Our Adventures in Budapest & Austria (Patreon)

Hey Everyone,

A quick pre-blog update: Strader, Dayn, and I (Travis) are working round the clock (quite literally - I work until Dayn starts working, and Dayn is up when I start) in an effort to release all of Avrum & VAST before The White Vault starts in October... Therefore, we're working in a strange order that will make the last 4 episodes of VAST go by faster over the next 4-5 weeks, at the cost of no episode release this week... The upside is that we hope to have at LEAST 1 release per week in October. We also need to push Dark Dice back to accommodate this schedule, as we spent our monthly time allotment on the below adventure, and prepping for it in days leading into it.

Our real adventure began over 6 months ago, writing music, arranging, rewriting, etc... However, preparations complete, studio time booked, composer Brandon Boone met us in Austria on our way to the recording! There was much coffee!

IMPORTANT NOTE: This journey took place during COVID, while Hungary was experiencing less than 150 new cases per day (as a country!). Despite this, we wore masks throughout the vast majority of our adventures and while you don't see us masked in photos, we intentionally took our off masks to eat, drink, and take photos. We are all vaccinated and followed the COVID rules for each country we visited. 

For those of you who don't know Brandon Boone, he is the primary composer for The White Vault, Tales from the Tower, and VAST Horizon. He has also contributed a lot of music for Dark Dice, and writes/records over 2 HOURS of music each for our favorite podcast of all time: The NoSleep Podcast!

After hours of travel, we arrived in Budapest, Hungary at the beautiful Keleti station.

We walked to our BnB, passing buildings that you could FEEL the history of... This one in particular looked haunted.

We passed actual gargoyles, statuettes, gold-plated rooms, coffee shops, bars, and walked through the very lively city of Budapest.

The next morning we got bagels and walked down to the river. Again, we passed so many scenic buildings, memorials, statues literally carved into buildings, murals, and really witty graffiti. Budapest's grand buildings have seen so much over the centuries, and it felt like we could see some of those changes just by looking at the shifts in paint color, or the small patches of brick and concrete intentionally omitted by renovations. We both swore we'd photoshop the cranes out of the above landscape... right after we catch up on our respective jobs. 

We took a photo of the parliament building, thinking it to be one of the most grand structures we'd seen... Until we realized that this was only the short end of the building.

It keeps going so much further than this picture shows... And the subway-like descending stairs (seen above) led to a powerful memorial to a shooting that happened in 1956, when a Russian tank opened fire on unarmed protestors. As Americans, we often think of WW2's conclusion as "the end of all major conflicts," but the lasting consequences and struggles throughout the world were presented within.

We walked passed many more statues and beautiful buildings, across a very large bridge which was labeled in google as "Bridge of 5 views" (Margit híd). We strolled, got more coffee, stopped in board game shop, and continued to the castle.

I know that most people lack my appreciate for street art but I couldn't help myself with this one...

We took a few wrong turns and wound up having to climb a few hundred stairs... This caused us to forget to take pictures for awhile. We were particularly embarrassed as local kids on a track team sped by us up the stairs, unphazed. We eventually reached our destination: The Labyrinth, which google claimed once held Dracula as a prisoner.

The labyrinth really delivered on all fronts. It was historical, educational, ancient, natural (half a million years old), spooky, and very interactive. It also had opera throughout, and creepy wax dummies like this guy right here. At least, we hope they are all was dummies... The creepiest part is how big it is, and how they randomly sneak scenes like this in places 90% of people won't notice.

There was only one room we outright refused to venture into, for obvious reasons as we were 90% sure that there are feet on the other side of this cloth, and from the cloth movement near where a face would be, we thought it might be breathing. In the halls beyond, we walked in dozens of meters of total darkness, hallucinated random colors in the darkness (our eyes kept lying to us and there was a room we both briefly thought we saw before walking into a wall), we laughed with German tourists, and eventually we found Dracula's prison cell.

Realizing it was getting late, we took a $5USD taxi to the other side of town, had a quick dinner, and started the string session!

You can see the entirety of our visit on our INSTAGRAM and it was truly magical. We got through 85% of the music in just under 4 hours, and it was the first time we'd ever personally seen our music come to life in this way. It was fairly emotional. We were both admittedly hyper focused on the production elements in the moment, but after the recording session we were able to emotionally process and appreciate it.

We caught a second dinner and watched the film Amadeo, noting how much Budapest seems to love music & art, if their statues and murals are any indicator. We also may have stayed up until 5am editing the first tracks we received, and binging Netflix's Squid Game. The following morning, we got more coffee, tea, and I had ridiculously good pomegranate-avocado-almond toast. Laugh all you want, but it was very good. They also take coffee-froth art very seriously in Budapest.

We continued our journey toward the central market. We got souvenirs for family (Hungarian paprika is said to be legendary), coffee, dinner, and rushed to the studio. 

Again, you can watch the magic of this session on our Instagram, and this time we were even more hyper focused, trying to accomplish 8 hours of work in 4 hours, while throwing things at the choir like tritones, multiple languages (Quenya, Infernal, German, Icelandic, & English), and rapid-fire chant sections. The studio itself has a history too, formerly an international record label HQ. 

We had a great time, and the magic of hearing an actual choir (as opposed to our MIDI choir tracks, or my terrible singing) immediately changed the quality of each song they touched.

When the session concluded we stopped for inexpensive sushi and a victory drink before getting coffee, and catching up on emails between episodes of Squid Game.

Brandon and I caught an early train to Austria before bumping into Gemma Amor, a horror writer and friend (whose works have appeared on NoSleep). We got drinks at Mozart's favorite café, Brandon ate two sad sausages, and we went on a few relaxing touristy adventures in the area. We also saw (but couldn't photograph) a Peter Lewis doppelgänger, and we're 90% certain that our taxi driver was the cofounder of Redbull, trying to be incognito.

Kaitlin joined us for this leg of the journey, and we enjoyed a day off, disconnected from electronics except for Squid Game and to take photographs. We enjoyed the mountains and vast vistas on an abnormally sunny autumn day.

I did bit of a terrible job taking photographs during this portion of the journey, but it was largely a café-crawl of tea, coffee, and conversation with old friends, mixed with hiking... I did catch a photo (above) of Brandon enjoying the view from a comfortable distance from the steep and incredibly high drop off the side of the mountain. 

Even nature seemed relaxed on our final day as a butterfly landed on Gemma, and a bee walked all across Travis' face before moving on to sweeter things (his hot chocolate, then flowers). And before we knew it, our grand adventure had concluded and we all departed in our respective directions toward the US, UK, and Germany.We look forward to sharing the fruits of our adventure with you!