Tomek Ziółkowski

"COUCH-VID 19" / Couch Raiders / PREMIERE

LIVE already introduced you to the Couch Raiders just the other day (via their full-length video: "CONNECTIONS") - so you might remember this crew from Poland, orchestrated by Polish filmer Booshek of Half A Brain, aka. Michał Buśko who's been living in Manchester for some years now. Despite such a move, the universal aspect of skateboarding still prevails over the arbitrary order of geography and, this time, it is in Barcelona that everyone caught up with everybody.

The resulting piece, brewed by Michał before the Big Lockdown: "COUCH-VID 19" is infectious with gritty VX-2100 vibes, and varied styles aplenty as many generations punctuate the timeline, comprising skaters from fifteen to forty-five years young.

The soundtrack is homemade, too, by Szwed Sed, big time hip-hop and rap producer in Poland and also a former skateboarder (if there's such a thing), who knows how to modulate the pace of his beats to the flow of the skater his creation is then tailor-fit for.

"It was a few months ago - before the virus - when my friends and I went on another trip to Barcelona; it's a tradition of ours to go there every year, to skate and forget about all the bad aspects of England and Poland, such as the bad weather.

Nearly everyone knows Barcelona is one of the best cities in Europe for skateboarding but, this time, we tried to explore the city in a different way than we normally do. We focused on skate spots that aren't near the city centre - we'd travel by train.

We were there for eight days and that's obviously not much time to stack a lot of clips.

We were very lucky to have our friends on board with us: Stu and Tommy, as our guides. They had been living in Barcelona for some time before the virus, so they knew more about the skate spots and places around than we did - this was a bonus for us. Stu still lives there to this day, and he's one of our connections from Manchester. We hope you're good, G!

Anyway, it was very interesting to see how many diverse age groups could participate on this trip - there were at least four generations of skateboarders present." - Michał Buśko

To Rome with love

Poland-based skate filmmaker Krzysztof Godek is, as of recently, running his own brand Repeat and, more generally, somebody whose works have been placed on display on LIVE quite a few times before; and today, he's back with an edit filmed, this time, in Rome - quite the unpopular destination for a skate trip despite being the capital of Italy, as it seems commonly overshadowed by the much more practical Milanese marble. Well, the task to restore a certain balance is up to Varsaw's SH Store riders in this case, and the results are now live for you to watch, for a little audiovisual holiday!

As a complement, here are some words straight from Krzysztof, and a photo gallery by Jakub Suwiński.

Pale grey eyes

The Grey Area Polish homies are back, still with O.G. Kuba Kaczmarczyk (interviewed here, in company of recent Danny Fuenzalida footage) at the wheel, driving in an audiovisual style that seemingly gets more refined with every new output. In addition to the local cities of Warsaw and Kraków, and of a chunk of Ukraine, the filmmaker's territory now also expands to Croatia where he notably connected with Tom Remillard at various editions of the Vladimir Film Festival; so of course, Tom has a full part (or two) in this new production, alongside the notorious Kraków Kids (interviewed here) Kuba Brniak, Michal Zarzycki and Franek Kramarczyk, but also Eniz Fazliov, Michal Juras, Didrik Galasso or Chilian talent Juan Jose Moraga. The spots are crazy, the tricks are quality, the rain is universal: a solid bite into some healthy, savory grey fruit, as usual. Full article including stories and a photo gallery over at Free Skate Mag, here.

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