INGRID (ENGLISH VERSION)

TOUR IN GERMANY

Those three months that I was away, there weren't any radical changes in the village. On the other hand, everybody realised that it was ME the one who had changed and that I wasn't the little girl anymore that people had known. In the beginning, I thought that this change of mine was really serious and negative, but I soon understood that everybody was growing up and was gradually leaving the immature parts of their character behind.

It was the same night, when I had come back home, I heard a knock on the door. After a while, mum came downstairs in my room and told me: "Some friends of yours are here".

"Tell them to come in".

It was Timo with his friends, who had come over so we could have a little talk. They asked me about my time in Australia and how everything was. In the beginning, we were talking about nonsense, but then they turned into an allegedly serious expression and Timo started telling me: "Err, you know that we have a band with the guys, but we need some keyboards and..."

"I won't join anybody's band", I sharply interrupted him. "I already have my two own groups, I can't join a third".

He raised his hand to make me stop. "Wait, I'm not asking you to become a member".

"Then, what?"

"Well, we're touring in Germany and we need keyboards. Could you come along?"

A journey again? I sighed. "When and for how long?"

"7 days. From the second to the eighth of January"

"I'm in", I said and we shook hands.

After a while, though, I said somehow skittishly:

"Could I also bring my...ehmm boyfriend with?"

Timo shrugged his shoulders in a sign that he was uninterested whether I would bring someone or not.

Finally, I phoned Josh, who would follow us with pleasure.

Timo had a band, called Nattefrost (meaning Nightfrost in Norwegian). Their style had ambient elements, but also metal noise and it wasn't bad at all, however there was a reason why I misinterpreted his word in the beginning, in the thought that he was trying to make me a member of his band. When we were at school and we were fanatical readers of Metal Hammer, I used to be a Nattefrost member for a while. However, the way, in which they would compose music was really extraordinary and didn't really match to my own preferences. In a nutshell, Nattefrost believed that a band should have a 100% togetherness and that they should write music all together. Alright, acceptable. However how would they work? According to them, we have to sit all together around a table along with our instruments and each one of us brings forth ideas and sounds. However the sound produced out of this was similar to a ragbag, which had no cohesion at all. So the result was the opposite from what expected. Just think that you're trying to make a recipe. And you just throw all the ingredients inside. What you get out of this is no mixture, but scattered ingredients inside the saucepot, with no consistency. That's what was also happening with Nattefrost and I was jokingly calling their style of songs primordial soup. Let alone that I can NEVER write, when the others are above my head. I just need my own solitude, in order to write the story and then decorate it with some music. For those reasons, I refused to become an official member of Nattefrost.

After the New Year coming, I started the tour with Timo's band. We wouldn't fly there, but there was a caravan to take us, which we would travel from Norway to Germany with. Every night we used to play in another city, so it sounds logical that we would spend the rest of the day in the van. I was often staying only with Josh, talking about anything and in general I spent most of the time with him. However, I had a good time with the other guys too, because we were going wild in there, we were screaming, singing loud, we were growling like death metal singers and in general we had destroyed every brain cell left in our organisms. Fortunately Josh and Timo's company got along well with each other. And yeah, it's indeed true that I spent my happiest days ever at that era.