"Eurotrash or Eurotreasure?" DJ Set 32 Available Next Week

I haven't been posting much to this blog, my kingpigeon.com site has been in a state of suspended animation, and my journalistic endeavors have been temporarily put on hold as I have been investing hundreds of hours into the creation of a three hour and forty minute long Euro-themed DJ set which will be made available to you next week. I "test drove" it last night in order to sort out various glitches and volume issues, and having just taken that epic ride I can promise you this: it will be worth the wait.

There's nothing like a little marketing to whet your appetite. Here is the (probably) finalized flyer.

Planning Stage: Estonia

Yesterday's 2 hours of planning my DJ Eastern European Misadventure focused on the clubs of Estonia. Estonia is a country of 1.5 million. They speak Estonian, Russian, and most know some English. My friend Vaidas, who has traveled around the region, tells me that Russian is not all that commonly spoken there despite the shared border with Russia. Estonians seem to see themselves more as Scandinavians with an Eastern European swagger. Their language, to my American ears, sounds much more Scandinavian than Russian.

The Estonian music scene is fantastic. It proves that population does not have a bearing on the quality of one's pop music. You might think a country of 1.5 million would have, at best, one or two talented artists. Estonia, it turns out, has a lot of good stuff to offer. Here are some great relatively recent Estonian pop tunes:

Hannaliisa Uusma (HU?) - Sa meeldid mulle
Birgit Õigemeel - Moonduja
Laura feat. Tafenau - Lihtsad asjad

I visited TurismiWeb and went through their long list of Estonian nightclubs to find places that looked like they would fit my own DJ'ing spirit, since the whole goal of this adventure is to DJ my way through Eastern Europe. I checked out photos from the various clubs' galleries, studied their advertising, and from that selected six candidates. I sent emails out to those six yesterday. The clubs I selected are in the towns I have indicated in the map above.

The winners were:

Beach Club (Pärnu)
Club Panoraam (Tallinn)
Club Red (Viljandi)
Lifeclub (Põlvamaal)
Nightclub Oscar (Tallinn)
Ööklubi YES (Valga)

So I wrote to each one of them, included a link to my latest Eurodance mix, and now await a reply.

Prison Break: Beginning of a New Life/Total Freaking Disaster

Sometime around 2 AM on 14 November, as I stood in the parking lot of my apartment complex in my underwear hoisting and then dropping an armchair into the dumpster (much to the delight of my neighbors, one of whom opened his door to inspect my progress before slamming it shut again in rage), I realized that I had reached the point of no return.

The path to that point began with depression in middle school, which morphed into depression in high school, which turned into depression in college, which then became depression in Atlanta, which became a half-hearted suicide attempt in 1997, which became therapy in early 2009, which became a drunken me throwing out an armchair at 2 AM.

The dumpster incident sounds like the sort of thing my fictional alter-ego, a Eurotrash DJ named "Mr. Lava," would have described in his blog on my Euro-music website "Eurotrash or Eurotreasure?" But this incident was real, as am I, and this blog will describe only real things as I move towards the biggest change of my life.

The current plan: to leave Atlanta for Eastern Europe in January 2010, and to DJ my way through the part of the world that I have long found the most exciting and interesting. I also intend to write about my adventures and discoveries, both here in this blog and also for other publications.

I have little money to start with. I presume I will have no health insurance. Not sure how that works, actually; that will be next week's task to determine. I am devoting 4.5 hours a day to planning this adventure, those hours divided into categories such as: "Finding gigs in Europe," "Eurotrash music research," "Cleaning out of apartment," and the always useful "Miscellaneous."

Sounds like a stupid plan, especially when you consider how little cash I will leave with. But oddly enough this is partly why I am leaving my job in the first place. If your job pays you dirt, then you may as well find another job that pays you dirt, but that you love doing.