We first met Matthias and Margo in Bayreuth in 2018 when they hosted us at a little DIY venue called Sübkültür. It was a tiny hole in the wall with a 6-inch stage where dan and played to a room crammed with people. Pictures from back then make it look like a hardcore show — just a mess of bodies hunched together for songs.

When we pulled up to Nueneinhalb and saw Matthias happily waving at us, Margot not far behind. I went in for hugs. It means so much to see a familiar face so far front home.

They moved into this new venue not long after covid broke out, then hosted their first shows in the new place around 2022 or so. It’s just a three minute walk from the old place, and we walked to the same restaurant — the Rosa Rosa — for a sit-down dinner together with Jens and the band.

The city owns the building and arts funding allows the rent to be quite low — around 500 euros a month for the whole venue. This has been a common story in most of the kulturzentrum’s that we’ve been playing on this tour — public arts funding allows them to offer a guarantee of several hundred euros, along with providing snacks, dinner, and a place to stay with breakfast in the morning.

He shared that to him, there’s no “hierarchy of artists” — no big artists, no small artists, just artists all deserving of respect and accommodation. He believes in songs, in music, and in stories. He loves Paul Auster and studied English and French Literature — he even finds that he enjoys reading more after leaving the university to book concerts.

Matthias is gregarious and personable, and he makes it feel like you’ve known each other for years. This became more interesting when I learned from Margot that he has face blindness — so his warmness is genuine, but also a strategy to allow him to figure out if he knows people already.

To top it all off, they used one of our photos (by Columbus’ own Fernando Rodriguez) for the cover of their event calendar. I’ll keep collecting these little artifacts of our tour — reminders of our travels for when it feels like it was all a dream.