symphony 2004 report

again I could make it to symphony in poland. this year in a car with nordbourgh and tirox which picked me up at the train station in potsdam. the trip to poznan was without any surprises, but inside poznan we got lost for some longer time. finally we saw the building of the party place (again eskulap musi_club) and were saved. for my surprise dalezy was already here, i heard before that he wouldn't arrive before late evening or even saturday. also dipswitch, madenmann and the m00ds posse found there way to symphony. other foreigners were tomcat and sir garbagetruck (he showed me some mobile demos on his nokia 6600). after unloading some stuff from the car we drove to some very big shopping center called 'tesco' to buy mainly something to drink. even with all the advertisements at the street it was a bit hard to find. the rest of the day was mainly boozing and talking with other sceners. two compos were moved to saturday, so my demoshow a bit after midnight was the only event of the first day (after the opening with a modified version of the invitation demo). on the alternative stage several dj's (tm dag etc.) were playing a good mix of techno and other stuff. nordbourgh was already dead drunk, his mix of beer and vodka was obviously to much.

saturday began after some hours sleep with more or less hangin' around since all the compos were moved several hours. the beamer had to be moved more far away from the big screen since the picture was quite small before (but much better quality than last year). many demos, videos and animations were played during the early hours of the day. the music on afternoon was mainly coming from my computer, some hand selected stuff from my scene music archive ;-). some guy was entertaining atleast the polish visitors since he didn't spoke one word english. outside the boozing continued. on the afternoon even nosfe arrived after some hours delay. i was boozing a bit on early evening with nordbourgh, tirox and some polish guys. one of the poles (update: cyc) got accidently hit in the face by a beer can. nordbourgh showed him what he has learned at the german army as a medic. we missed the gfx compo and during the music compos i was pretty tired. right now 'krzyz kross' are making some pretty weird live music on the main stage. at nearly one o'clock in the night the pretty short democompo (only 4 entries) began. there was a quite ok demo by uridium and one technically and visually amazing demo by plastic, just the sound didn't fit and wasted imo some of the potential of their demo. the organizers didn't spoke much english in the compo. tomcat thinks already that this years symphony suxx. last year it was clearly better organized. actually i don't know if many compos are following, atleast intro and/or wild compo should follow. on the alternative stage the dj's began to play their music.

the wild compo followed not much later, it was atleast better than last year. but again nearly no english words during the compo and some of the videos made problems on the first try. no animation compo this year and no intro compo. some time after the wild compo there was (to my surprise) one pegasos (amiga) demo shown which was obviously made for the amiga compo. flapjack and silentriot were absent at this time. even later at 4 o'clock the mp3 compo started - still without flap or silentriot and also without the most visitors. from a dma member i have received a floppy disk with their 'borntro' (in which they are greeting me - thanks!), this one was shown just minutes before the mp3 compo. open word to madwizards: next time better organizing or you will loose atleast your international visitors, last year you showed us that you can do it better! several people were already gone on the next morning and so it was no real surprise that there was no pricegiving. the organizers had also to give back the location earlier than expected. the trip back to berlin was again without problems and from the border on we listened to some good techno from the 'fritz loveradio' ;-)

reaction from flapjack: