Noisecore and other distractions

China is loud! Like woken up at 7am in the morning to the sound of a jackhammer on Sunday loud.

Good thing is, you don't have to care as much either. So if you feel like blasting Death Metal after 10pm then that is mostly an okay as well. That is fun, because in good ol' Germany people might complain if you take a shower after that time - insane and totally uncool.

So yeah, thing can get weird. Obviously the subject of 'noise pollution' is something that doesn't really come up. Why? No why!

This leads me elegantly to noisy music or what can be seen as such. Recently Black Metal spiked in popularity again, especially with one band: Deafhaven. Not only did they deliver one of the highest ranking albums in 2013, they topped the Rock Charts with Sunbather and all of that with a pink album cover. Get it? Black Metal and a pink album cover - we are going places.

In May last year I went to the concert here in Shanghai and it was impressive.

Have a taste of the music:

[embed]https://youtu.be/RWyVhIBmdGw[/embed]

It is Sludge influenced black metal with beautiful melodies and a beautiful cover. What is not to like?

And here is my brillant lead to other distractions. Because what I like to distract myself from work with and to stay healthy and relax is martial arts.

Currently I am training here - Shanghai JX Fight Club with the man Ramsey Dewey.

Not only is it the best martial arts gym price wise, it is also the one with one of the nicest characters all around. I can be a handful and joke all the time (until I am exhausted or got punched in the gut) and Ramsey is just always positive, comes with free life advise and a crazy amount of wisdom when it comes to fighting. So come around if you are in Shanghai!

Before that I had a great time with the awesome people in Munich MMA complete with pink shirts and an owl as a mascot. See - there is a pink thread through this post. Those guys are great as well and rest assured neither there nor in Ramsey gym you will find aggressive assholes - only fun, exhaustion and a good vibe.

We are coming full circle here, because yesterday my MMA trainer Ramsey also dances. He is basically like Jean Claude Van Damme, but cooler. There was a contemporary dance show in the little art district M50 not that far from my house.

The show was first a slideshow of seemingly random Chinese movie scenes, like Kung Fu movies, the Monkey King, a girl picking flowers and all this underlined with a distorted guitar and effects distorting and repeating the images seemingly at random. It was intense and reminded me of that Deafhaven concert - since one of the supporting bands was displaying a similar video weave in the background and the music they played reminded me strongly of that.

This is how that looked:

Later on Ramsey and female dancers came on, again to some weird music and they were dancing and performing a ritual, maybe they got baptized, maybe they became initiated to worship aliens or maybe they were abducted or hypnotized...

I can just give you a tiny glimpse here:

So what I take away from this is: move more and think more. It's good for you!