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Neues Album: "Need to move at last"

ALBUM-RELEASE Konzert: 1. Oktober 2016 // Knut's Quartiersbühne

„Need to move at last“ - endlich in Bewegung kommen. Das ist es was der Wittener Singer-Songwriter mit seinem neuen Album jetzt tut. Auf vielen Bühnen NRWs war er im letzten Jahr unterwegs. Solo – aber vor allem auch mit seinem Trio (Johannes Nebel / Bass, Philipp Klahn / Schlagzeug). Und endlich runden sie dies ab mit einem wohl gewählten und liebevoll aufgenommenen Auszug aus ihrem Repertoire.
Ca. drei Jahre ist es her als Nils-Christopher sich entschloss alte musikalische Wurzeln auszugraben und ihnen wieder zu folgen. Grundlage dafür war seine Gitarre, mit der er schon im Alter von 14 seine ersten Songs schrieb. Sein letztes Album „We Can Be“, welches 2012 bei Doublemoon Records erschien, war komplett am Klavier entstanden. Der jazzige Grundton des Albums ist gewichen und hat mehr Soul bekommen. Und natürlich verändert sich auch der Sound und das Songwriting durch die Gitarre. „Holz“ und Minimalismus sind hier die Bestimmer und ihnen folgen mehr Intimität und Wärme. Genau von diesen Begriffen war auch die Zusammenarbeit der Musiker in der letzten Zeit geprägt, welches mit dem Produzenten Alex Werth (Studio Debussy Essen) durch ein weiteres tragendes Mitglied bei der Aufnahme erweitert wurde.
Jetzt muss es nurnoch raus das Album, welches beim Label Funk Bunker Records aus Witten ein Zuhause hat. Für das offizielle Release haben sich die Jungs ein ebenso warmen und intimen Ort gewählt. Die Quatiersbühne des Knut's in Witten. Als Überraschung wird es vorweg noch ein kleinen Support geben.
Jetzt heißt es „Need to move at last“ – endlich in Bewegung kommen. Wir hoffen, dass auch Ihr euch bewegt und an diesem besonderen Abend der Veröffentlichung teilhabt.

Knut's Quartiersbühne
Wiesenstraße 25, 58452 Witten
Beginn: 20 Uhr / Einlass 19.30 Uhr
Eintritt: 7 Euro
Reservierung unter: info@nils-christopher.de

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When you are alone

You will remember the people more than the place.

When you are alone for days or weeks at a time, you eventually become drawn to people. Talking to randos is the norm. I’ll never forget the conversation with the aquarium fisherman, forest ranger, and women at the Thai market. It’s refreshing to compare notes on life with people from vastly different backgrounds.

When you meet fellow travelers, you’ll find they are also filled with a similar sense of adventure and curiosity about the world. Five days of friendship on the road is like five months of friendship at home. It’s the experiences that bond you together, not the place. A rule I followed that worked well: be the first to initiate conversation. I met some incredible people by simply being the first to talk.

Make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty.

Travel can be affordable.

Long term travel is different than a luxury vacation. The point is to see the world, not stay in a 5-star hotel. During the trip, I stayed on a strict budget. The goal was to spend no more than $33 per day on accommodations. After a year, I was able to spend only $26.15 per day by booking through HostelWorld and Airbnb. When I wanted to meet people, I’d stay in a shared room at a hostel. When I wanted to be alone, I’d book a private room with Airbnb.

Take the cost of your rent or mortgage + food per month and divide it by 30. This is how much it costs per day to live at home. You will find that it’s possible to travel the world for roughly the same amount. Or, if you live in an expensive city like San Francisco, far less.

English is a universal language.

I was surprised how many people spoke English (apparently 1.8 billion people worldwide). Places where English was less prevalent, I made an effort to learn a handful of words and phrases in the local language. Even though it’s passable, I do desire to learn another language fluently. You can only take the conversation so far when all you can say is: “¿Esto contiene gluten?”

It’s possible to communicate a lot without saying a word. For instance, I left my phone at a restaurant in Chile. I pointed at the table where I was sitting, put my hand to my ear like a phone, then shrugged — 2 minutes later, my phone had been retrieved.

Trust your intuition.

I learned to trust that tiny voice in my head a bit more. When you are alone in a foreign country and your phone is dead, you are forced to trust your intuition. Is this neighborhood safe to walk around? Is this person someone I should interact with? Am I heading the right direction? Intuition is like a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it becomes. It’s feels like a sixth sense when you’re able to read between the lines of a situation.

The world is endless. The world’s a tiny neighborhood. My fav people are the ones who can hold two impossible ideas in their heads.

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Time is passing by

CSS selectors all exist within the same global scope. Anyone who has worked with CSS long enough has had to come to terms with its aggressively global nature — a model clearly designed in the age of documents, now struggling to offer a sane working environment for today’s modern web applications. Every selector has the potential to have unintended side effects by targeting unwanted elements or clashing with other selectors. More surprisingly, our selectors may even lose out in the global specificity war, ultimately having little or no effect on the page at all.

Any time we make a change to a CSS file, we need to carefully consider the global environment in which our styles will sit. No other front end technology requires so much discipline just to keep the code at a minimum level of maintainability. But it doesn’t have to be this way. It’s time to leave the era of global style sheets behind.

It’s time for local CSS.

In other languages, it’s accepted that modifying the global environment is something to be done rarely, if ever.

In the JavaScript community, thanks to tools like Browserify, Webpack and JSPM, it’s now expected that our code will consist of small modules, each encapsulating their explicit dependencies, exporting a minimal API.

Yet, somehow, CSS still seems to be getting a free pass.

Many of us — myself included, until recently — have been working with CSS so long that we don’t see the lack of local scope as a problem that we can solve without significant help from browser vendors. Even then, we’d still need to wait for the majority of our users to be using a browser with proper Shadow DOM support.

We’ve worked around the issues of global scope with a series of naming conventions like OOCSS, SMACSS, BEM and SUIT, each providing a way for us to avoid naming collisions and emulate sane scoping rules.

We no longer need to add lengthy prefixes to all of our selectors to simulate scoping. More components could define their own foo and bar identifiers which — unlike the traditional global selector model—wouldn’t produce any naming collisions.

import styles from './MyComponent.css';
import React, { Component } from 'react';
export default class MyComponent extends Component {
 render() {
    return (
      <div>
        <div className={styles.foo}>Foo</div>
        <div className={styles.bar}>Bar</div>
      </div>
    );
  }

The benefits of global CSS — style re-use between components via utility classes, etc. — are still achievable with this model. The key difference is that, just like when we work in other technologies, we need to explicitly import the classes that we depend on. Our code can’t make many, if any, assumptions about the global environment.

Writing maintainable CSS is now encouraged, not by careful adherence to a naming convention, but by style encapsulation during development.

Once you’ve tried working with local CSS, there’s really no going back. Experiencing true local scope in our style sheets — in a way that works across all browsers— is not something to be easily ignored.

Introducing local scope has had a significant ripple effect on how we approach our CSS. Naming conventions, patterns of re-use, and the potential extraction of styles into separate packages are all directly affected by this shift, and we’re only at the beginning of this new era of local CSS.

process.env.NODE_ENV === 'development' ?
    '[name]__[local]___[hash:base64:5]' :
    '[hash:base64:5]'
)

Understanding the ramifications of this shift is something that we’re still working through. With your valuable input and experimentation, I’m hoping that this is a conversation we can have together as a larger community.

Note: Automatically optimising style re-use between components would be an amazing step forward, but it definitely requires help from people a lot smarter than me.

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Trust in your intuitions

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