Hazmat Modine in Moscow

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.

The "Required St. Basils shot" (photo: Wade Schuman)

June 27th, 2010 Moscow

After getting up at 4:30 a.m. (about hour and a half of sleep) we arrived in Moscow and went to the hotel, which is in the center of Moscow about five minutes from Red Square and located over the club we play at on Wednesday.

We were famished and very ready to eat something before the recording at the TV station… We all ordered omelets, but they came in very slowly and after three hours many of the band members crawled off to bed for a nap before their omelets had arrived.

The TV show was a live one-hour music program. After washing up and preparing instruments and gig clothes we took four taxis with our gear to the station arriving at five, we set up in a huge room with lights and much theatrical smoke.

The quantity of smoke used was astonishing, (designed to be used for atmosphere and to show the lights, it shoots out of a machine making a large hissing noise, like a distressed snake), but for a singer who also plays a wind instrument I find it difficult to deal with, and after a while my voice started to crack, by the end of the night my voice was pretty much shredded, which was quite evident on the recordings.

We practiced the set for some hours and then went off to eat at a wonderful restaurant with food from the region of the Carpathian Mountains, (they had the amazing thick fresh cherry juice.) Then we went to get our make up done and the show started at 11:00 live with interviews about the music with our promoter Alexander Cheparukhin and then counting down live for each song.

We did four songs live for the program then two more for the online selection. We left the studio about 12:30 a.m. The whole process lasted about seven and a half hours. Here is a link to the show on Russian TV:

We were exhausted and went off to bed… the next day was a day off! This evening was pretty much our first full nights sleep in a very long time.

June 28, 2011 A off day!

This was wonderful a precious off day in Moscow, Rachelle Garniez and I spent the day walking about and talking. It was just glorious to be off duty and have nothing to do or worry about.

Moscow is rich with images and contradictions, not unlike New York there is a huge variety of building styles and there is a strange tension between the current capitalistic obsession with luxury and the stolid communist architecture and sculpture which sits everywhere with a dull heavy authority and looks sad and slightly ridiculous in context of the living city now.

We sat in a restaurant on a pond in a park that circles the city and talked as a worker in a small boat dredged up green algae from the lake. Later the evening the band attended the show of the band De Temps Antan who, were staying on the same hotel and playing the same venue as us as well.

It was nice that many of the same musicians for all the festivals were doing the same circuit. It felt like a real community, eating, and hanging together after the shows. Upstairs in the hotel where we were staying someone had brought in a large parrot (a Macaw), which sat in the corner and squawked all night long.

June 29th, 2011 club Masterskya

We had a great gig at the club, a really nice small place with high ceilings and a wonderful old time cafe club atmosphere. It was packed to capacity with 200 smoking, drinking dancing sweating people,. We played for close to four hours with a short break in the middle.

For me, no matter how glamorous or impressive it may be considered to play for thousands on a big stage, nothing really compares to the pleasure of playing in a small club for people that love to be there with you, and this audience was full of energy and enthusiasm and we gave them our all.

Afterward the band hung out with the members of the other bands coming for the festival in Perm drinking and playing music till four in the morning in till the light came. It was a very special night. (The bands were: Last Man Standing and De Temps Antan.)
Clip of show at Masterskya: