On the second day of my tour, we went to Ghent, Belgium to participate in Tweelank, a two-night festival of music at Campo Santo, a crumbly beautiful church on top of a hill surrounded by an impressive cemetery. The cemetery is the burial grounds for many writers,painters and composers. I found the idea of performing at a cemetery church to be interesting and curious for me. The acoustics were very reverberant–it was a thoughtful place picked out by the guys at Kraak for the acts they had chosen for Tweelank.
Kraak is an organization in Belgium that supports and promotes a large amount of experimental/left-field music acts. They book shows and bring artists from around the world to Ghent, Brussels and Antwerp. Since they do not have a dedicated venue, they choose different venues depending on the act they are bringing in. Each year they also have a festival in March and they promote a film series and other concerts throughout the year. I was disappointed to have missed the concert the night before for Tweelank because it featured Limpe Fuchs, an artist that performed on a large stone xylophone and other acoustic/visual instruments. After talking to her, I found out that the stones were picked out in Switzerland and she has been performing sculptural instruments for a very long time. She also had this large drum elevated with a long pipe-tube hanging from it that sounded like a low deep gong or chime. I couldn’t imagine touring with these large one-of-a-kind instruments. You can see some performance clips of her on these instruments on her site.