I had forgotten how well I eat in Europe, and on tour in particular. We seem pretty fortunate to get great catering and otherwise I’m always fairly conscious about what I eat, since so much of the time is spent on a bus or waiting around for the next move. A good bit of time is spent lugging heavy gear all over the place, so exercise is plentiful enough too.

Sunday marked our first gig. Hellfest, held annually in Clisson, France, celebrated its biggest year to date, with 40,000 attendees over 3 days and headliners including Motorhead, Slayer, Stone Sour, Kiss, Alice Cooper, Fear Factory and Deftones (ahh didn’t get to see Deftones though). There were tons of other great bands around including Dillinger Escape Plan, Queens of the Stoneage bassist Nick Oliveri’s new band Monodo Generator and Behemoth. Met a lot of great people!

The show at Hellfest went really well. The guitar tech and sound guy hadn’t been around for any of the rehearsals and this band’s setup is a little different than the traditional rig, so there were a lot of last-minute issues to solve. Nonetheless, everything went down without a hitch and the first show of the tour, which also happened to be a main stage festival performance, was a big success.

Pictures coming soon!

Sunday night we piled into the tour bus and laid back as we drove towards Switzerland. We stopped short of crossing the border and took up residence in the parking lot of a Novotel in the small town of Dijon. Not a whole lot going on there. We basically walked up and down the highway looking for anything worth checking out and only really found restaurants, a grocery store and a bowling alley. A pretty boring day but we made use of the hotel showers and I got some work done on videos in the works. No internet!

Climbing back on the bus around 2am, we sat in the back lounge and listened to an early mix of Sunday’s Hellfest performance, which was also filmed and will be put towards some promo material in the future. The playback confirmed what the crew had been trying to convince the band of since the set- that it was pretty damn tight and all the ‘micro-mess-ups’ they were dwelling on were not going to come across in the mix the way they remembered them. Rad.

We’ve arrived in Switzerland! A quick trip to the local Media Bin (Future Shop?), obviously right beside an IKEA, and I finally picked up a firewire 9-pin to 6-pin cable we’d been missing for a little too long. Now we can record the shows. Super cool. And picked up the guys a copy of NHL ‘09 for Xbox. Tour bus tournament, commence! It’s been long overdo.

It’s about 7pm. Doors. Opener’s on at 8:15. DTP at 9:45. Should be a pretty good show! Tonight we’re at Z7. It’s our first club date, which for the most part presents an opportunity to iron out any outstanding issues, try some new things, and have a good time.

Hope to get some pics up soon. In the mean time, hope everyone is well.

Europe. Something is great about this place. It might be simply that I haven’t been here at any one time long enough to realize it just like every other place in this universe, or otherwise, maybe that’s just it- another place in time.

Traveling is one of my favourite things to do. It seems to provide a great opportunity for my two favourite things: exploring and creating. Hours on a plane, layovers, buses, hurry-up-and-wait. Half of traveling is waiting, for transportation, itineraries, and while in transit; these just happen to be my favourite moments to write. The world around me isn’t waiting for anything more than an arrival. Everything is up in the air until that time when we reach our destination and until then, possibilities and potential take advantage of the silence of manifest and make themselves heard, and I listen.

The paired side of this traveling coin of course is the arrival of whatever it is we’re awaiting - a destination, an event, more transit -and that just leads to more new experiences, more exploring, more inspiration.

There are a lot of reasons for writing this particular journal. Currently, I’m writing between rendering video files for a new Project video. More waiting : : more opportunity to be creative.

I am at present on a plane somewhere between Montréal and Paris, much closer to Paris at this point, but when all there is below you is ocean, I’m not sure it much matters. Touring with the Devin Townsend Project for the next 18 days is something I’ve been long anticipating, both explicitly and just in general: touring- right now the only thing better that comes to mind is space travel. Anyone have a ticket to MIR?

Over the next 2-point-something weeks I’ll be acting somewhere along the lines of drum tech, stage monitor engineer, live recording engineer and alien from the fourth dimension hellbent on finding the ultimate cup of coffee and destroying every planet that comes up short. Though the work never really stops (here’s hoping it never does), there will always be the forced moments of potential, when the world turns off except for the passing by of whatever crosses a window, and in the case of airplanes, I might as well be in a sense-deprivation tank. Dim blue lights, 200 sleeping bodies, the all-encompassing sound of ventilation and pen.

er, laptop.

…and Final Cut Pro. Damn these Planet Earth cuts look brilliant. You know there’s something missing in your life when you go out and buy a dvd to experience the world. And by something I mean everything.

The video is looking great. We land in an hour; it will be 8:30am in Paris and I will have been up for 19 hours, having slept about 3 hours the night before, and looking at a full day ahead of me. Couldn’t be more excited!

Next stop, Clisson, France.

p.s. The lights in the fuselage have slow changed from near-darkness with a tinge of blue, to rose. I guess the ’sun’ is coming up