Sunday 26 April 2009

Burnt Roads and Woven Jacquard in the Netherlands


This weekend we got invited to play the Neurosis-curated Beyond the Pale mini-festival within the annual Roadburn Festival in Tilburg, Holland. Phew. We played this festival last year and the whole experience was pretty overwhelming then. It might be the full year of touring since and all the people we've met and then ran into this weekend, but this year's festival seemed somehow much more manageable. Of course, having our friends Robert and Helge around certainly helped keep my mind occupied and anxiety at bay. Robert's putting out a 12" of ours very soon and we thought it would be a-okay for him to sell some records at the show along side our stuff - sadly, not so. I hope listening to the Big Lebowski in it's entirety on the drive home made the weekend worthwhile! I also opened myself up to very possible ridicule when I placed a small stack of patches on our merch table - demographically, the Swedes seemed most keen on them.

These guys asked us to play. They are legends and they are awesome. (Sorry for the crappy shot, but I am short and the room was packed...)



My new Berlin craft friend Linda told me about the Audax Textielmuseum in Tilburg so in the few hours I had before things really got underway at the festival, I snuck out of my music duties to check it out.





This place is both a museum and running Textilelab, so almost no machinery is standing stationary. In one room, raw fibre is transformed into heavy and beautiful wool blankets.




In another, some of them most amazing jacquard art is woven up on massive machines.





Photography was forbidden in Knitted Worlds exhibition, but check out their blog to see what some of the artists were up to. Some of it was pretty darn incredible. A couple of my favorites were Kelly Jenkins' massive and naughty knit magazines and Greetje Van Tiem's newspaper yarn.

2 comments:

karyn said...

i hope you'll post about linkle. it was the first sewing cafe i heard about and was a huge spark of inspiration for the workroom.

and all these textiles are amazing!

leah b said...

that's so amazing karyn! linda's pretty great - she's become my go to person for where stuff is at in this city. i'm also working on a little something with her and a couple others so more on that soon.