It’s with great sadness and frustration that we inform you that our U.S. tour can’t continue as it is planned right now. The reason is that we still don’t have our visas we need to get into the country and there is no chance to get them before our flight departs next Wednesday. We’re already working to reschedule the tour but there’s nothing certain we can say at the moment.
It seems this has become a common issue non-American bands and artists have to face lately and too many of us lose this fight. U.S. immigration service slowed down the processing of visa applications without any reason and there is no possibility to control nor get insight in this process. We have commissioned and payed a visa representative in June and in the meantime we did everything necessary to schedule the visa appointments at the U.S. embassy here in Germany. We’ve even paid another $1200 for premium processing to speed up the whole thing. Yesterday (!) we’ve got an update from immigration service on our case questioning the relationship with our label Season of Mist and asking for more evidence. Considering we’ve already mailed them the signed contract and various press statements, interviews and reviews of the new album right at the beginning which is definitely evidence enough it seems they simply don’t care at all and/or aren’t interested in letting us play the tour. Of course we’ve answered all their questions, however, they now need another 15 days of time to review our response and to issue the necessary forms we need for the appointments at the embassy. No appointment – no visa. Traveling without visa would see us denied entry and risk being banned from the U.S. for several years.
We’ve played our asses off this summer to save enough money and all in all we’ve spent more than $8000 which is all non-refundable and now completely lost. Courtesy of U.S. immigration service and the Department of Homeland Security.
Apologies to all of you who have been looking forward to the tour as much as we did. Sorry to all promoters, bands and people involved and thanks to Tone Deaf Touring for their effort in this tour. We hope to make it up for you sooner or later!
We’ve put up a new shirt and zipper in our shop which would have been the official U.S. tour shirt. It comes with a free high-quality download of ‘Stellar’, shipping starts around October 10th. So if you wish to support us feel free to get some merch at our shop:
derwegeinerfreiheit.bandcamp.com
