Farsund

The weather was not on our side this year. It rained pretty much constantly in Farsund. On Friday and Saturday nights the rain and wind reached impressive storm intensity.

As artists (and lowly student artists at that), the festival was not particularly well organized. We got conflicting messages about all of our concerts (time, location, what kind of concert). Other groups were also listed at the wrong time or wrong location in the official program. Still, it was a great time.

We drove out of Rauland on Thursday morning with a car packed full of instruments. Sveinung and I were bad passengers and slept almost the whole trip while David struggled to hold himself entertained in the driver's seat. We stopped in Evje and treated ourselves to espresso and pastries. After that we passengers did a better job of keeping the driver company; we worked on learning the rather complicated refrain to an entertaining mock ballad.

Upon arrival in Farsund, we found our hotel rooms, grabbed our instruments, and to the Reinlender Parade. Our first taste of the days to come was leading the reinlender parade, playing a tune we were supposed to be learning as we marched. This didn't really work very well since there was only one person who knew the tune and he was successfully drowned out by his drummer accompanist.

The parade ended in the public square with a festival showcase. We were asked to play a tune for the showcase a few minutes before we went on stage. Anna (who play two and one rowed accordions) hadn't been up to school yet and hadn't rehearsed with us all summer. Also, her accordion had some sticky keys. We played our safest tune. Needless to say, it didn't go as well as it could have.

That evening we rehearsed with the students from last year who had managed to get festival passes if they played parts of our concerts. It was here that the confusion began when we found out that our hour-long concert was actually a half hour, so we had to figure out what to cut of our largely unrehearsed program. In the end we divided our solo numbers between concerts and took the best of the group numbers.

Thursday night's party was short lived. We came late and had to get up early for Friday's concert. There were also not very many of us and we had a rather thin set of common tunes.

Friday we were scheduled to play in a Chinese restaurant. It was difficult to tell if the audience was interested in us, but eating their lunch, or not interested at all. We're going with the former because it makes us feel better. Later we went back to the restaurant since we got free lunch for playing; the food was pretty good, so I can understand if people we paying more attention to lunch than our music.

After Chinese food, we enjoyed a couple of concerts. The first was panel concert with a broad spectrum of the festival artists. From Kim Andre Rysstad (kveding) to Fosbrooks School (English music/step-dance - playing and dancing at the same time) the program was varied and entertaining.

We left early from that concert to get to Unni Boksasp and band. I think Unni is amazing, plus her band includes Ånon Egeland (my fiddle teacher and big name in Norwegian folk music) and Olav Mjelva. Her concert was a usual excellent. The only low point was a tune she composed about the woman who was her inspiration. I can forgive one tune in an otherwise fabulous hour long concert.

We went to bed early so we would be fresh and prepared for Saturday's concert. Saturday we got up early and enjoyed a leisurely breakfast. Then we headed over to the other hotel where we would be playing. We had a successful soundcheck in spite of our ridiculous combination of intruments (enrader, torader, gitar, seljefløyte, sang, harpeleik, 2 fiddles, and nyckelharpa for four people). Anna made it from her other performance just in time for us all to go on stage together. I think we played pretty well considering we were quite nervous and it was a little difficult to hear each other on stage.

After our performance we wandered off to find lunch and relax, having fulfilled all of our obligations for the weekend. The only place we found to eat at was the local pub in the center of town. As we got closer we read on their announcement board "HiT Studenter", that is... us. We headed back to the car and got our instruments, put our heads together and came up with a new set list. 45 minutes after realizing we were supposed to play the concert we started. It turned out to be the best of our concerts that weekend. We were relaxed, the audience was engaged, and we had a lot of fun.

When we arrived back at the hotel, I got a message that a relative had called. I called him back and got to meet up with my 4th cousin who lives in Farsund. That was pretty exciting - I hadn't seen him in at least 15 years, so there was a fair amount of family updating to be had.

On Sunday we allowed ourselves to sleep in a little before climbing in the car for the long drive home. Sveinung entertained us by learning to play melodies on the harpeleik the whole ride home.