Back from Zurich: Danzdas' Wild Ride

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mfarinato695.686 days agoPeakD3 min read

Hey folks, I'm back from our opening tour concert in Zurich at Altepost, one of the last standing anarchist and antifascist squat centers in Europe. Fun fact: Lenin himself once slept there during his exile. Talk about a place with history!

Now, I won't get into the amount of "weed" we found, but let's just say it was plentiful. Honestly, if I were the Chief of the DEA, I'd feel like a total failure. With nearly 238 million people smoking weed and drug lords turning into businessmen instead of farmers, the whole situation feels completely dystopian to me.

But let's move on. We bumped into a famous rock star, Tom Morello. Not sure about him, never been a fan of anyone. The concert was fantastic, though. Too bad we had to come back to this harsh reality.

This song was born from the ashes of the jam we had at Altepost. I secretly recorded plenty of sounds—Mirko's trumpet, some drums—and patiently, like a tailor sewing a suit, I built this song. Inspired by the contradictions in this world, I decided to use frames from the Apollo 11 movie I found on Archive.org.

Now, the song is a pure trip—mushrooms, LSD—Bloomey-looney - No room for proper melody, no bass keeping the line. It's totally free to jump from one scale to another, inspired by Tinariwen, Bombino, and other Tuareg guitarists. I simply tune my guitar to "Berber tuning" and keep playing until I find a riff I like and start experimenting.

This is just an experiment to create a connection between my need to be free from market rules and my dreams, inspired by this amazing hashish I'm smoking. It's a blend of Moroccan and Polline, straight from the farmer in Switzerland. Don't worry, I didn't smuggle it—I'm not that crazy. This friend of mine likes to offer me his hashish, and I pay him back with songs. Life is funny.

Latest news: I'm part of a band—Danzdas. The way I create my music is based on a unique approach. I think each music style is a "dialect" of the main language, which is music. I just need to learn the accent, the inflection. To do that, I need to dig deeper into the wildest sounds and start owning them as if they were mine. To reach this point, I need to play with every possible combination my mind can create. This is why I keep producing music—to experiment with the wildest dreams that my friend "the hashish" suggests to me.