Sofa Salon Lineups 2014

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2014, Berlin, Cera Impala, Fredrik Kinbom, house concert, Il Tempo Gigante, lineups, Lisa Richards, live music, Mélissa Laveaux, musicians, My baby Will, Odi, Sofa Salon, Svavur Knutur, Vincent Long, when, Zoe Boekbinder

Hallo zusammen,

We had a really great Sofa Salon last Saturday night at K98, a wonderful house project. The space is much bigger than previous Sofa Salon wohnzimmer but will definitely work for the right musicians. Iris Romen’s enchanting country-jazz and Big Daddy Mugglestone’s situationist gospel preaching were two opposing sides of the Americana tradition and made for an exciting evening. Plenty of happy faces. I stayed until 06:00 and now know that shots of Berliner Luft are a seriously minty bad idea.
I’ve been booking for future Sofa Salons and we’ve got some wonderful lineups coming together.
Email me (berlinsofasalon [aet] googlemail.com) for reservations.

Friday 7 February: Vincent Long (Ber) + My Baby Will (Ber)
For Sofa Salon #53, Berlin troubadour Vincent Long manages to be funny, sweet and somehow sultry all together in one tall, literate indie-folk parcel. Vincent put in wonderful sets at various events over Berlin in the last year like Melodica Festival and Everyone Is From Somewhere. When our hostess saw Vincent at Melodica Acoustic Festival Berlin, she asked if she could host Vincent for Sofa Salon. Done. Support comes from inventive Italian in Berlin Monica Cipollone a.k.a. My Baby Will.
Eintritt 8€. Einlass 19:00. Bring friends. This one is behind the Bergmannstr in Kreuzberg.
https://www.facebook.com/events/199601670247416

Friday 14 March: Odi (IE) + Fredrik Kinbom (SE)
#54 features rootsy Irish indie pop singer-songwriter duo Odi + Swedish lap-steel musician Fredrik Kinbom. Odi’s quavering, emotional voice and emotive music was one of the lovely surprises that sometimes pop up in the Sofa Salon inbox. Fredrik Kinbom stepped in last-minute to support The Re-Mains at Sofa Salon last year and sounded so lovely (I’m a terrible sucker for good slide/steel guitar) that I have found him another show. People have already reserved places for this show, so get in quick.
Website: Odi
Website: Fred Kinbom

Friday 11. April: Il Tempo Gigante (DK) + Mélissa Laveaux (CA/FR)Sofa Salon #55 features amazing Danish guitarist/songwriter Il Tempo Gigante and talented Candian musician Mélissa Laveaux. I am hugely excited because after I booked Il Tempo Gigante for Berlin Music Week 2012, he suffered an unfortunate accident that stopped him playing for quite some time. It’s a pleasure to have him back on the live scene and doing a show for us. He is supported by remarkable Canadian songstress Mélissa Laveaux who, based in Paris, has been making waves with her very funky acoustic sounds. If you liked Elyas Khan at Sofa Salon, you’ll dig Mélissa.
Website Il Tempo Gigante
Website Mélissa Laveaux

Sunday May 11 – Melanie Horsnell (AU) + Hanna Leess (US)
It’s my birthday and I’m hosting a mini-festival with some hand-picked artists from across the world. Featuring is wonderful Australian musician Melanie Horsnell who will be touring Europe for the release of her most recent album The Cloud Appreciation Society. More on the lineup as I confirm acts.
Website: Melanie Horsnell
Website: Hanna Leess

Friday 13. June – Cera Impala (US) + Zoe Boekbinder (US)
Cera Impala returns to Berlin after having moved to the lovely gothic city of Edinburgh. She is much-loved in Berlin’s roots music scene as a player, writer and bon vivant. It’s a pleasure to have her back at Sofa Salon. Zoe Boekbinder is a roving US singer-songwriter with an apparently ferocious work ethic and a backpack of finely observed songs.
Website: Cera Impala
Website: Zoe Boekbinder

September: Svavur Knutur (IS) + Lisa Richards (AU)

Do: host your own house concert

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Berlin, community, community-building, Couchsurfing, Croxton Records, DIT, DIY, DO, earning a living, Europe, food, friends, GOOD, house concert, How Do?, intimacy, Konzert, live music, Mick Thomas, musician, new ideas, potluck, sharing, Sofa Salon, Suzanna Espie, touring, wine, Wohnzimmer

Around 2007, legendary Australian songwriter Mick Thomas told me a story about one of the artists on his Croxton Records label, the great soul-country singer Suzannah Espie. She had booked two gigs a week apart in Perth, some 3,400km away from her home in Melbourne. The cost of two return airfares was prohibitively high, some AUD$600. Suzannah rang the venues and anyone she knew in South-West Australia and asked if they could help her find some fill-in gigs to get her through the week. What she found was a handful of willing hosts who offered to put her up, feed her and invite their friends around and pass the hat if she’d play a concert.

Copyright Kate Seabrook 2012

After permanently relocating to Berlin in 2009, and remembering Suzannah’s story, I started my own monthly Berlin house concert series called Sofa Salon and started touring Europe as a solo musician under the name Wasp Summer. Over two years, my planning preferenced house concerts, filling in with some club gigs rather than using house shows as convenient, short-lead-time fill-ins for a club show tour.

Most of my touring is organised through the various Couchsurfing.org forums devoted to house concerts. Most of the Sofa Salon artists come from personal recommendations, email requests and acts that I see or hear of personally.

Copyright Jordane Chaillou 2012

I love hosting, watching and playing house concerts for the same reasons that I like dinner parties more than nightclubs – intimacy, connection, attention. It’s one of the great pleasures of my life in Berlin to sit in front of great singer-songwriters and hear them in company but with few distractions. The audience necessarily offers a higher level of attention which encourages the performer to offer greater intimacy and honesty no matter their style. It can be confronting for first-time guests and performers alike but most participants come away beaming. A large part of the audience for Sofa Salon comes from repeat visitors and word-of-mouth guests.

Copyright Orange ‘Ear

As hostess, guest and performer, I’ve discovered there are as many different ways to host a house concert as people to host them. I’ve played house shows in France, Germany, Australia and Spain – all with different policies on inviting guests, raising money for the artist, food, drink.

There are some general underlying principles to hosting a house concert.

1. Your musician should be paid.
Some hosts will never charge an entry fee on principle, but will pass the hat for the musician. The risk is that your guests won’t be generous. One night, I made 20€ after travelling 6 hours and playing for 1 1/2 hours. O the next your, I made 240€ from the hat and CD sales. Some, like myself, set an entry fee to guarantee a base level of income. I aim for 100€ per artist but I can guarantee at least 30 people at every Sofa Salon. Some hosts set a ‘suggested donation’ of 5-20€. Some artists with a bigger profile ask for a set fee and ask the host to arrange to cover it. As you like.

2. Offer dinner, drinks, accommodation
I always offer a bottle of wine and dinner for my artists as part of the deal. On tour, I am nearly always offered accommodation as part of the deal. Frequently, I am picked up from the train station. This makes touring much more cost efficient for the musician and is greatly appreciated.

3. Bring an audience.
There are various ways to arrange this. Some hosts like to make their events open to the public. Some only invite personal friends. Some find guests through facebook or couchsurfing events. With Sofa Salon, I have created a Berlin-wide network of hosts and, to protect their security, I only accept reservations by email and only send the address a day prior to the show to people who have reserved. It also gives me new names for my Sofa Salon email list which runs to over 1000 people after 2 1/2 years of shows.

Other variations on the hospitality theme include running a cash bar with cheap drinks or allowing the guests to BYO, making food to share or asking guests to bring food for a potluck dinner and hosting outdoors in the Summertime.

Why should you DO a house concert? If you love music, you can have it as a living intimate part of you life, witnessing excellent performance up close. You can gather your friends and community together for a heart-opening experience of sharing. You can offer practical and material support to touring musicians. There’s no reason why this could not be extended to film, dance, activist talks, educational nights, slide nights with visual artists. It’s an open-source, open-ended, community-building activity and it’s the best thing I ever created.

Migration

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alt.country, Berlin, curated, Deutschland, Dichter, electronica, folk, folk rock, Germany, house concert, Konzert, live music, monthly, poet, poetry, pop, rock, Serie, singer-songwriter, Sofa Salon, spoken word, Wohnzimmer

Hello Dearhearts. I’m migrating the website for Berlin Sofa Salon house concerts from blogger to wordpress, in order to make my life and blogging easier.