OUT THIS TUESDAY, JULY 31st 2012

FIRST VIDEO: “FOREST BATTLE”

—–TOUR DATES—–

Riki Feldmann:

Specialty: Photography, Audio Engineering, Live Improvisational Video
Website: www.rikifeldmann.com
Recommended: New Idria, After the Fire

I can’t really say enough about this guy. He’s on tour with us right now helping us set up and running the projections. He also filmed and produced a few of the videos we’re using (the ones with the sweet nature shots) and even stars in one of them. If that weren’t enough, he engineered Peacocks/Pink Monsters at his recording studio Nu-Tone and has engineering our next record. Last but not least, he’s my favorite photographer. All of those sweet Judgement Day photos? He took’em. His specialty is abandoned ruins.

Luke Judd:

Specialty: Video Installations and Live Improvisational Video
Website: http://rumspringawords.blogspot.com/
Recommended: “Revelations” – Judgement Day
Contact: slowcollapse@gmail.com

If you’ve ever been at a sweet underground warehouse show in Oakland with crazy live video projections you’ve probably seen Luke’s work. Dude works with a lot of our favorite bands: The Burning of Rome, Foxtails Brigade, Devotionals, Silian Rail, Saything and many more. We’ve worked with him a few times now and it’s always a pleasure.

VJ odbol (aka Tyler Freeman)

Specialty: Inventing
Website: www.odbol.com
Recommended: “Finis Omne” – Judgement Day

Odbol specializes in designing interfaces that bring the body closer to the machine. The first time I saw this guy in action he was creating live video for BATTLEHOOCH with a nintendo Wii controller. Awesome thing is, that’s not even his craziest invention. VJacket and DrumPants are just as fun.

Mike Mayfield

Specialty: Animation
Website: www.youtube.com/MikeLMayfield
Recommended: “Song of the Sad Assassin” – Why

We were so incredibly lucky to have Mike do the animation for our Violin Hero video last year. Dude is a total pro animator, working on big network cartoons like American Dad in addition to creating his own awesome shorts. On Violin Hero he went above and beyond, syncing the animation up flawlessly to every note of the music. “I totally played along with a Guitar Hero controller multiple times while I was working on it to make sure it had the same feel, similar intuitive timing, etc, even though I felt like a total dork doing so!” Right on!

John Snapp

Specialty: Video, Editing
Website: www.youtube.com/poorbailey
Recommended: “Jingletown Blues” – Poor Bailey

John is the bass player for one of favorite East Bay bands, Poor Bailey and he releases a new video for them every week or two. He’s also made sweet videos for Audrye Sessions.

AWK:

Specialty: 16mm Found Film
Website: N/A
Recommended: “All in Vain” – Judgement Day

AWK raids thrift stores for used reels of film and rebuilds them into dark collages of doom. You can see his work on many of the Dark Opus music videos.

Recorded March 28th, 2011 in a living room in Madison, WI

DOWNLOAD

Sneak Attacks at SXSW:

An amazing solo grindcore violinist that we played with in Indianapolis:

Click here to view the embedded video.

A crazy party at Football Frat in Chicago:

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First up is the So show 2/10 at the Starry Plough in Berkeley. So is my new progressive fusion band consisting of Jesse Boley on tenor sax, (of Ghost and the City) Zack Ehrlcih on drums (currently of Lucky Cloud, formerly of The Botticellis), and Eric Kuhn on Bass (of Silian Rail), and me on cello. We play all original music, except “Downtown Tiger” by Kurt Patzner, the Patzner family patriarch. This will be So’s first show, so it should have some exciting energy. Also playing are Panthelion, Loveseat, and The Goldenpath.

Later 2/26 and also at the Starry Plough is Foxtails Brigade and Graham Patzner. Foxtails Brigade is Anton’s band with Laura Weinbach, who has an amazingly beautiful voice and fingerpicks prog folk on acoustic guitar. They seemed to be in a perpetual state of transition until recently, when bassist Joe Lewis and percussionist Josh Pollock  joined, and now they’re playing a really tight set. Graham Patzner is the youngest of us Patzner brothers who has been refining his brand of singer songwriter for a couple years now. He
covers a wide vocal spectrum, and brings his live in the moment attitude to the stage. I’ll be assisting him, along with an unknown amount of people which will undoubtedly include Nick and Will from Loveseat. The whole thing is a lot of fun, and I can say now instead of being a helpful brother, I feel like an enthusiastic musician.

The Starry Plough is a classy joint, and both nights should be if nothing else a whole lot of fun.

- Lewis

Also if people are unaware, Jon fronts a pop punk band called Sorry Mom and Dad. They are the best.

The Starry Plough
3101 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley

Thursday 2/10
9:00
$8
21+
The Golden Path
Loveseat
So
Panthelion
facebook event page link:
http://on.fb.me/SoShow1

Saturday 2/26
Foxtails Brigade

Graham Patzner

TBA

Sorry Mom and Dad

DAY ONE of work on our new acoustic record went excitingly well. We got the studio all set up and running at The Barn and had some epic fireside jams on some of the new material as well as some oldtime blues standards.  Jon has been experimenting with deadening his regular drum kit as well as playing buckets and other pieces of percussion. He seems to be really inspired. We all are!

We’re super lucky to have Riki Feldmann with us. Not only did he fix the house electrical power and assemble the entire studio, he has also been shooting a ton of photos and videos which, like all of his work, look incredible. This week will be well-documented for sure.

If you’re interested in following the recording process, you can do so on Twitter at http://twitter.com/stringmetal. We’ll be posting stuff there all week in addition to our daily Facebook posts.

What are you waiting for??

-JD

Our next record is going to be totally acoustic, but way different from our previous acoustic EP’s, because Jon going to play percussion. Instead of a playing his traditional drum kit, he’s working on putting together a super-sweet acoustic kit and with paint buckets and other percussive items. We’ve already written about 4 new songs and we’re hoping to write 10 or 15 more in the next couple of months. Of the songs that we have so far two are super-fast metal shredders, one is kind of punk-country and the other one is more slow-grooving and reserved. Our plan is to do all of the recording in a week at the end of January in a barn up on the northern coast of California. We’ve already booked The Barn so we’re pretty committed to keeping this on schedule.

We did 3 songs with the bucket kit on KPFA last night. That should give you a pretty good idea of what we’re talking about. Those songs come towards the end of the show but the whole thing is great so we definitely recommend checking it out: http://kpfa.org/archive/id/65618

LIVE SHOWS

We’ve always been fans of test driving our songs live before we go and record them, so we’re going to be doing that all month in December. All of our December shows will be acoustic, starting with two very special seated parlor shows:

Thursday, 12/9 in San Francisco at the beautiful Porto Franco Art Parlor.

and

Friday, 12/10 in Oakland at a secret underground theater. The venue has requested that we do not post the address on the internet but if you want to come just email us at judgementdayband@yahoo.com and we’ll give you all of the info that you need.
____________________________

If seated shows are not your thing then you might want to come check us out on Sunday, 12/12 at Gilman with Andrew Jackson Jihad. It’s been a while since we played Gilman and for a while there we thought it was going to be shut down, so we’re very excited to be doing another show there.

Now, if you’re thinking: “this sucks, I want burtal, shredding, ear-shattering metal, not wimpy acoustic wuss music,” stop worrying! It’s not like we’re permanently going acoustic. We’re just going to try this out for a little while and see how it goes. We’re still going to play some shows fully electric. In fact have a really awesome one coming up January 8th at Slims with the world’s greatest action-adventure-metal band Arnocorps and Middle-Earth’s most fearsome orc-metal band A Band of Orcs.

We have no idea what our new acoustic record will sound like but we think it will probably be pretty awesome and we’ll definitely learn a lot by making it. So we’re excited.

Cursive singer Tim Kasher has recruited our very own Lewis Patzner to play bass, cello and trombone for upcoming dates on his fall solo tour. Get ready for some awesomeness.

We first met Tim way back in 2004 when we went and played on the street outside of a Cursive show at The Great American Music Hall. Apparently someone shouted out “they’re covering Cursive songs!” and next thing we knew, we were surrounded by a bunch of people including members of the band. We actually were just playing our own original Judgement Day songs but it didn’t matter. People were stoked and Lewis and I both got jobs.

For this Fall tour, Tim Kasher’s band will be performing songs off of his newly-released debut EP, The Game of Monogamy as well as some songs from his other bands’ earlier works including the bad-ass, cello-heavy 2003 Cursive album, The Ugly Organ.  Lewis is juiced. Here’s what he had to say:

“I’m excited for sure. I’m a longtime Cursive fan so I think I’ll be sharing a lot of feelings with the other fans in the audience, which will be pretty special.”

Catch Lewis playing with Tim Kasher in your town! Here’s where they’ll be:

OCT. 18 EUGENE, OR WOW HALL*
OCT. 19 SAN FRANCISCO, CA THE REGENCY*
OCT. 20 SAN LUIS OBISPO, CA DOWNTOWN BREWERY*
OCT. 21 SANTA CRUZ, CA RIO THEATRE*
OCT. 22 LOS ANGELES, CA WILTERN*
OCT. 23 TUCSON, AZ RIALTO*
OCT. 24 ALBUQUERQUE, NM SUNSHINE*
OCT. 25 LUBBOCK, TX JAKE’S*
OCT. 26 TULSA, OK MARQUEE*
OCT. 27 AUSTIN, TX STUBB’S*
OCT. 28 DALLAS, TX HOUSE OF BLUES*
OCT. 29 HOUSTON, TX HOUSE OF BLUES*
NOV. 1 DENVER, CO HI DIVE#
NOV. 3 SALT LAKE CITY, UT URBAN LOUNGE
NOV. 5 VANCOUVER, BC MEDIA CLUB
NOV. 6 SEATTLE, WA TRACTOR TAVERN
NOV. 7 PORTLAND, OR DOUG FIR LOUNGE
NOV. 10 VISALIA, CA CELLAR DOOR
NOV. 12 POMONA, CA GLASS HOUSE RECORD STORE
NOV. 13 SAN DIEGO, CA THE LOFT
NOV. 14 PHOENIX, AZ TBA
NOV. 19 OMAHA, NE THE WAITING ROOM
NOV. 20 CHICAGO, IL SCHUBAS
* supporting Minus The Bear
# with Azure Ray and Tim Fite

Over the course of their 10-year career From Monument to Masses released four epic, politically charged albums on Dik Mak Records, leaving a heavy footprint in the world of post-rock. Their long, slowly-shifting song structures and intricate guitar loops made them a perfect match for intelligent instrumental bands like Explosions in the Sky and Mogwai, but their drum beats also contained elements of hip-hop and drum-and-bass that could get even the most intellectual hipsters to shake their asses on the dance floor.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Although they were instrumental, From Monument to Masses gave themselves a powerful voice by incorporating audio samples of speeches and lectures into their songs. As a political band in the Bush era, they spoke out strongly against the war in Iraq and for human rights. Their name represents the idea that change in history comes as a result of the actions of the masses, and not the action of the individuals for whom monuments are built.

Click here to view the embedded video.

From Monument to Masses has had an undeniable influence on many great musicians, including many of my friends. Eric Khun of Silian Rail has always been a big fan, saying “they had the intensity that I know and love from rock and punk rock, but with a lot of intricacy and subtlety  to it.”  For me, going to see these guys at Bottom of the Hill back in the days when Judgement Day was still just playing on the street, they were band that made it cool to be an instrumental band.

We are extremely honored to be joining From Monument to Masses for their final performance. If you are a fan and a supporter of instrumental rock, this show is a must-see.

PETE FIELDS

Click here to view the embedded video.

AUDRYE SESSIONS

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DEVOTIONALS

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JON BUSH with BUCKET KIT 2.0

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SCOTT ALLBRIGHT

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ASHKON

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GRAHAM PATZNER

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And a couple more:

Haight Street Fair

We were so busy practicing with all of the singers for the Lyres & Lace show that we almost forgot about our show on Sunday at The Haight Street Fair. It’s a good thing that we didn’t forget because it turned out to be a huge deal: we played in front of an estimated 20,000 people, our biggest crowd ever!

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Fort Gallery in Oakland

There’s nothing like a good Oakland warehouse show, and The Fort is one of the best warehouses in town. It was super dark in there so I was afraid we would not be able to capture any of the awesomeness on video. Luckily our good friend Dave Kluger showed up with a crazy miracle-camera and got this amazing video:

Click here to view the embedded video.