New Arch Matheos Video released :-)

I have always been a die hard Fates Warning fan, with their "Awaken the guardian" album being  my very favourite album ever, this one is pure magic for me. So of course I was completely thrilled when they announced this kind of "reunion" of the old Fates Warning, and Sympathetic Resonance turned out to be an awesome album, it perfectly shows how the old Fates Warning would sound like in 2011. Here is the first video for this album, the song "Midnight Serenade", my personal highlight for 2011 :-)

The real me

Did you ever surf the internet and suddenly stumble upon yourself? Sometimes this happens to me, there are some cool sites online just paying tribute to myself or Blind Guardian, on the other hand there are also some freaks creating pages or profiles using my name and pretending to be me, which is not cool at all. So how can you know if it is really me that you found online? Actually this is very simple, aside from the official Blind Guardian homepage, the GMC homepage and this blog there are only two more places where you can find me:

Facebook - Yes, I have a Facebook account, no, I won't add you ;-) I am using Facebook only to babble with some friends of mine, there is no such thing as an "official" profile, it is only private so don't bother sending me requests there.

Google+ - I am also using Google+, originally I only wanted to see how it is compared to Facebook, in the end I liked both so I also kept my profile on Google+. Since this is not as private as my Facebook account you can even feel free to add me there, just don't expect too much posting from my side, you see how often I update this blog ;-)

If you see "Marcus Siepen" anywhere else on the internet you can be absolutely sure it is not me, I am not running any other pages or profiles on whatever communities.

Latin America & Australia

Hmm, I just realized that I am a bit slow with my updates again, so let me finally tell you about the rest of the Latin American /Australian tour. After finishing the Brazilian shows under perfect conditions and with awesome gigs we started moving into unknown territory and played in a lot of countries in which we have never played before. Unfortunately we ran into some serious technical problems, everything from broken mixing consoles to wrong electricity voltage or no electricity at all, but thanks to our crew we could still play every show and some of them turned out absolutely remarkable despite of the technical chaos. Take the show in Caracas for example, by the time we arrived at the venue to do soundcheck the whole place was completely flooded because of very heavy rain. The big problem was that also all the power generators were in the water, all the electricity was drowned completely, there was no chance of using anything of our equipment that demanded the converted power. So in the end we used equipment that we borrowed, stripped down everything (going down from 48 channels of monitor sound to 8 is fun :-) ) and played a set that was completely adapted to the circumstances: we couldn't use any clean sounds for the guitars or any keyboards, so we kicked out all those songs demanding this and played a pretty old school set, still the show was a lot of fun. My personal highlight of that evening was the Bards Song, the only "clean guitars" song that we didn't sacrifice, we played it with crunchy electric guitars, it sounded pretty differend but everybody still liked it.
After the Latin American part of the tour we went to Australia and played some great shows in Sydney and Melbourne. Unfortunately we had to cut the set in Sydney short because the owner of the venue only informed us about a strict curfew exactly one minute before that curfew, when we asked earlier on that day if there would be a curfew it was still "no curfew tonight"...Well, it was still an awesome show and we can always add the missing song next time ;-)
So a big thank you goes out to everybody involved, our fans, our crew and all the new and old friends we met during those weeks.
Another big thanks goes out to my friends in Sinbreed, whith whom I played a couple of gigs during the last weeks. Shortly before we started the South American tour Frederik asked me if I would like to play some shows with them cause they only had one guitarist in the band and of course I accepted the invitation. I didn't have much time to learn the songs, actually my only chance was using a couple of days off on the road, but in the end that was time enough and I loved the new experience, after all it was my first time playing with different musicians since the middle of the 80's. In case you missed those shows, don't worry, we are planning to do more next year ;-)