Wednesday we premiered part one of Leon Moss’ “BENDER” video, today we close the show by giving you part 2.
Press play, there is really not much more to say, the skating does the talking and part 2 starts with a loud shout!
Leon would like to thank all involved and we would like to thank him in return for the collaborative efforts.
About 2 months ago we got a DM it was from a guy we know called @kuyt3000. We had met him in Düsseldorf during skate week but had previous knowledge of him through our doings with the Europe Co. his message read as follows:
Hey, my friend Leon just told me in the train that he would really like it if you would host his video after the premiere. And since he is asking I thought I would ask you guys because the connect is there YO!
Needless to say, I asked if he could put me in touch with Leon and we would take it from there. The rest was easy, the video was sent, watched by us and we uploaded the video files. We then asked Leon what he wanted people to know about the video and he sent us in response:
I moved to Düsseldorf in December of 2017, this footage was filmed in the 12 months after my move. I filmed in the gist of the video in Düsseldorf & Aachen but we also went to Cologne and the rest of the Ruhr valley :-).
we guess he is right the rest is just a formality. Press play and enjoy the video!
One of the many benefits of being from a small country is that it doesn’t take a long time before you are in another country. Belgium, Luxemburg, France, and even Denmark are all relatively short drives away. But even though countries like Germany are close, crossing the border makes everything look and feel slightly different. From the colour and build of the houses up to the food, everything is similar but not the same. Me being from The Netherlands but residing in Germany noticed these things when I first came here. But as time goes by, we start to accept our surroundings as they are and stop seeing things we were fascinated by a year before. So it was great to see this video pop up and notice the excitement Wouter, Pascal, Robbin and the rest of the Skatestore team must have felt at times.
Intro Roland Hoogwater.
Text Wouter Molenaar.
Photos Thomas Wieringa.
Video Marc Bolhuis.
During this Skatestore tour through Germany, we drove around, skated lots of spots, travelled to new places and drank lots of beer… A trip like this sounds like an ideal skateboard vacation doesn’t it? It was my first trip with this group of people, and we travelled to the German “Ruhr Area”, which was a pretty new place for us all. The Ruhrpott consists of a couple of old industrial cities like Dortmund, Essen and Köln. We had some excellent spot guides in the friendly folks of the Obtain Company, and they served up one spot after another. During the trip, all eleven of us stayed together bunched up in an Air BnB located in Bochum (one of Nordhrein-Westfalen biggest cities). Even though things where tight we ended up giving Sebastiaan Vijverberg his very own room because he snored too loud and we needed our beauty sleep.
We started most of our days quite early and chose a daily diet consisting of iced coffee, beer and pizza. Because of the proximity to one another, we picked a new city to skate every day, and to our surprise, we got to skate many well-variated spots in all of the cities.
As far as the skating goes, I remember some pretty crazy tricks going down pretty fast! For instance, Wouter de Jong jumped on this kinked rail that no one else wanted to touch and Shajen 360-flipped a rather large set first try. Every day we all tried our best to stack some clips. Another great thing was that we didn’t stress, sometimes we stayed at a spot for hours just because we could, other times we got kicked out tremendously fast. Either way, fun was being had the whole time. To answer my first, only and most important question; Yes, it was the ideal skateboard vacation.
Skate videos much like other forms of expression are often linked to the reality of the maker. When talking about trends in videos some video makers seem to have landed into territory that allows them to utilize the lost glory of industrial areas.
The title “Steel” makes obvious reference to the industries of yesteryear and while Adam Bos works his magic in the USA where Trump is trying to reignite the fire we see the same tendencies in German, Ruhr valley based companies like Obtain and Europe Co.
This video stands out a bit more because of an excellent music selection process that led to Adam using songs that add to the aesthetic instead of just using songs that work (which is hard enough already). Congrats on a great project and the Vimeo staff pick.
The description of the video “imac died while editing” leads us to believe there is more or there could have been more of where this came from.
We hope that those Apple geniuses can patch things back up because we need a steady Europe Co. flow.
After a little drought (it was winter after all) Paul Herrmann is back with another episode of his video column and to be honest, we feel like it is his best one yet. Don’t just rely on us though, make up your own mind and watch Kevin Vietzke, Timo Meiselbach, Skkinz, Luis Waterkamp and more in Demain.
Einen Tag lang mit dem Wollbrett Jungs Martin Schiffl, Patrick Wenz und Flo Becker unterwegs im Ruhrpott.