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Music

The Saga of This Musician's Stolen Luggage Proves There's a Smidgen of Hope Left in the World

Lobster Theremin's Route 8 has had one hell of a month in America.

It's every musician's worst nightmare. You're about to embark on a new tour throughout a foreign country, and boom, you get robbed. All of your gear, instruments, luggage, as well as items every touring artist needs like fresh underwear and socks, are now gone. Earlier this month, Budapest-bred producer Route 8, known for releases on Lobster Theremin, fell victim to such a fate. On the first night of his tour in Detroit, where he was joined by the label's head Jimmy Asquith (who DJs as Asquith), the entirety of his gear—from personal possessions like passports, to his father's antique camera, unreleased tracks, and clothes—were stolen out of the car of a promoter they with touring the city. In a saddening Facebook post, Szilveszter of Route 8 explained the dire situation, as well as opened up a donation option for his fans to send money so he could buy new gear to play out the gigs they had planned—as well as buy socks.

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A couple days later, after Route 8 had played a set in New York as part of BEMF festival, the artist posted again on socials to let his followers know that he'd received an overwhelming amount of donations on his Bandcamp page and that he would likely be able to buy back the missing gear. He also said, though at this point it was surely a long shot, that he planned to donate the money to charity if by some small chance his missing luggage turned up.

Wednesday, ten days after his previous post, the unbelievable happened: close to the entirety of the missing gear and luggage was returned via a good Samaritan (described simply as an "old lady") from Detroit, whose friend had found the luggage. As you can read in the post below, Szilveszter explains that the anonymous woman reached out to him on Facebook (savvy old lady, yeah?) after finding the majority of his gear dumped in a parking lot in Detroit. He also included that he immediately reached out to the promoters whose car was jacked, and who some had apparently suspected was involved in the robbery, to confirm the situation, which he did.

Via THUMP's own exchange with Szilveszter of Route 8, we learned that the woman who found his luggage learned of their origins after finding an "event card" (in this case probably a flyer for the party he was pegged to play in Detroit) which had additional information about Lobster Theremin, as well as the label's logo. Then using what one has to imagine as a simple Google search, she was able to connect the dots after noticing the same logo on one of Szilveszter's synths, which eventually would lead her to the artist's website, and real name—one she was able to contact on Facebook—and voila. Gear returned.

While there are still some missing items from the car that are still unfound, the saga of Route 8's lost luggage proves that in these dark and dire times, perhaps there are still some good people out there in the world.