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Roadburn 2011 Adventure Pt. 8: My Mind’s Been Released

3:01AM — Saturday Night/Sunday Morning — Hotel Mercure, Tilburg

I wound up giving up on seeing Shrinebuilder and Ufomammut tonight in favor of Stone Axe and Swans. I don’t know if it was the right decision, and quite frankly, fuck it, I’m through making the right decisions. I’m too tired and I’m too fuck-offy to care what I should be seeing. I made tonight at Roadburn what I wanted it to be, and you can fuck right off if you think I should have been somewhere other than I was.

Pushed my way through to Ramesses in the Green Room when I got back to 013, and no regrets for that, although the space was packed. They were ballsy, they were heavy, they killed, blah blah blah. It was good, and the more I stood there the more I wanted to hear their upcoming album, the promo for which is on my desktop at the office, so I guess mission accomplished. I’m starting to run out of euphemisms for “I liked it.” So fuck it. I liked Ramesses. They were good.

While making my way through the merch area for the umpteenth time this weekend, I ran into the dudes from Stubb, who were on tour with Stone Axe until tonight. I kind of offered to put out their record if they couldn’t find a better deal, so that was something, but more importantly, after shooting the shit for a while, I did the science and decided to see Stone Axe instead of Shrinebuilder. The math was simple and went like this: I’ve seen Shrinebuilder; I haven’t seen Stone Axe. Equation over.

Stone Axe, for what it’s worth, laid rocking waste to the Bat Cave. Theirs was the first set all weekend I’d seen in there, and if it’s the only one — which, since nothing for the Afterburner is booked in there, I guess it will be — it was the right choice. They rocked. And that’s it. I felt like I knew them from listening to the records, but live, Stone Axe is a different beast entirely. Tony Reed killed it on guitar and Dru Brinkerhoff was drunk enough to swipe my beer from the front of the stage before their set even started. It was a rock and roll party, and for a couple minutes, I managed to let go of what a miserable bastard I am, how fucking stressed out I’ve been about work, about school, about this site, all that shit.

It was brief, but for just a bit of Stone Axe, I genuinely didn’t care anymore about any of it. I pulled my earplugs out and let go, and honestly, I don’t think I’ve done that since Neurosis played here in 2009. It didn’t matter that when I get back to Jersey I have a ton of shit to catch up on, or that I spent most of the day wanting to blow my brains out all over the gorgeous Tilburg sidewalk, or that hits are down this month and everyone thinks I give a shit one way or the other what gets posted on the forum when I don’t, or what kind of asshole dwells on this crap anyway when he’s supposed to be having the time of his life: I just rocked out and that was it. I had to travel over 3,600 miles to make that happen.

Like I said, the respite was short-lived, and I was soon back to my grumpy fuck-all. I walked out of Stone Axe partied out, watched them close through the door and soon and set up shop in the main stage photo pit (fucking where else?) for Swans, who proved unphotogenic and apocalyptic in equal measure. I stayed until they did “Jim” from last year’s My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky and then split to come back to the Mercure and call it a night and revel in the foulness of mood for a bit. Oh, if only Evoken were playing now.

One more day to go. It’ll be 4AM at least by the time I finish uploading the photos for this post, so I’ll wake up when I wake up and head over to 013, probably same as today. I’m tired, I miss The Patient Mrs. and my tolerance for weirdos is at its end, but on my way out of the venue, I ran into Winter‘s drummer and he seemed like a cool cat, and I got Johan Lundquist, Robert Lowe and Leif Edling to sign my Roadburn flyer, and I told David D’Andrea I wanted to interview him for this site, so I don’t at all mark the night a loss. I also got one of the last discs of whatever it was White Hills was selling, so tongue out to anyone else who wanted it.

A photographer took my picture yesterday for the Dutch 3voor12 site, which in addition to covering the fest is doing a special pictorial on beards. I had to give my name (JJ Koczan), where I was from (New Jersey) and how long I’ve been growing my beard (a year-plus), and though she told me it would be online today, I can’t find it. Probably for the best. The first part of the series is here if you want to check it out. The rest I don’t know. Maybe I’ll show up there sooner or later and you can find out first-hand why I make it a policy never to put pictures of myself on this site.

Afterburner tomorrow. I want to see Sungrazer so bad I can taste it.

Ramesses

Stone Axe

Swans

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4 Responses to “Roadburn 2011 Adventure Pt. 8: My Mind’s Been Released”

  1. Trent says:

    Sorry I had to miss Shrinebuilder and most of Swans in order to see Ufomammut. But it was worth it. They absolutely laid waste to the Midi.

  2. Woody says:

    What? No special mention of Tony from Stone Axe’s totally mint RIOT shirt?

  3. Stavros Nikos says:

    There’s a fan-shot Roadburn 2011 channel on Vimeo:
    End-joy!

    http://vimeo.com/channels/roadburn2011

    Check out the sweet Ufomammut clip!

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