Hazmat Modine in Kiev with Albert Kuvezin

This is a guest post from Wade Schuman of Hazmat Modine as part of The World’s blogging series presented by musicians and artists while on tour.

We arrived at the festival in Kiev this morning after getting up at 3:30 a.m. and taking the two flights from Kazan. It was sort of a Ukrainian patriotic festival on a beautiful hilltop above the town. There were hippies and people doing martial arts and archery and Hare Krishnas and food stalls, and strange pre-Christian effigies.

Unfortunately it was also pouring rain and the stage had a half-inch of water on it. No one seemed to speak English and the stage manager looked about 24. Any attempt to convey that water and electricity don’t mix was met with blank stares and a shrug.

Frustrated, we decided to not do a sound check but a line check later before the show if the weather cleared enough to play.

We left for the hotel, which turned out to be almost a museum of an old soviet hotel. Huge, dingy but fascinating and beautiful in it’s own way. With halls full of photos of employees and odd shaped doorways, layers of smells and giant steep steps in the building that you have to drag your luggage up like the stairway in a Mayan temple. Communist architecture seems to often disregard ergo-dynamic function completely.

Photos from Kiev, inside the hotel, down by the river, photo of the band Yat Kha

The hotel had fantastic Ukrainian food in the restaurant on the 10th floor with great salads and dumplings, even though the service was soviet style, that is: there was none. The process took hours to get the food, which didn’t always arrive at all.

On the 11th floor was “Heaven on Eleven” a gentleman’s “entertainment” club with strippers, an odd contrast to the solemnity of the rest of the building.

I had a nice walk in the rain by the river and admired the unbelievable dowdy soviet buildings. They had a sad homely charm with laundry hanging from the windows.

We arrived at the festival and the stage was still flooded and the sound crew seemed a bit lost, but the audience standing in the rain was amazing, roaring with delight and energy and full of excitement. Due to the difficulty of getting the line check together, we had a reduced set time from an hour to a bit over 30 minutes, but the adversity of a situation like that always makes me want to do my best, and the audience and the band were so excited.

We had a great show with the audience screaming clapping and jumping up and down and as special treat Albert Kuvesin from the Tuvan band Yat Kha came up and sat in with Joe on his solo on the song “Everybody Loves You” his Tuvan sub-sonic karrgara sounded incredible with the tuba, and the show was a thrill, the rain was still strong but the audience stayed in there.

We left the stage with soaked shoes and a smile. It was a very memorable and special show, but now back at the hotel at 11:30 p.m. I am drying my clothes and equipment and my soaking shoes and preparing to leave at 4:30 a.m. tomorrow morning to play on national television in Moscow. Sadly both Reut Regev our trombonist and Steve Elson our sax player had to leave, Steve for California and Reut for her own tour in Europe. So we will continue our tour with a much reduced horn section.

From the menu at the hotel restaurant: “Potatoes prepared on your desire,” ” Potato baked in its own grasses,” and “Ice-cream in your desire.”