INGRID (ENGLISH VERSION)

STAND UP FOR SCIENCE!

After coming back from Germany, I left with Alexandria on our first tour, as I had promised the rest of the guys. However I didn't want to miss school and we had to tour all around Norway, so we booked ours shows on Fridays and weekends and the whole tour lasted three months. Vivian and Bryan came straight away from Britain and we booked hotels to every city of Norway, reaching even Fredrikstad. It was a good chance for them to travel throughout Norway. Booking hotels was a very easy task, as I'd been used to it, because I would travel with my parents every Christmas all around Europe.

The tour began and we had our own caravan once again, however, because the majority of us were girls, we weren't going as wild as we did with the other guys in Germany. Of course, we had a lot of good time and fun, but things went smoothier. However concerning our live performance, I can't tell that it was the best thing for me. Until we went onstage, I was pacing up and down at the dressing room, having smoked about ten packets. I was completely nervous and I had very weird feelings, because I was going to be at the front, as I was going to sing live. On the other hand our debut album had this doom metal sound and it had something that we could never again find. We had written songs, which lasted about fifteen minutes and while playing those live, you could feel that you are on a completely different universe. It was a sense of having gotten stoned, even though we never did a drug use. I can't explain it precisely, but during long solos that Vivian used to play, I was totally calm and I would keep my eyes closed and, no, I wasn't dreaming of circles spinning around, but I was dreaming of flying or floating in the cosmic infinity. But when the track was loud and rhythmic, then I was headbanging like there's no tomorrow. And when the years went by and we weren't playing such heavy music anymore, I would feel a great nostalgia about those live moments. Furthermore, our band has a trademark and this is incredible: Vivian's guitars. Truly, when she plays a guitar solo, it sounds like an animal screaming and I'm not joking at all. This is usually happening, whenever she keeps a high note for a long time. That sounded splendid combined with uilleann pipes, a few years later. We have asked many professional guitarists and nobody can understand how the hell she's able to make her guitar sound like that. But she claims that this a technique in progressive rock music, as it was also done by Genesis and Gilmour. However I believe that Vivian's playing had something different on it. And finally, I would carry onstage about fifteen synthesizers and, of course, my beloved Hammond Organ.

As I mentioned before, our tour lasted three months and we were performing only on Fridays and weekends. The rest of the time I was studying and discovering new bands. However I was constantly listening to a single album and this was I Robot by Alan Parsons. For some reason, I'd fell in love with it. I would probably listen to it three or four times in a day. I was astonished by the music, of course, but also by the album's topic. Someone might consider it to be something not so special, because of its strong influences by electronic music. However exactly this thing was my paradise and would make me lose myself into it. Furthermore, its topic was interesting enough. It was related to the fact that technology is spreading with such a speed, that in the end it had destructive consequences. As an example, it brought robots, that would finally kill their own creators. It was something like a combination of Blade Runner and the British horror series Black Mirror, but I Robot was released decades before both of those did. And it is true that this specific topic had never really occured to me nor had I ever thought about it. I was a typical social media user and I was also in a way brainwashed by wanting to become famous through the number of my likes in Facebook. Of course, having searched a bit more about this topic,  I started watching Black Mirror series, as I mentioned above. However, I found some more 'secrets' about the net. For example, I read about the dark web and the deep web, the dark side of the internet (and indeed Deep Web is the darkest side of the internet), where not all of us can have an access to. Here is where you can find things ranging from Kalashnikov guns and fake IDs to children pornography and human beings being sold and other stuff, which are not necessary to be mentioned here. In the beginning I had a small shock, but after long discussions with Vivian, she was telling me laughing: "Facebook is a necessary evil".