Freak Kitchen Blog - July, 2006

After a bit of waiting on Charles de Gaulle airport, intensively stuffing chevré cheese into myself, I am now looking out the window on the French landscape as the rain is pouring down. Quite cosy. A cup of hot coffee would complete the cosiness. Maybe they come by with some caffeine later on, we’ll see.

Hellborg was right. France is damn hot… and very moist too. The rain helps, of course. Try to sit still while I work on my beloved HP laptop, a trusty companion when travelling the planet. I am supposed to jump off the train at place called St Pierre Des Cor or something. Someone is supposed to pick me up and take me to a hotel. Tomorrow I am supposed to do some teaching. Yepp, yepp.

Had a pre-Freak Guitar Camp-meeting with dudes Björn and side-kick Christian Alsing yesterday. Little by little we are getting geared up for the three week insanities. Really looking forward to it! Got my old, worn-out Ibanez guitar back from Christian who had injected new life into it. Not that I play it a lot, but since I spent so many hours sitting on my butt, building my style on that guitar, it deserves to be at least slightly playable (not to mention all the micro organisms that used to live on the fretboard. Nasty… Boy, do I need to learn to clean my instruments every once in a while). Also got a whole bunch of Dean Markley strings that I am playing nowadays. Alsing works at the Swedish distributor, which is handy, to say the least. Borrowed a KISS live DVD from Björn that I will watch tonight at my Tours hotel room.

I love the Freak Kitchen Forum. Very happy we finally got one. Thank you again, Alex “Nimblefinger” Wood and HTML Dude for setting it up. I am keeping an eye on you guys and gals as often as I can. (Can’t believe how much gear you posses in the gear-section! Gee… I get nervous just thinking of all the things that would go wrong if I was to play those racks and pedals).

We are moving the freakguitar.com-site to a different server. Something we should have done a long time ago. Hope to put lots more playing examples and whatnot out there soon. Been held back by lack of sheer space but no there are no excuses anymore.

Shit, it’s hot even in the train… Turn on the air condition, fellas. I am Swedish!

Got to Tours and had dinner with my fine friend and splendid (also Laney) guitarist Christophe Godin. Sipped on an excellent glass of white wine before calling it a day.

Had a groovy time teaching for a couple of days. Thanks to all guitarists showing up! Hope you had a good time. As usual it was tiptop to hang out with my fellow stringbender friends Christophe and also the amazing Patrick Rondat (who will visit the camp to show you some diabolic picking). This year we were also joined by the gifted Stephan Forte from the band Adagio. I met Stephan once a bunch of years ago when he interviewed me for a guitar mag I can’t remember the name of.

I was asked to do a mini-Freak Guitar show before an Adagio gig in Tours. It was a lot of fun and I salute you guys and gals’ overwhelming support. Played some old stuff as well as some new stuff, including the tune ” Serge”. It was hot as hell onstage and usual I was dripping from sweat after a few minutes. Oh well…

I hereby would like to thank the fabulous individual Alexis for taking good care of me. Not only did Alexis work hard with translating two days of mumbo jumbo coming out of my talking hole. He was also my designated driver since I loathe waiting around when I can work in my hotel room on music, e-mails, e t c. Thank you so much, Alexis. You have a special place in Freak Heaven.

To my great surprise I found out last night before going to bed that my return ticket was booked a day later than what I thought (and I booked the ticket, damn it). Tried desperately to change the departure/book an award ticket with my flying points/buy a new ticket, but the system online was out to lunch. So now I sit here on a train station hoping I will find a way to get to my beloved Swedish house when I get to Paris. This is one of the downsides of being such a stubborn bastard and do all things yourself: you got no one to blame for all the fuck-ups. Major merde. Oh well, we’ll see what happens.

Now I am back in St Pierre des Cor, waiting for a connecting train to the French capitol. Congrats to the world cup semi-final victory by the way! Best of luck in the finals. Italy won’t bend easily, that’s for sure. Talked to Jonas Hellborg the evening of the football game and he told me Champs Elysee was cooking, to say the least. Saw some footage on BBC of the partying and it sure looked inspired to me. Can’t imagine the celebration on Sunday if the French win…

Next up is Orsayran in the beautiful Dalarna, Sweden, on Wednesday the 12:th. An annual Freak Guitar clinic that I combine with a little kick backing together with Camilla and Maya. We are both big fans of Dalarna. Our house was built as a replica of Swedish writer Erik Axek Karlfeldt’s writing house. Vital information. Chris, Björn and myself are going to start rehearsing for Barcelona this Sunday. Can’t wait to make noise with the compadres again.

And YES! London has just been confirmed on our UK tour in September/October! Just received the message from Mik Gaffney, our right hand in England. Hope to see you there! We hereby promise to do our very utmost to perform groovy shows for you all!

Talk to you soon, all the best,

IA

Another beyond hot day in Sweden. Just finished breakfast and am currently sipping on a groovy cup of coffee. I thank God for my river where I can go swimming in (“swimming” might be stretching it. I am merely sitting on the bottom. It is deep enough to have my big head underneath the surface).

Talked to Jonas Hellborg a minute ago who is in Paris working on a future recording we will release. He said it was insanely warm in the French capitol (and he likes infernal temperatures). Gee, hope they got air condition in Tours or Swedish sweat will be all over the place. Got to go cool off again…

We are working on the Freak Store. Yes, I know you’ve heard it before, it will open soon, bla-bla-bla, but this time it is actually true. The HTML Dude, living in San Francisco, is sinking his teeth into the actual coding of the page(s), building the store binary, while the first merchandise order is about to take place from here. T6, a friend of the band (the same guy who made our gigantic cow head and tons of other things), is making as many cow belts as he can this very moment. There will be hoods, caps, several shirts (including girlie shirts), CDs and other stimulating paraphernalia. You will be able to use PayPal, IBAN-payments (Europe), and, for our Swedish Kitchen Freaks, PlusGiro and Bankgiro payments. All freaky things to those who wait. Give it a month or so, OK?

Next gig will be in Blanes, outside of Barcelona, Spain, in a couple of weeks. Hope to see you Spanish freaks there! Björn and Chris + fiancés will fly down a couple of days before to kick back, so if you feel an occasional smell of Vikings, you might be right.

Bye for now, I’ll be back soon.

IA

Check, check, testing, testing… This working?! Hello, hello, everyone OK? Ah, here we are with a REAL blog, a little every once in a while typing from around the world, thanks to the ever so splendid HTML Dude, whom we simply couldn’t live without. (Thank you, HTML Dude!) Just writing to see how this works…

Today is a stunningly hot day in good old Sweden and I have been swimming like crazy together with my fabulous dog Maya. Also have been sitting on my porch, playing some low tuned music to get my fingers ready for next week’s teaching in Tours, France. A two day workshop together with my friends Patrick Rondat and Christophe Godin.

Talked to Björn a couple of minutes ago. He was sitting inside typing nasty rhythm examples for the Freak Guitar Camp. I have been an efficient boy and prepared all my stuff already, will only do practical things before the camp starts in a bunch of weeks, like copying, e t c. Good for me.

Well, my fiancé needs some help with a small tree she’s about to plant in the garden. Gee, do I live heavy metal life, huh? Talk to you soon, all the best.

IA

We’ve finally taken the bull by the horns and wrestled a new blog in place. Check out this space for upcoming musings by IA and the other boys.

You can, of course, still find the old blogs and diaries where they’ve always been. Just follow the links in the header or in the sidebar!

The latest entries are still found in the pre-blog Cooking diary.