Greetings from the Road!

TOURMIN.

I'm sitting on the floor of my parents house in Aptos, CA. For the past week or so we've been slowly making our way back home from Austin, TX. We've been staying with family members, doing 8 hour drives, listening to hours of music, discussing definitions of "lo-fi" and "punk rock", debating, planning, trying to figure out how to sleep... cleansing..... sitting still in a van... endlessly.

TOURMIN.

This has been a really incredible tour (and all tours are incredible, but this one especially so!) It is by far the longest time we've spent out on the road, and we've seen parts of the country that I've never seen before. (Lots of Desert! Lots of Scrub!) But we've met some really wonderful people and had some totally epic adventures that I'm sure we'll remember forever. (5 am, sitting at the black jack tables in Vegas... comes to mind... ALSO, playing in the middle of the Arizona desert while the sun went down... or walking around downtown austin, a little fuzzy, giving strangers high fives...)

SO I know that it was my promise to update at least every 2-3 weeks, but we've been on the road...what can i say.. it's hard to find time during tour to get access to the net for longer than a minute (HOW DO THEY SURVIVE?!?!?!)

But now... relaxing in beautiful APTOS (i just won $10 at darts, hell yeah!) I have some time to put up a bunch of stuff I've been meaning to share.

First off, TOUR SONG #1.... TOUR SONG #1 (Fall 2009) by Battlehooch

BACKSTORY ALERT!!!!! For the first batch of tours we did we talked about how it would be cool to try to write a song during the course of the tour... but we never got around to it. However, on our tour to Southern California last November we were finally able to make it happen! Huberloinz and myself used our recording devices to record little fragments of random dialog and also quick improvisations on whatever instrument we came across. Then, I cut it all up and put it together in Abelton Live. It pretty much doesn't sound like anything we've ever done, but somehow I still think it sounds like BATTLEHOOCH. Try to pick out the Charles Mingus Sample, if ya can :) :) :)

(SIDE NOTE ALERT!) - we've been working on a second tour song for this current tour, but it's not quite ready to be shown yet... but it includes recordings of screeching washing machines, dog barks, peanut butter jars, and Anton from Judgement Day freestyle rapping. COMING SOON.


To wrap up this post, I just wanted to gather together some of the videos that we've been amassing over the course of this tour. The first one is a video that a newspaper in Austin did about us street performing during SXSW...



.... the next video is something that a new fan shot while we played in a field on the first day of SXSW...



...and finally here is the first part of our own video tour journal, edited by our 7th member: Fuegodamus (i.e. the dude who does all of our trippy visuals at our live shows). We have tons of footage that we're still editing together, but like I said, it's been hard to find free time for the past week or so, so we'll be putting that stuff out ASAP.)


This tour was amazing and while I'm excited to sleep in my own bed tonight (!!!!!!) I'm sad to know that I won't be zipping all over the country playing music and meeting new friends. Hopefully these videos can give you a sense of what the experience as been like. As always it is a joy and an honor to travel the country with my brothers. For a more detailed description of what the tour was like, check out our twitter accounts HERE. We were all trying to tweet like fiends, trying to capture the intangible madness that is touring.... moment by moment.... and if i do say so myself, i think we did a damn good job.

LOVE YOU ALL!