Archive for April, 2008

Metal Orchestra Class

One of the highlights of the “Four-Door Tour” was that in Salem Oregon we taught a metal seminar to about 40 high school and middle orchestra students. It was awesome. After playing our usual set we taught them all metal riffs and got them all to jam along with us. They rocked! The local paper The Statesman Journal was there and made a great little video article about it.


CHECK IT OUR HERE

Thanks to West Salem Orchestra Director Darryl Silberman for hooking us up with this awesome gig. We’re very excited to get back to Salem again soon for a sweet club show.

Published in: Press, Tour Journal | on April 18th, 2008 | No Comments »

The end of our “four door” tour

Well we’re done with our shows in the northwest. I think it’s safe to say that the whole trip was a success. Whether we were rocking out on the awesome warehouse stage of Rotture in Portland or teaching metal riffs to orchestra students at West Salem Highschool we were always having a great time. We’d like to extend a heartfelt shoutout to everyone who came to our shows, and a double shoutout to our old and new friends (and relatives) that let us crash under their roofs. We’d also like to throw out out a double secret probation shoutout to our buds in Silian Rail. great people, great musicians, great times. We’re already working on coming back up there, so If you have any suggestions or hookups you can throw our way we’d appreciate it. If you live in the Bay and you’re sick of us talking about our out-of-town shows, we’re playing at The Gilman in Berkeley on May 9th. Prepare to have your minds blown.

LP

JD

Go A’s, Go Giants, RIP Warriors

Published in: Tour Journal | on April 16th, 2008 | No Comments »

“4-Door Tour” Blog 1: Northern California

We are officially on tour! We’ve decided to name this tour “The 4-Door Tour” because both Judgement Day and Silian Rail are traveling in little 4-door cars packed to the max with gear. It has been amazing!

Our kick-off show in Sacramento featured Lewis rocking out so hard that he fell over and snapped his bow in half at the end of “Revelations”. Luckily our friends from fellow string band The Definite Articles were in the audience and let us borrow a cello bow to finish our set. What are the odds of that? That’s the first time we’ve ever broken a bow. I guess that’s what happens when you get possessed by the metal spirits. Good thing it was only a backup bow.

CHICO!!! We love Chico. This was our fourth time playing there and definitely our best yet. We played at this little art space called “The Crux”. The local bands The Secret Stolen and La Fin Du Monde both totally killed it and Silian Rail had an especially good set. I jammed with them on a couple of songs which was fun.

Lewis was going to jam too but when he took out his cello he found out that the end pin had fallen backwards into the body and was rolling around making loud, bad-sounding noises. It was scary. We spent more than an hour trying to get it out through one of the F-Holes but it was too big to fit. We ended up having to play the set with Lewis holding up his cello on a drum stool. He had to be careful not to move in the wrong direction and put a hole in his cello but he still managed to rock out and play a great set. We played a bunch of old songs and brought up Eric from Silian Rail to play some extra drums on a crazy 9 minute jam at the end. Good times.

Later on after the show we had an epic late-night jam sesh with 3 guitars, bass and pizzicato violin until 5 in the morning. Eric is just as crazy on guitar as he is on drums. He was totally blowing my mind.

The next day we went over to The Music Connection (a music store/repairs shop) to take care of Lewis’ cello problem. The dude totally handled it and we were back in business. We had lunch at Broadway Heights and hung out for a while and then headed to Redding.

The Redding show was smaller but pretty chill. Lewis and I both jammed on Silian Rail’s set and Eric played Glockenspiel on one of our songs. The guys that put on the show are the same people that used to run this awesome Redding venue called The Dip but since it shut down a while back they have to bring their whole sound system now whenever they want to have shows, so it was pretty cool that they wanted to have us. After the show we headed back to their place and had another epic jam sesh, this time with a 12 string guitar and a little bit of piano in addition to the usual acoustic guitars.

In a little bit we’re going to head up to Oregon. We’re playing in Medford tonight. Hopefully it will be fun.

-Anton and Judgement Day
MP3: Excerpt from the Chico Jam with Eric

Published in: Free Music Downloads, Tour Journal | on April 7th, 2008 | 1 Comment »