Crash Effect Podcasts

Over the coarse of the last few weeks I had gone back
into our podcast archives. I used the handy dandy
Garage Band program to add chapter markers,
artwork, and tags.
If you have not subscribed to our podcast
you can do so by clicking here.
I look forward to contributing to the podcasts each week.
Michael does the audio side of them and I get to do the visual.
Below is a random assortment of art you will find
embedded into the podcasts.

Acadia Café Show • March '07

This was a fun show. It was a little rough around the edges and not quite polished at moments but hey that's our style. Gritty, greasy, acoustic rock is what we market ourselves as and that's what we put out there. Paul Chamberlain (of Cousin Dad) opened the night. He is a folk-blues-bluegrass rooted musician who was joined by Ken Sherman (also of Cousin Dad) on fiddle. These two were seasoned musicians who were able to play a great set. They both had a wonderful sense of humor. It was a real shame that there weren't more people to see them. If you ever have the chance you should check them out. The second act was Jon Jacobsen (of Johari's Window) performing solo.
Last up was us. Michael and I played a fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants performance. We had briefly rehearsed as a two piece and didn't have time to thoroughly rearrange the songs to better suit a two piece act. This was supposed to have been the last show for Crash Effect with former members Kris Norberg (bass) and James Zirbes (guitar). After failing to join us for rehearsals for the show Michael and I decided to be the crash that we are and attack the show without them. As I mentioned earlier it wasn't the most polished show but our music and message was heard. We sold a few copies of Bomb and enjoyed some Rogue on tap.
It was a good show, not our strongest, but a good show still. I'm looking forward to playing the Acadia again in May when we are a little more polished and arranged.

Summer Flash-Back

Today I took some time to update and clean up the
Crash Effect Myspace.
I created a "master" blog entry that will hopefully drive some traffic to the Crash Effect site. Going back through the blog entries I came across a review I wrote last summer about the Flaming Lips show at the Minnesota State Fair. I'll paste it below. Ah Memories...

The Greatest Rock Show EVER!
Last Night was one of those nights I will remember
and cherish for a long time!
Anxiety and anticipation bubbled and churned in my stomach as I was looking for a place to park at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds. Rain poured in sheets so thick you could not see five feet in front of you. Water ran down streets like rivers a foot deep.
Was this going to be worth it? Is this even going to happen? I call my buddy who was supposed to be running camera for the event. Have they called the show yet? Do I even want to get out of the car? Or do I go find a coffee shop to stay warm and dry?
He replies with, "Well I'm literally standing in front of the stage in knee-deep water but they still think the show is going to happen..." Well then there is nothing for it. Tickets for the show and admission to the Fair have already be paid. Suck it up and get out of the car!
What... Am... I... Doing?!!! Lightnings though my brain as I step out of the car and into ankle deep waters. My shoes fill with cold dirty rainwater. Rain stings my face. Still I trudge on.
I resemble a Salmon swimming up-stream against the crowd of people desperately rushing for an escape to their vehicles. As I feel common sense beginning to creep into my mind it is violently flushed out by the sounds of fanatical Flaming Lips fans making war-cry like yells as they charge head down like rhinos into the Fairgrounds. My spirit lifted a rush of emotion overtakes me. My heart begins to pound. A beast within me begins to take over...
and that beast wants a cheese on a stick! Satisfying the beast with fried cheesy goodness I begin to subside back to myself and the rain begins to die down. All is good in the universe once again. I make my way into the Grand Stand after some roasted corn on the cob and park myself in front of the stage. Sonic Youth takes the stage and puts on a solid show. As I'm standing bobbing my head in proper rock show educate. The thought drifts though my mind... Sonic Youth looks kind of old now. They are more like Sonic Middle Age. They can still make a symphony of feedback like nobody's business. Than the moment I've been waiting for, as confetti cannons explode across the sky and Giant balloons bounce merrily above the crowd, a man in a giant bubble begins to crowd surf. The crowd goes nuts as a dozen Santa Clauses rush onto stage left and dance around in an excited group of monkeys sort of way. Meanwhile a dozen martian women go-go dancers shimmy and shake stage right. The music is euphorically explosive as the bubble crowd surfing man gets back to the stage just in time to leap out of the bubble and hit the microphone for the first verse.
More confetti and streamers blast into the crowd as the enormous screen behind the band lights up with the mouth camera of the frontman. Flat out, Hands Down, No Contest, this was the greatest rock spectacle these two eyes have ever seen. I've been to hundreds of shows large and small. This show blew them all out of the water both musically, visually, and with crowd participation. This was the biggest party in Minnesota! If you could harness the exuberant energy of a week of Mardi Gras, boil it down, bottle it, let if ferment, filter it, and harness it in pure raw form, and then release it in one location for two hours, you would then have the chemical makeup for this show. If you have ever attended a Flaming Lips show that you can give me an amen. If you have never had the privilege of attending a Flaming Lips show you need to! HaleFAlujia!

Well there you have it. My summer flash-back to last year. After reading over the entry above I'm finding myself in the mood for some fried cheese.

BOMB available on iTunes

Crash Effect is now available on iTunes Music Store.
Check out BOMB : the Radio Singles and while you are there subscribe to our podcast.
It's a wonderful feeling to be on iTunes. There's not much to it to get on there. Virtually anybody can do it, but there seems to be another level of legitimacy for Crash Effect having our music available there. There's something about having your music available to everyone on the planet that feels good.
As Michael mentioned in a blog entry on the Crash Effect Site through the month of April (2007) we will donate 20% of all sales on iTunes to our ongoing partnership with UNICEF. This is something that I am VERY excited about.

BOMB on CDBaby.com

Yeah baby! BOMB available on CD Baby, baby!
...um... maybe...one too many babies...
Bomb: The Radio Singles is now available to purchase online at cdbaby.com. After being on there for less than a week we have already sold a copy to a gentleman in Spain. Thanks to the wonders of digital distribution, and promotional monsters like myspace, Crash Effect's music can be introduced and purchased by anyone around the world.
Sometime in the next thirty to sixty days Bomb will also be available on iTunes, Rhapsody, Real-Player, Napster, Tower Records (online), Best Buy (online indie section), MSN music, Buymusic, Verizon Wireless and a few small odd ball online shops.

The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

I'm beginning to appreciate old school fiction more and more. After listening to Frankenstein and now the Time Machine my interest in this genera has been highly piqued.
Here is a very brief run down of the plot without spoiling anything.
The main character is never mentioned by name. He is simply called "the Time Traveller". The story opens with the Time Traveler sitting in a tavern demonstrating to colleges and peers, using a fully functioning model, that time is a dimension. They are familiar with three dimensional space since they live in it. The fourth dimension, being time, is hard for them to grasp. When the miniature model time machine disappears from the table in front of them they pass it off as a magic trick, an illusion of sorts. His frustration with their disbelief is the push he needs to get inside the full sized machine he built and take it for a joyride. He then immediately sets off on a journey into the future. H.G. Wells does a wonderful job of describing what it looks like to travel through time, his machine allows the Time Traveller to observe the changes of the outside world in fast motion. The sun and moon spin around the sky forming a band of blurry light. He also goes into some detail of the changes to the buildings and landscape around him as he travels through time. His journey takes him to the year 802,701 A.D. where he finds an apparently peaceful and primitive future filled with a simple race called the Eloi. They appear to be quite unintelligent and child-like and live without quarrels or conflict. The story follows the Time Traveller's interaction and relationship building with them.
One evening the Time Traveller returns to his usual place to sleep and he suddenly realises that the time machine is missing. He soon discovers that the Eloi are not the only race to inhabit the Earth. He discovers that the human race has diverged into two branches. He learns of the race of Morlocks, large, nocturnal, cannibals who resemble albino apes and who dwell underground. They are the ones who have taken the time machine. The story then follows the Time Traveller as he battles the Morlocks to recover and reactivate the Time Machine.

Much like Frankenstein, I was surprised at how long ago the book was published. The Time Machine was first published in 1895.

Dropping Bombs

The BOMB EP has arrived! Our first studio project is completed and ready for your listening pleasure. It has 6 tracks:
1. Beauty Queen
2. Bomb
3. You
4. May Day
5. Do You Know
6. Bomb - war room remix
The CD also contains bonus media content.
There are extra tunes from our rehearsals, video from our first show (scary), and much more.
We are very proud of the hard work we poured into this project.
The project is a bitter-sweet for us. The day Michael brought BOMB to our rehearsal for us to see, Kris and James had a bomb of their own to drop.
Both Kris (bass) and James (guitar) have decided to formally leave Crash Effect due to "musical differences". It was a bit of an odd conversation at the time because the EPs had arrived and were sitting on the coffee table in front of us in their shiny-new reflective cellophane wrapping and you could still smell the ink. After talking it through with them, and coming to a general consensus that it was for the best for all parties, Michael and I went over to Caribou to talk about the departure and figure out what to do next. It was kind of poetic sitting in the exact same Caribou where Michael, Jamison, and I had conceived the concepts that would become Crash Effect. It felt like square one, back to the drawing board. I have come to know this to be true; If you spend enough time at a Caribou with a Wireless-Internet connection eventually you will come up with a brilliant concept. That was exactly what happened for Michael and I as we formed the band, came up with foundation for the band, and what direction to go with the band from here. It seemed to be one of those blinding flash of the obvious moments now in hind site. The foundations had already been laid. We didn't need to reinvent the wheel. Crash Effect is about community. It always has been with our work with charitable organizations. We are now going to take it one step farther. We are going to push on as a two piece incorporating the musical community around us. We want to collaborate with fellow musicians who can add to the music and join us in the humanitarian aspects of the band on a project-to-project basis. This enables the musical community to be apart of Crash Effect, add their contribution, and leave their fingerprints on the music and community so-to-speak. It is likely that we will continue to work with Kris and James on a project-to-project basis in the future. I'm sure you will see them on stage with us or their name in a CD insert from time-to-time. Michael and I will operate as principals as we work with musicians to make a mosaic of music. Although Crash Effect has always been community based we now are kicking open the floodgates to a larger community to be apart of. We are excited for what the future holds and the amazing opportunities we will have. Kris and James leaving may be the closing of a chapter but there is now a blank page before us. We have already been hard at work with a new look, sound, and vision. As we are so appropriately named, the Crash is not stopping or even slowing down but changing course and picking up speed and more rhinos!

Red Sea Show

Despite snow storms that covered the Twin Cities in over thirty inches of snow and nasty, wet, bone chilling winds, we had a good turn-out!
We had fans, friends, and family show up to watch us.
They were real Minnesotans!
We played the Red Sea Bar in Minneapolis (Not Egypt, just in case you were confused) with Lazy Red and Burning Chrome. It was a great show. A lot of fun. The venue itself is a little small but that seemed to help the place feel cozy and intimate. We sold a hand full of EPs. Had some laughs. Made some new friends AND had our first fan to know and sing the lyrics along with us. She was even sporting a Crash Effect t-shirt. It was good times had by all.

MinneSNOWta

We haven't had snow storms like this since I was a kid.
Which has been a large determining factor as to why I have never invested in a snow blower. The sissy winters we've had for the last decade haven't been enough to justify the garage real estate. That property has be reserved for my motorcycles.

Two weekends in a row of getting a butt whoopin' from Old Man Winter.
My wrists, shoulders, and back will be soar for a week after all the shoveling I've had to do.
We received somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 inches of snow with the two weekend white-outs. The snow was so deep that my last round of shoveling consisted of scooping and throwing chest high. Of course, in true Minnesota fashion, the moment you clear your driveway the snow plow comes by and puts a nice three foot bank at the end of your driveway for you to shovel. D'oh!

I enjoy the illusion that I'm bending the shovel. Not planned.

The other item that goes hand-in-hand with Minnesota snow storms is the road salt.
The images on the right are the normal color of our car. The images on the left are what our car looks like after ONE commute to work and back. Yuck.

Invisible Children • part 3

The videos below highlight some of the campaigns that have happened and are happening through Invisible Children Inc.
The TRI Campaign.

The BRACELET Campaign

The Global Night Commute part 1

The Global Night Commute part 2

There are many more powerful and inspiring videos about the Invisible Children Inc. That can be found on youtube. Including the videos that correspond to each of the different colored bracelets for the Bracelet Campaign. I encourage you to check them out. Just go to www.youtube.com and type in Invisible Children in the search and off you go. There are also some wonderful videos that were made by individuals who were at various events and made their own short documentaries. There are also videos that follow the Invisible Children cross-country tour(s). For more information about Invisible Children Inc. Stop by their website and spent a few minutes. There is a lot of information about how to get involved in campaigns, screening parties, and more. They also have great downloadable .pdf files for information about donations with breakdowns of how monies are spent, where exactly donated dollars are going, and how they are being distributed.
Get educated. Get involved.
www.invisiblechildren.com

Invisible Children • part 2

The video below is a brief snippet of a back story
to the invisible children of Uganda.
It is a very tame CNN piece that help bring you up to speed.

The hard-to-swallow sad truth is that there are invisible children of sorts in every country.
Fortunately, thanks to the Invisible Children film,
some of these invisible children have been seen.
I'm sure the CNN video you saw above would have never been shot, edited, and aired if not for this film. The wonderful and beautiful thing is the stone dropped in the puddle has begun a ripple effect and the ripples are growing.

The movement has begun. Are you going to be apart of it? There are many many levels and degrees in which to get involved. All will help. The smallest of actions to create change is still action. It's a step forward as apposed to no step at all.