmosphere concert. For the uninformed, Atmosphere is a renowned underground rap group from Minneapolis. 
They randomly had a concert scheduled in Hamburg. Normally, these shows are sold out months in advance in Minneapolis.  But, in Hamburg it's a different story.  We had no idea Atmosphere was touring, it was a random spotting which led to one great concert. Allow me to explain.
The night Justin came in, we celebrated my birthday and went out to a Greek restaurant in the middle of Schantzee.  Schzntzee is a hot spot of Hamburg. It's where the riots, concerts, and general night life happens.  Hosted by our new neighbor and friend Ale, a kind hearted man with a goofy sense of humor which is exagerated by his endearingly thick rimmed glasses and perfectly manicured ghotee, took us out to a local spot in the middle of the area.  
As we enjoyed German interpretations of classic Greek dishes, a man came by on his accordion.  The custom in Hamburg is people play around you, look to see if you enjoy their music, then ask you for money since you enjoyed it.  A familiar tune was coming from this accordion.  We couldn't put our finger on it and it soon became maddening.  Usually the answer escapes to the back of your mind when you think harder and harder to figure it out, but I got lucky and realized it was the theme song from 'Godfather.'  
So there we were, seated outside under the 8x20 foot awning of green and white stripes.  We beraded Ale with endless questions about Hamburg, what to see, the history, the local spots, and so forth until the food came.  ALong came the food and it was delicious. 
I don't want to get into the details of the meal because it's going to make me hungry for it. Let's skip to the concert.

On our way home through the winding streets, we walked through a concert venue and noticed a few brightly colored fliers on the wall of the open public area.  Here's where the discovery happened.  At the top of the list, in bold, black Helvetica lettering; ATMOSPHERE. To make a long story short, we got excited and danced around a bit. Fast forward a few days and we're at the Atmosphere concert.

Wow. Sorry for all the build up but I'm sure it wasn't too bad.

The concert was epic.  We got tickets the night of.  Literally, as in we went there an hour late because we had night class.
Surprisingly, the place was packed. But tickets were available! 
EVen better yet, I brought my camera and held it high saying "intriudigun, photographer!"  
People at the show were kind and let me pass by them.

Slug, the lead singer of the group, came out in full force and lit up the crowd.  The crowd was vibrant and hung on his every word.  A german native crowd sang along to every english word of every song Slug sang.  It was impressive, and it sounded funny due to their accent. I will give the German dialect credit, it's a pretty beautiful language when spoken fluently.  Arnold Schwarzenegger was my first experience of German and it was all wrong!  Arnold's from Austria where they speak German like Southerners in the USA speak english: obnoxiously. 

Great concert indeed. I was able to muscle my way up to the front and sat on stage while I snapped endless pictures of Slug.  I hate the low lighting of concerts because it's nearly impossible to get a good picture. 10 out of 300 plus pictures I took ended up nice. I'll post them all up later, but for now here's the one I made a project out of for my advertising photography class:



0 comments:

Post a Comment