The ferry deal looked clean on paper. Car on board, gear on board, both ends of the trip sorted, a price that worked. By the time John Pettersson came back to actually book the crossing, the route had stopped lining up with the tour dates and he’d never accounted for weight restrictions in the first place. The whole plan had to be rebuilt: a different city to leave Sweden from, a different one to land in Poland, and a slimmed-down live setup to accommodate the weight.
That’s roughly how Comprehending‘s first shows outside Sweden actually started taking shape.
The Uppsala instrumental math/post-rock band step out of Sweden for the first time this May and June with For Example John, the Polish math rock turned emo project whose new album “failed as a friend” we just premiered in full, and Violet Ambulance, before heading back to Sweden with For Example John, Sire and Noodles For My Poodles. Four shows in two countries, and one set of lessons that Pettersson, Comprehending’s guitarist and de facto tour booker, is happy to enumerate in detail.
The dates:
22.05 Sopot, Dwie Zmiany (with Violet Ambulance)
23.05 Warsaw, Pracovnia Art Club (with Violet Ambulance)
12.06 Uppsala, Kulturhuset Femman (with Noodles For My Poodles)
13.06 รrebro, Kvarteret & Co (with Sire)
The รrebro date is a replacement. Earlier in the planning the Swedish leg ran through Stockholm, but the venue cancelled. Pettersson tried to reach them and got nothing back.
With For Example John already holding travel plans and hotel bookings for a city that had just dropped off the tour, the whole thing started to feel like it was on him. “Panic struck and I tried to contact them to see what was going on, without results,” he says. “The only thing I could think about is how I’d let everyone down and how I’d ruined the tour.” A month of asking around eventually produced an answer from Kvarteret & Co in รrebro, one of Comprehending’s go-to venues, who weren’t fully booked.
The broader thing Pettersson keeps coming back to is how differently this run feels compared to anything they’ve done at home. Comprehending have spent most of their existence playing DIY shows in and around Uppsala, where booking is a low-friction conversation between familiar venues and familiar bands. Going outside Sweden was a different problem entirely, and not one the band were ready for at the start. “We always assumed we had to do everything ourselves,” Pettersson says, “so we never asked for help starting out, which we now realize was a big mistake.”
That self-contained approach had also produced a run of mismatched lineups, where Comprehending’s instrumental math-leaning side would end up on a bill with whoever happened to be available. “This led to a lot of one-off shows with bands that weren’t necessarily a good match music wise,” he says. “But the shows were great, so nothing bad against any bands, simply just a poor match up from our side.”
The For Example John partnership started as low-effort as it gets: a follow on social media after an article covered Comprehending’s first record, “The Perils and Rewards of an Unknown Path”, and a general conversation about how the Warsaw band handled their own touring. That conversation is where Pettersson’s working theory of booking fell apart.
His original mindset, transplanted from the Uppsala model, was venues first. “I need to find venues to play, and after that I can look into bands to bring,” he remembers thinking, “because how could you get a band to lock down a date if you haven’t even got a venue to play yet?” That works inside a scene where everyone already knows you. Outside it, venues don’t reply at all.
What For Example John told him was that they weren’t doing it that way. Responsibilities for finding venues and coordinating across cities were split between the touring bands. Each one handled what they actually knew. “Of course you can’t do all of this yourself,” Pettersson recalls thinking. “You don’t know the ins and outs of the places you’re trying to go, and they don’t know you. So, make it a team effort and do the stuff you do know!”
That shift is what made the rest of the tour viable, and it’s the thing Pettersson is most direct about correcting from his earlier setup. “Before this tour I had had the mindset of treating every interaction like a business interaction, and I’ve learnt that this is just a small part of having a touring band,” he says. “You need the professional side and must be able to present your band well in your niche, but the actual interactions with other bands should be treated as friendships. Being open and sharing progress and setbacks with your friends makes all the challenges and anxieties of handling these big efforts so much easier. We are all just people trying to live out our dreams and have fun in the process.”
The ferry mistake and the Stockholm cancellation became easier to absorb once that mindset was in place. They also drove home the distance between booking close to home and booking across borders.
“There are so many more people relying on everything working out,” Pettersson says, “and one small mistake or hiccup can throw your entire plans off.”
The long-term destination Comprehending have in mind is Arctangent, the UK math rock and post-rock festival the band describe as the goal. This tour was meant to be the launching pad and learning ground to get there. The bigger takeaway, Pettersson admits, was something else entirely.
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“We instead learned so much more in the process and we are so grateful to have met For example John and the other bands involved in this tour,” he says. “The DIY scene is hard, but I can truly say I love it and I hope we can be a part of it far into the future.”
“The Perils and Rewards of an Unknown Path” came out in August 2025 on Comprehending’s Bandcamp, with a limited 12″ green and black splatter vinyl pressed to 100 copies. Music by John Pettersson and Andreas Valdna, mix by Richard Stรถรถk, master by Tobhias Ljung, artwork by Adriรกn Vaccaro. The album, the band’s first full-length attempt, deals with what Pettersson calls “different tasks in life and the obstacles surrounding them.” A tour with one venue cancelled, one ferry plan rebuilt, and a whole new theory of booking probably counts.
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