First of all, Merry Christmas! I'm having a nice lazy Christmas this year so I thought it would be a good time to talk a little bit about the tour that Countermeasure went on this past summer. It was an incredible experience, one I'll never forget.
We left at the end of July and flew to London, England, where we spent about four days and performed a few shows. That was an exciting weekend - seeing the tour kick off, performing in new venues every day, putting our feelers out to see whether European audiences would like us as much as they did when we were there the previous year (they did). After that weekend we boarded a bus to Edinburgh, taking in the beautiful English countryside.
We stayed in Edinburgh for three weeks, and it's one of my favourite cities I've ever been to. It really started to feel like home. The point of the trip was to perform at Edinburgh Fringe - we did 14 hour-long shows in total, plus several promotional shows of a handful of songs around the city. It was really a fantastic experience - never before have we had the chance to take multiple runs at the same show in such a condensed period of time, and was really incredible to see how much it solidified our skills. Our show enjoyed an unexpected amount of attention and traffic, considering it was a first-time show in the Fringe. It was pretty thrilling. You can read some of the reviews here and here.
After Edinburgh, we headed to Italy for a week. This was kind of the 'vacation' part of the trip - we had several days off before Vocalmente, the vocal festival in Fossano which was the reason for this stop. Italy is beautiful, but I have to say I never felt quite at home as I did in Edinburgh. But I enjoyed the heat more than the cool rainy Scottish weather!
Our involvement in Vocalmente mostly consisted of taking part in the Swingles Camp, a series of workshops put on by our friends the Swingles. But we also opened the festival in a double-bill with local group VoXes, in one of the most incredible concerts I've ever sung in my life. We were singing in the moat of the gigantic medieval castle in the middle of Fossano, for probably close to a thousand locals, who gave us one of the warmest receptions we've ever seen, including a double encore. What a night!
After a month away it was a bit of a drag to return to regular working life, but it was also nice to be home. It was an amazing tour, with success far beyond our expectations. It'll be hard to top that in the future (but, I always say that with each new thing Countermeasure does, and somehow it always happens)!
Marla