The Tour Blog
Nasum breathes black
Posted: July 4, 2012 12:34:39 by Anders Jakobson
In case you missed the announcement, Nasum will team up with Black Breath for the final leg of the Farewell tour. We feel that this is a really good package that will be completed with other bands as well. On all the Swedish dates Skitsystem will appear, and in Malmö doomsters Pyramido will play and in Stockholm Massgrav will grace the night with some blistering crust.
Speaking about the Stockholm show, this will be a FREE show. Nice, right?
There are a few TBA among the dates. These shows are booked, but can't be announced yet for different reasons. They will be quite soon, so keep visiting nasum.com - your hometown might be on the list!
Peace and Love and With Full Force
Posted: July 2, 2012 10:48:44 by Anders Jakobson
We've had some strange weeks already, but I wonder if the Peace and Love/With Full Force weekend takes the price for the weirdest one in the end. Usually we fly somewhere, play, fly somewhere else, play and so forth. This time, as Peace and Love - which is Sweden's biggest festival - was just a few hours by car away from us we were able to drive to the festival, play, drive home and sleep in our own beds. Not the Finnish part of the touring party, obviously, but I guess it was as odd for them as it was for us Swedes.
Anyway: usually we end up on metal stages or whatever, but as this is a huge festival with "everything" on the bill, we shared stage with some debates and lectures about ungrinding things. Yet another addition to the weirdness. But never mind that - it was a small venue for music never the less so we did our shit and apparently did it good as the local press gave us five out of five for the show. I thought the show was okay, but apparently we are so far into the zone right now that we don't really know when we do really good anymore. We blasted shit to bits without knowing it.
Peace and Love vs. With Full Force
The weirdness of a day trip and a split debate/grind stage aside - that was nothing compared to what followed the next day. We did another day trip to Germany, but it was during the night and some shitty things happened… We had a stage time at With Full Force at 02.45 (which technically was Saturday morning) and we weren't even the last band on stage - not even the second last! Considering the late time, our flight was at 07.15 in the evening so we all had a lazy day before even getting to the airport. We had a round trip booked with Air Berlin, where the Finns and Jon would go to Helsinki on the following day as Jon was playing at Tuska with Victims. Oddly enough we got our boarding passes for the return trip already in Stockholm and in hindsight that might be the reason for the fuck up that was to come.
The flight was slightly late leaving Stockholm. The captain said that the "window" for the landing was full in Berlin so we might have to wait for 50 minutes before we could take off. 50 seconds later we took off… Weird. Anyway, about 90 minutes later we landed and waited for our luggage only to realize that four pieces of luggage were missing - two guitars, the cymbals, our backdrops and a big case of expensive microphones. After some detective work, it came to our knowledge that the luggage - all part of the Finnish party's booking - already had been checked in for the return flight, as if they wanted to fly from Stockholm to Helsinki via Berlin including an 8 hour layover… Not likely!
It took about an hour before we had all our shit and we went in the rainy night to With Full Force and got there about midnight. None of us weren't in a particularly good condition to play some grind at that point, but after some food and drinks the energy returned and we did a pretty good show for 40 minutes. An hour later we went back to the airport to catch our early flights. That's right, no sleep!
We split up in two parties and Urban, Jesper and I ended up on a flight that in the end got an hour late to Stockholm, so three very tired guys touched Swedish ground again around 11 in the morning. By that point, or even at the airport in Berlin, we had already forgotten that we had been on stage just a few hours earlier… Such a strange notion, but considering how weird this weekend was, it was no surprise.
Charity t-shirt for Obscene Extreme
Posted: July 2, 2012 09:43:39 by Anders Jakobson
For the Obscene Extreme Festival there will be a limited Nasum-esque charity t-shirt where all the profit goes to Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). There will be only 100 copies available and the starting price is 350,- CZK but you can pay how much you want for your copy.
Read more about this at the OEF website.
Italy times three and Graspop Metal Meeting
Posted: June 27, 2012 16:23:22 by Anders Jakobson
Last week we made three club shows in Italy and then the Graspop Metal Meeting in Belgium. I'll spare you the boring negative rants about early flights, long drives in a minivan without a working AC and all that stuff…
Italy then: Well, one can say that Italy has a special place in the Nasum history as it was in Cremona the "last" Nasum show (with Miezsko, that is) was held. It was a good weekend together with Regurgitate and friends. Not too unexpected, some people who were at that show came to these three shows as well, and it is as always a joy to meet long time fans. It's fun to meet new fans as well, but some of you should at least learn my first name if you want to get my attention. I'm not called Jacobs or Andres! But never mind that.
As a direct support on these three shows we had the pleasure of having Singapore's Wormrot. These guys gave the audiences an aural bashing with their super tight and entertaining grindcore. I get vibes from both old Napalm Death and Assück when I hear them and they are definitively one of the best "new" grindcore bands around these days. I hope our paths meet again!
The two first shows in Milano and Rome were slightly disappointing when it came to the sheer number of visitors. They were far from packed, but obviously we were very happy about the people who showed up that were totally into it. This changed at the last show in Bologna which was held at a huge squat with a large yard and a smaller venue. Loads of people and the temperature in the venue even beat the legendary hot show at Maryland Deathfest! The overall temperature in Italy during these days was quite high for some frozen Northern grinders as ourselves, but it was nothing compared to the burning heat in that venue! We had to cut three songs towards the end to be able to finish the show without either passing out or bursting into flames. Too bad because it was one of those shows that could have kept on forever.
To close this part of this story, I'd like to say a sincere graze mille to our very punctual and secure driver in Italy - Gianluca.
The Graspop stage from a different view.
A flight later and we were in Belgium attending the huge Graspop Metal Meeting. This is one of those festivals that is almost too big, and although we played at the smallest stage, it still was bigger than what other festivals have to offer as their main stage. GMM is a festival that has been around for ages and the organization is top notch. No complains there. Brutal Truth played at our stage just before us so it was quite fun to see these guys again, all though just for a brief moment. After us Ihsahn played, which turned some people in the Nasum touring party into little fanboys when the very friendly ex-Emperor guitar player turned up backstage. I had a very unexpected brief meeting with someone from Agathocles, which really closed the circle on this 20th anniversary Farewell tour.
Some irritating technical glitches on stage made the show suffering a bit. Hopefully it wasn't that obvious for the audience, but I think we all felt that we could have performed better. As always it was fun, but unfortunately not one of the best shows so far.
Next up: Sweden's biggest festival in Borlänge and With Full Force in Germany, where we have an extremely late stage time at 02.45, so get some sleep during the day if you plan to see us there...
A swinish greeting from Nasum
Posted: June 25, 2012 16:20:04 by Anders Jakobson
Peace and Love wanted a video greeting from Nasum, so we recorded one backstage at Graspop and let a pig do the talking. English translation below...
"Hello! Here I am hanging out backstage - obviously - with Nasum. They are getting ready for Peace & Love, this coming Thursday. Yup. Then they will grind as pigs!" Share this blog post
Hellfest and Metaltown (updated with video link)
Posted: June 18, 2012 00:51:08 by Anders Jakobson
Although we had our first taste of the European festival season at the end of the US trip with the quick stop at FortaRock in Holland, it felt like we got into it for real during last weekend's visits to Hellfest and Metalfest.
The negative thing about Hellfest is that it's a fucking drag to get there! We took insanely early flights from Stockholm and Helsinki and landed in Paris, which is something like six hours away from Clisson. One quite uncomfortable van ride later and we arrived pretty much in time to our "riser access", which is a couple of hours before the show when we can set up the drums and amps and stuff behind the stage. Compared to a fifteen minute change over, this is luxury!
After the Mr and Mrs Gasmask stunt at the Örebro show our booking agent got flooded with requests from different promoters urging us to repeat it at their festivals. Hellfest was one of those, so we dressed up our tour manager in the male gear and had a French - I guess - girl, whose name I didn't catch, stand in as the bride. So they did their little play and then we went up on stage and did the biggest Nasum show ever (so far). We estimate that 10,000 people saw us (which is about 100 times the amount of people who saw us at Billy O's in Ventura). Amazing!
We were a little bit rusty due to the two week break, but we had lots of fun. Apparently Terrorizer Magazine liked what they saw as Lee MacBride wrote in their blog: "While Taake set the bar for the day's performance, Nasum followed it up with what could well be one of the best performances of the weekend. It was a full blown aural assault that left us physically shaken. We're still recovering!"
And then Olivier "Zoltar" Badin said some nice stuff about us in his "Video Croissant":
[...video not available anymore...]
After chilling out for an hour and a half we got into the van again and repeated the six hour drive and ended up at an airport hotel at 03.30 or something, with an early lobby call next morning... Sex, drugs and rock'n'roll? No: van, grind and van again...
Update: Here's the ENTIRE show at Hellfest pro-shot with multiple cameras... Enjoy! [...video not available anymore...]
The following day we shared "gates" at the Paris airport with both Integrity and Turbonegro, but that was quickly shadowed by sharing the flight from Copenhagen (where we had a lay over) to Gothenburg with Slayer! Totally absurd! Anyway, Metaltown is thankfully actually in Gothenburg so the van ride was considerably shorter and we even had some time at the festival before the riser access. Yet again we did the Mr and Mrs Gasmask thing with the original couple, but it almost didn't happen. Virtually two minutes before the intro started we realized that one of the gasmasks were missing, but Janne did an Usain Bolt impression and quickly ran back and forth to the backstage tent where the missing gasmask was located!
The beginning of the show got struck by some technical difficulties as Jesper's bass suddenly was out of order, despite working perfectly at the line check just ten minutes earlier. So we had an unfortunate break just after the first song, and when we got cracking again Urban broke a string... Shit happens, but then we rapidly got back into the grind groove again.
From a personal point of view I had a tough time during the first half of the set. My left arm was very tired from the night before (again - that two week break is to blame) and I had aching calf muscles, which I never get from drumming. In hindsight I blame the 12 hours in the van where I had to sit in a very strange position due to some weird table riser in the van floor...
Anyway, yet again it was a fun show in a packed tent. We met a lot of friends and other bands. For instance, we exchanged some words with Bill and Brann from Mastodon, who both were present - as Today Is The Day members - during the first Nasum tour in 1999. The press were also present and Sweden's biggest newpaper Aftonbladet gave the show four out of five. Not bad!
Although the big festivals have their charm, we all feel quite good about doing three club shows in Italy next along with a stop at Graspop in Belgium. But that's to be expanded on another time.
Behind the scenes: Creating a setlist
Posted: June 13, 2012 23:27:58 by Anders Jakobson
During the preparations for this Farewell tour, creating the setlist was one tricky problem to solve, which demanded trial and error in the rehearsal room, endless email discussions, a minor genocide of darlings, a democratic vote, an Excel document, and ultimately post-it's and a window before we felt satisfied.
We rehearsed something like 40-45 songs, which were trimmed down to about 32 which we kept on rehearsing without having any particular order. In time an order materialized but it was obviously a way too long set for a grind show. We needed to get rid of a few more songs and had a vote in the rehearsal room where we all picked our 20 favorites. The ever so industrious Keijo did some of his Excel magic and we felt not particularly grindcore staring at a lap top with some titles and numbers. But it was electronic democracy and we got rid of a few more songs.
We kept rehearsing and got closer and closer to a final setlist, but still there were things that didn't work and I took some initiative and made a few suggestions between two rehearsal weekends. This really got the ball rolling and we got to the final setlists by going old school:
When I created my suggestions I wrote our different blocks of songs on post-it notes and stood by my window and shifted the notes. I left them up so we could do the final shifts together. And so we did. Finally we had one 45 minutes setlist and one for 60 minutes. They are basically the same with some smaller differences.
The longer one was played at the first show, and the shorter on the other gigs with some encores. But just a few shows into the US tour we started to alter the setlist, so apparently what worked so fine in the rehearsal room didn't really do it live.
Early on in this project I expressed a wish to have multiple setlists that would use songs from a buffer of 50 songs, to make each and every show a little unique and to keep things interesting for me. Well, I was the only one with this wish, but we've done some ad-libing and variations already so even though we have a "written" setlist, it's not entirely set in stone.
I've kept track of the variations so far, and after the tour is over I will post the setlists for ALL shows...
As for the content of the setlist, i.e. the songs, we've made sure that the entire career of Nasum is covered, at least when it comes to the albums. We play a few songs that have never been played before live, and although we probably disappoint some fans by not playing their favorite tracks we feel that we have a good collection of songs to play each night.
Videos, videos, videos and more videos!
Posted: June 8, 2012 14:46:39 by Anders Jakobson
I hope you all haven't missed the video page where we have collected all the YouTube clips from the shows that we've found so far.
We started with individual clips but as that rapidly became quite a hassle, we have collected the clips in playlists sorted by show, and we add stuff to the playlists all of the time.
Unfortunately we lack clips from a few shows, to be exact:
• May 19 @ Now That’s Class - Cleveland, OH (US)
• May 24 @ Europa - New York, NY (US)
• May 26 @ Highline - Seattle, WA (US)
• May 27 @ Branx - Portland, OR (US)
• May 29 @ Billy O’s - Ventura, CA (US)
• May 31 @ Chaos in Tejas - Austin, TX (US)
So if you have any - upload them and send us the links, or if you find any - send us the links @ farewell@nasum.com.
Update one hour later
A clip from Billy O's came in the mailbox and we really need to share it. By all means the most intimate Nasum show ever... (Songs are "Scoop" and "Bullshit")
Part two of week two of the US/Canadian tour ...with an European bonus
Posted: June 5, 2012 14:05:11 by Anders Jakobson
The first part of the Farewell tour is over. We've been back in Sweden and Finland for a couple of days, catching up with the normal life and getting rid of the last traces of the jetlag. We are obviously recharging our collective batteries for next weekend when we start the European festival season for real with Hellfest in France and Metaltown in Sweden. But enough about the future now, and back to the US...
Where were we? Oh yes, last time we were in Portland, Oregon. We left the Northwest and our driver Jeff and his dog and took a short flight down to Oakland, California where we were met by our next driver, Jeremy, who had a mohawk and the skinniest legs I have ever seen. Apart from being a solid driver with a squeeky van, Jeremy doubled as our merchguy for the California dates. In Oakland our tour manager Greg had gotten us a really nice hotel down by the water just a few minutes from the Metro venue. This magnificent setting was only slightly disturbed by a loud honking train that passed through the city just a few yards away every ten minutes.
Setting up at the Metro in Oakland.
Anyway, at the Metro we were joined by our next main support band, Landmine Marathon, who generously shared their backline with us. The venue was a huge warehouse and apparently a little bit large for us this evening. The show was good, but not one of the best on the tour. In the crowd was a girl from Örebro who lives in Oakland now, which was quite odd but obviously fun.
The following day we had a monstrous 7-8 hour drive along the coast to reach Ventura. By this time in the tour we've gotten quite accustomed to long drives and particularly to sleep through them in some odd and inconvenient position. I don't remember much of the drive apart from a really nice stop at Refugio State Beach. Very nice and definitively something else that a damp venue in some slightly seedy part of a town.
A drummer at a beach. Inge krångel.
Well in Ventura we were somewhat stunned by Billy O's which was nothing else but a bar with barely any room for people and the smallest stage ever. No back room or anything so the bands had to assemble their gear on the sidewalk OUTSIDE... Why on Earth were we booked at this place? In the end the actual show turned out to be one of my personal favorites on the tour - small and very intimate, but most of all fun as hell! To say the least - the US tour took us to all kinds of venues.
Intimate show at Billy O's. Hey, that rhymed!
After the show we drove down to Long Beach, Los Angeles and stayed at the same hotel for two nights with a show at The Black Castle between the nights. Now, I don't know how many people told us to be very careful at The Black Castle... "It's a scary neighborhood - don't bring any valuables..." That sure made us paranoid to say the least. I left everything but a few dollars at the hotel room and hoped for the best but expected the worst. But the neighborhood wasn't particularly scary. Nothing happened and we could do the final show in California without any problem. In fact, the scariest thing that happened was when I accidentally dropped one of my hi-hat cymbals so it ended up UNDER the stage, impossible to reach by hand. In the end I had to crawl in some nasty shit and use a two-by-four to reach it. Yuk!
On this final show we were joined by the legendary Nausea which was really cool and our show was good. Jon barfed two times on stage without missing a note, a rare talent indeed. By that our time with Landmine Marathon and Jeremy was over and we thank them a lot for their help.
One early domestic flight later and we were in Texas and were met by yet another driver, this time the lovely Maggie. Texas was as expected hot but fortunately the hotel was nice and cool and the Red 7 venue was just a few steps away. Little things like this makes touring a lot easier. But the heat cooled off in time for our gig and the stage was covered in fans (the mechanical ones, that is...) so Maryland Deathfest remains the hottest show on the tour! Chaos in Tejas became something of a reunion as our merchguy from the first week, Jamie, returned, but this time as a stage manager, and Massgrave also played and after the show the guys from Dropdead had arrived. Nice to see some familiar faces again. Massgrave's singers Lenny and Woody joined us on stage and did "I see lies" by themselves leaving Keijo free to do some crowd surfing and during "Inhale/Exhale" their drummer Hesher came up and helped out with the vocals. A good ending to an exceptionally good US/Canadian tour!
A bunch of thank you's are in order, so first and foremost thank you Greg and John who were with us during the entire run as tour manager and sound guy, and thanks Jamie for your work and the improvised tour of Philadelphia, and thanks Erik, Jeff, Jeremy and Maggie for your driving skills, and thank you Brutal Truth, Dropdead, Massgrave, Black Breath, Landmine Marathon and Nausea and all you other bands that shared the stages with us. We love you all and will miss you!
...but the trip didn't end there. We had one stop left before we got home. After a hellish day of traveling - a domestic flight to Washington, and then a long continental flight to Amsterdam we got to Nijmegen, Holland at 10:30 in the morning (after loosing half a day in timezones) and tried to gather some strength for the first of many European festival shows. The show at FortaRock was scheduled at 3 in the afternoon and four and a half hours earlier none of us were in a particularly good condition to play some grind for the Dutch people, but it was just a matter of getting some rest, some food and bring forth the last drop of energy. One refreshing factor was that we were joined by our all Finnish crew Janne, Hannes and Antti, who were all nice to see again. The actual show was large in a packed tent but not 100% on the Nasum performance scale due to some mishaps and a terrible stage sound.
Dressing room door at FortaRock.
Shortly after the show we packed up our stuff and went back to the Amsterdam airport and traveled home. All in all we spent only half of a day in Holland. Weird.
That's it - the first part of the tour. 16 shows done and still many more to come... Stay tuned for more postings in this blog...
One final note though: I'm not lying when I say that there obviously has been some worries in the band before the tour started. Have we made the right choice, will people accept Nasum 2012? Well, judging from the reception so far, people seems to like us and one comment on Facebook really nailed it: "It was a good call to do the tour". Spot on!
Part one of week two of the US/Canadian tour
Posted: May 28, 2012 11:31:52 by Anders Jakobson
We are currently in Portland, Oregon where we completed the Northwest shows just a couple of hours ago, which apart from today's show in Portland also included a stop in Seattle, Washington yesterday.
But before we went to the west we did two amazing shows on the east coast. The show at Europa in New York was absolutely crazy and the best club show so far in the US. The place was packed, it was hot as hell and the New York crowd brought the best out of us. We were also joined on stage - semi-surprisingly - by Travis Bacon from Grudges who sang "I hate people" together with Keijo. All in all it was a memorable evening, which also sadly became the last show together with Brutal Truth and Dropdead.
Then our van took us to Maryland Deathfest - the first announced show on this tour, where we got a spot even though the festival was completely booked - which could be seen as a highlight of the tour. We got into Baltimore quite early and we played absolutely last on the day. Before us both Napalm Death and Godflesh headlined the outdoor stages.
Although MDF was smaller than I had expected, it was obviously the biggest show on the tour so far, with approximately 2000 people in the room when we played. This is what it looked like:
Kudos to Paul from Canada in the front row with the "In Memory of Mieszko" t-shirt.
Apart from being the biggest show on the tour it was also the hottest that quickly sucked all the energy out of us, but with a packed room you really had to deliver the good stuff despite being close to catching fire. The good stuff this evening included an American version of our Mr and Mrs Gasmask live action intro, with the help from real life married couple Greg and Meghan. We yet again had musical guests on stage, where Jason Netherton and Travis Bacon rejoined us.
After a late show we had just a few hours at the hotel before we had to leave for the airport so sleeping wasn't really an option, which obviously left us extremely tired and not particularly in the mood for a seven hour flight... This also meant that we had to part with half of our crew, our merch seller Jamie Getz and our bearded driver Erik Larson. Both super nice guys that made the first week a good time with lots of laughs and good work. We miss you guys and wish you the best!
Jamie waving a wad of cash at MDF and Erik looking all tired but happy at the Baltimore airport early in the morning.
During these Northwestern dates we've had a new driver called Jeff who has a van that is very close to falling apart, but still does the work. He also has a puppy called Hartka (possibly spelt in another way) that rides with us in the van. Quite funny.
Seattle was really cool where we were supported by the mighty Black Breath, Massgrave and Theories who all were super cool guys, and during the Portland show we were yet again supported by Massgrave as well as From Ashes Rise and Nightnurse. We thank all these bands for sharing their backline and for their over all nice attitudes during these shows.
What else? Yeah, we went to Matt Jacobson's pizza place Sizzle Pie here in Portland and had a few really good slices at a really cool place. Unfortunately, Mr Jacobson himself was not in town. And for those who don't know: he is the owner of Relapse Records and the guy who signed Nasum back in the late 90's.
Only four shows left, three in California and one in Texas. Apparently it's hot as hell in Texas so MDF might not remain the hottest show on the tour in a few days. We'll see...
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