Tenerife Life

What’s good! We’re back on here and we have so much to tell you! Let’s start from the top..

As mentioned in our last post, we made it to Tenerife last December and moved to a small beachside village called Bajamar. It’s a pretty calm area, especially compared to the Island’s southern towns. There are just a few weird people who like throwing out their glass waste at 1 am every night and then there’s the local post office worker – their super loud car alarm goes off every time they start their car lol. Apart from that we’ve really been enjoying our stay away from all the hustle and bustle of big cities like Vienna. There’s a tiny supermarket here and a single bar that serves mediocre margaritas that we still order from time to time, like when we want to celebrate hitting a new streaming record (thanks to you guys ofc). One thing we dislike about Bajamar is its center, where you will find many shops with German words on their storefronts (“Deutsche Konditorei”). We like places that haven’t been overrun by tourists even though we are tourists too, weird paradox and far from a fresh take, unlike Lou’s new mullet which is super fresh and clean and amazing and GREAT 😜✨

La Laguna is the closest city to us, offering more specialized shops, nightlife and more action in general. It’s a wonderful place, but it’s so damn cold! The difference in temperature between Bajamar and up there can be up to 10 degrees celsius even though the distance is less than 8 miles. Guess that’s how mountains work hehe the more you know..

Both of us have been surfing for a while now so we try to go surfing out here somewhat regularly (we still suck tho). However, we recently came in contact with a phenomenon called “localism” which describes local surfers defending their territory by being aggressive towards outsiders/tourists. Whatever your stance on localism, our car was keyed in the parking lot because of this which certainly isn’t the worst thing in the world but it did make us feel bad and less welcomed. May the car keyer be cursed with bad waves for at least two weeks!

Apart from surfing we’ve been exercising a lot in other ways: We got back into the gym and started gaining weight as a result. We think it’s funny to be an indie band that makes super soft and dreamy music but then be absolutely ripped when we perform on stage, cool contrast right? Might be a lot of work for a joke, it’s gonna pay off tho. Running has been another staple of our exercise routine and we can definitely feel how we’re gaining endurance from week to week, hitting new time records on our beautiful, scenic running route. One thing that is definitely helping our fitness progress is our diet – we’ve been eating very clean out here, non organic foods tho cause we’re broke af BUT eating heaps of locally grown fruits and veggies. Lou makes fried rice and poke bowls all the time and luckily we still enjoy it as much as on the first day!

It’s pretty wild to think that we’re leaving here in less than a month to go back to Vienna. Summer in the Austrian capital is bearable, don’t get us wrong, but we’re definitely gonna miss Tenerife nonetheless. The last few months here we’ve been occupied with writing, recording, mixing and mastering our new single “losing friends” which will be out on April 22nd. It’s been a very long road to completing this record, the mixing phase took so much longer than we expected. It really feels like we’re getting a lot better at it but then we keep making our songs more and more complex and difficult to mix so we keep taking longer anyway. At the same time we’ve been working on our live show which is something we’re equally as proud of as we are excited to make it better over time – AND ofc show it to you guys! Putting together a stageworthy show might not seem like a big deal but for us the difficulty lies in the fact that we’re just two guys trying to perform the parts of a whole band. It honestly seemed impossible for the longest time, especially considering our lack of decent music equipment, but we finally bit the bullet and got going. We started off with just the project files of our eight indie songs that we’ve released to date (sidenote: HUGE throwback opening those projects, unveiling old ideas for vocals like for the unknown which almost came out completely different than it is now). Then we cut out the parts that we actually can and want to play live and kept the rest in there so we can play them via our midi controller on stage. We feel like that’s the best solution for now as it’s super fun and energetic while saving us the hassle of organizing an entire band and traveling to shows with a party of people. This way it’s just the two of us on stage, Lou and his guitar (And approx. 1 Million effect pedals lol) and Emil holding a mic and pushing buttons plus triggering some drum samples, playing some keys. We were also allowed to play a few songs at a bar in La Laguna recently, which served as a proof of concept for our live show. People seemed to love it and we were even asked by staff to play a full concert there. Exciting!

After a two week break (Emil got a throat infection and then covid on top of that and Lou was sick as well :/) and finishing our first collab ever with a super awesome Austrian artist we’re back to writing now – this time for our next single after “losing friends”. Today we wrote down a bunch of ideas and even found a really cool idea for the chorus that we are absolutely in love with. Probably some of our best writing to date, feeling ecstatic. Tomorrow our dear friend Pat (he’s insane) is coming to visit for about two weeks so we’re gonna have to slow down our efforts to some extent but will definitely try to get as much done as possible since we’re behind on our release schedule for the year. After Pat leaves our close friend Thommi (also insane) is visiting and almost right after that we’re leaving here which means turbulent times are ahead but we will try to be productive anyway. Stay safe out there:)

Edit: last weekend, we finally got to play our full show at “La Bowie” in La Laguna! We had to practice a lot beforehand but it was totally worth it! We had such a good time and everybody was so nice to us, lovely people all around <3. The owners of the venue are a super nice couple that put together the entire event and helped us get our sound right. Huge thanks to them 🙂 A few people we met earlier during our stay here on the island showed up, as well as some of our closest ones. At the end of our show we covered Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name of” which was suuuuper fun. What a beautiful night!! We had a few drinks after the show and went home feeling great because of all the love we received and also we now know that our live show actually works and we are in fact able to entertain people. Right now we’re editing a video of our show that night so we can send it out to other venues/promoters and hopefully get booked for more shows. We’re SO excited, it’s insane.