Update

Welcome back music lovers, time for an update.

We played our first show since the album release in November, our eleventh in total by the way, two Saturdays ago at dB’s in Utrecht. It was a DIY-deal, which basically means you rent the venue and get to organise your own show. We’d done it before in 2008, together with Machinist & Industrial Passage and Heavy Lord and really enjoyed that experience so we figured we’d try it again. Sharing the stage with us this time around was Hymir, a local group that specialises in performing an atmospheric blend of death- and black metal and slightly symphonic touches. They also released their first album in the previous year, you can check it out on their Bandcamp. The turn out was satisfactory, meaning: not crowded but still a sizeable group of people, not counting the bands. We broke even, also because we sold a couple of cd’s after the gig. A last.fm-user that goes by the name of ‘LastSilence‘ took some pictures with her “old and dying camera”, as she explained later but it sure did capture the essence of an Akelei-show. I’ll post the pictures below.

On a sad note: the Utrecht gig was Josha‘s last with us. He’s getting ready with his long-time death metal compadres in Carceri to unleash their looong awaited debut album The Good Must Suffer the Wicked and won’t be able to combine this with playing bass for Akelei. We understand his decision of course and thank him for the good times. Josha is a friend (and my brother) so in no way does this mean we won’t be seeing each other anymore.

Also, we did two interviews, our first. They’re both in Dutch and can be found here and here. And we made the end-of-year list at Zware Metalen. We ended up on the 11th spot, just 5 points short of beating Immolation to a place in the top-10! I’ll compile a list of reviews here: