Merry Christmas to all the Centrevol Fans!!!

Hello, kai here. I’m on vacation now with the wife hangin with the parents. We will be heading up to Tahoe tomorrow and doing the laborious chore of ski/snowboarding in Heavenly Valley this week (my wife’s from the east coast repping the skiers, I’m repping the west side with my board). Just wanted to drop you guys a quick line to tell you about the lovin from the fans.

Every holiday we all get a few text messages from friends saying “happy turkey day” or whatever. This year, I got 3 (three) texts from friends we have met on the road and only ONE text from a “local” friend, (and that friend happened to be in the band, more on that later). So, this is not only a celebration of all the lovely Centrevol friends I’ve met, but also a chastising of my local friends who didn’t effing text me to wish me a happy birthday to Jesus (I’m not bitter).

Anyway, on to the hall of fame of all the friends accross the land who love me: Leah Widdekind from MSU Northern, Havre, MT wrote: “merry christmas have a wonderful day ” probably a group text but I’ll take it! My friend Allie from Carroll College in Helena MT wrote “Merry Christmas Kai ” affirming that it was just to me, hell yes wife-clone! And the complete spaztastic mexi-afro mascot of Salt Lake Community College Jesse Sanchez wrote: “Kai baby! Merry Christmas! Hope it was good.” So to all of you I say Merry Christmas back, and thanks for the shouts.

Now, to my local friend, it happened to be none other than the Jonny G, bassist for Centrevol, who, in his excitement texted me “Merry Christmas!”, but forgot to account for the time change and it woke me at 6:52 Christmas morning!!!! WTF!!!! Jonathan, the earth rotates, and after a certain age, ppl become ok with trading a little sleep in exchange for ravenously opening presents at the ungodly crack of dawn.

So, now I want to leave you with this delicious little random embarrassing tidbit: My mom bought me this wonderful Nike jumpsuit which, although is highly practical and useful, is entirely antithetical to what I normally wear so I thought in my stupidity I would play air guitar for you all in centrevolian land to show you what an idiot I am. I uploaded it at an absurdly low quality so not only can you not quite see how stupid I look in it, but how absrudly horribly embarrassing I look playing air guitar is also distorted. (btw, you can catch a sneak preview of the song “Warranty”, one of our fav songs on the upcoming album). Enjoy:done

Good Deals for the Holidays

This blog once again goes out to all you ski/snowboard enthusiasts! One of my housemates Mark introduced me to these cool sites for finding deals on equipment, though they only do one deal at a time so stay on your toes…can save ya a lot of mooola!

Brociety

Tramdock

Steep and Cheap

CENTREVOL 2.0 (two point oh)!!!

Yo Centrevol nation! Check out video featuring one of our new songs Shine a Light, LIVE!! Watch it in full screen high def cuz we look good and sound above average!!!

As you can tell, we have been trying to reinvent ourselves as a band… this so called “2.0″ version of us really accentuates a pop sensibility, although not at the same time eliminating our intensity and energy as musicians. Of course, as a Californian band, there is an amalgam of styles, but the point is we are maturing, and we’re satisfied with what we are producing. We hope you like you’re little taste of it!! Go to our youtube site and post your rating and responses!!!

Check It Out // An Art Auction for a Good Cause!

painting by Brian Bello

Premier Winter Art Auction 2009
For Long Beach Rescue Mission
Presented by Long Beach Art Werks
Saturday, December 12th
Opening at 12:00, auction at 5:00

2nd City Council Art Gallery
435 Alamitos Ave.
Long Beach, CA 90802

Long Beach Art Werks community action group, is teaming up with local artists, the Long Beach Rescue Mission: At night, most of us experience the streets in transit or through a window, but for some, the streets are home. Long Beach Art Werks is dedicated to inspiring social justice through public art engagement. Struggling against the odds, we have the chance with this event to transform our compassion for humanity into community action and extend our hands to the less fortunate.

You’ve dropped coins into rattling cups, but now is a chance to give them change.

Featured Artists — Kelly Campanella, Jamie Karson, Dave Wrathall, Travis Ott-Conn, Katie Reinman, Eydie McConnell, Stephen Sotnick, Andrew Cortes, Kevin Flynn, and more to come!

Current Sponsors — Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach Rescue Mission, Roll Up Long Beach, KBeach Global Radio, Long Beach

Union Weekly, Associated Students of Comparative Literature, and Jaguar Press.

Full Program Schedule

December 1st             – Deadline to donate art
December 9th and 10th    – noon-5 p.m. Prepare gallery/hang art
December 11th            – noon-5 p.m. Meet and greet, LBRM and LBAW
December 12th            – noon-7 p.m. Art viewing, auction at 5 p.m.
December 13th            – noon-5 p.m. Art viewing, take down at 3 p.m.

LB.Art.Werks@Gmail.com

Marketing/General Info        Art Donations            Sponsorships
Kyle Veremans            Michaël Veremans            Ryan Smith
310.908.3177                310.426.0347            714.650.6577

For more information on sponsorships, get in touch with Ryan.
The Jaguar Press

Show This Week: Pseudo Rebels CD Release Party!

More Info @ the Pseudo Rebels Site.

Night croquet on my night off!!

Hello Centrevol Nation! Right now we are in the midst of an era of songwriting intensity, that is we’re rehearsing 3x/week at a grand total of around 12 delicious hours in the rehearsal space every single week (that’s more than the total amount of time you undergrads are in class, admit it)! So, when we get a night off, it’s time to live it up!!

On Thursday, when I’d normally be at rehearsal, my wife, my roommate Tyson (the phantom Korean guy in picture #2) and I celebrated my night off by playing a little night-croquet in my backyard. Tyson supplied the cigars, and I supplied the beat down, by knocking balls with precision expertise FTW! (The term “knocking balls” cannot possibly sound clean, so get over it, and FTW stands for “for the win” in case you are web-illiterate).

We are prepping for my best friend Matthew’s man-shower to celebrate the coming of his half Mexican baby where night-croquet, scotch, cigars, and hilarity will ensue. Look out for the blog post about that one! Until then, we are making up for our night off with an even more delicious 7AM (that’s right, seven in the morning) practice on a SATURDAY.

Whatever will be… will be (Our local show residency!!!!)

Let me get you some back context with us and local shows… actually let me zoom out and commentate on local shows in general. Bands are often slain by local shows, it can be the most difficult and draining endeavor for a young band. I have known touring full time bands who can only draw 2 people in their hometown. I know of bands who have music placed on TV, radio, video games, you name it, and they turn down local shows because it just take too much energy… Local shows can be a merciless and self-defeating beast.

That being said, Centrevol has done relatively well when it comes to this subject. We have paid our dues and played in front of like 10 people, but we have also packed venues and taken names. Local shows is not like touring in the sense that you really need to reinvent yourself; it’s hard promoting to a fan-base that knows if they miss a show they can just go to the next one!

So we didn’t know what to do with the show we played at Que Sera a few weeks past. The band we booked with “Lady Danville” was bumped from the bill, and we were wondering whether we should just throw the show and have a remote rehearsal on their stage… well, we decided to kill it and blow it up on the promo. Two groups in particular really came out in mass quantities: The Bubba Gumps and Boeing crew! Big shouts to you guys.

In fact, and this is the most exciting news, the owner of the venue was there and she loved our music and our crowd so much that she decided to offer us a monthly residency! Now, residencies are super cool because you can start building a crowd, you can bring in other bands promoting a scene, and you don’t have to worry about booking in that area!!! It’s a big step for us to get a regular local gig at a respected venue, and we are thankful. Please keep checking back for more info on our residency every 3^rd Thursday of the month beginning January 21^st!

Photos courtesy of Haytham Elmasri, you’ll need to be logged into FB to see the rest of the photos…

Ski Season Has Arrived!

Hey peeps!

Jon here…as we get ready for the ski season here, I’ve been hoping to make a couple outings when the snow hits the ground here in CA. My buddy Ryan introduced me to the Teton Gravity Research Project movies that are a good way to get you hyped up for the season. We made a point to go see the showing up at the Claremont Colleges in Claremont, CA a couple of weeks ago. Here’s the link to the movie showings in your area as they tour the country.

Check this out: Black-Eyed Peas MASS FLASH DANCE…

This was at an event for Oprah in Chicago.  It was the largest coordinated dance ever – i believe over 22,000 people were involved!  Pretty cool. Watch the girl in the front at the beginning!

more about “Black-eyed Peas on Oprah“, posted with vodpod

 

 

The Portland Mini-tour debrief

It’s kai again with an update on our adventures in Portland. An incredible amount of stuff has happened so it’s time to get chopping.

Rolling into Portland we pulled up to the illustrious “Thrift Lodge”, a bankrupted Travel Lodge with its “TL” logo plastered all over the three-story dive motel. We decided to sleep for a few hours before heading to the convention center.

Basically the rest of the day was spent at the conference, setting up, getting our booth looking sexy, and networking. We met up with our new agent and representation Travis from Layman Lyric. He is an exceedingly large and obsessively kind man: large in the sense that he’s 6’4 and bulked to the teefs; kind in the sense that he loves humans and lavishes all with generosity from his towering dexterity. The whole purpose of us getting to Portland was for this sole reason: Attend the “Marketplaces” within the conference and refresh the relationships we’ve made with students in hopes that they bring us to their campuses.

That night we were reunited with our friends at Carroll College, MSU Northern, St. Martins, Utah Valley University, Boise State, and many, many others. We seriously doubted that A: folks from last year would come back to a second NACA, B: anyone would remember us, but we were wrong. It was a night of hugs and shouting and laughter and reconnecting with the little communities we had been making across the land.

Since most of our friends had not been to Portland before, we decided to play host and invite our friends to some Voodoo Doughnut (the equivalent to Southern Cali’s In-N-Out Burger in terms of iconic mass). The weather was horrid, thus a walk to the non-seating spot was out of the question. The boys and I were happy to play courier to our good friends and we nabbed two dozen of the heavenly sugar dripping disasters and met up with the others at the Double Tree Lobby. Laughter and happiness ensued until late in the night.

http://www.voodoodoughnut.com/

::Saturday::

The Thrift Lodge was restful indeed. It is not an expensive motel, but you get more than you pay for. We had a late morning lounging around waiting for our day to start. Our first Marketplace was in the afternoon, and we hyped our top-secret show to the max.

Off to the airport to finally become a band again: we reunited with a Jon in high spirits; then off to the venue. Now, the venue was tricky because we had a 6pm showtime, in the middle of dinner hour. The owner has no will to make a rock venue, rather a restaurant with bands in there at night to keep ppl around to drink more after… we kind of didn’t fit in with this plan. During our sound check, the staff asked us to turn down, and again during our set. We were thrilled to see many of the students we had invited came out to see us play, but, the show ended up being quite dismal.

Having a rock band play acoustic is one thing, but asking that rock band, holding unfamiliar instruments and amps to turn down (again) is just depressing. Plus, the venue was so crowded that some of our friends from OIT had to be turned away anyway! All this to say, the show was not very productive. All of the people who went to it were our friends and were already interested in booking us anyway. And, here’s the kicker… wait for it…

NACA found out about our clandestine performance and Travis caught the heat for it. We don’t know how they found out, but it was probably accidental, NOT malicious, that is, whoever told NACA was probably not intent on hurting us. Consequences? We would have been asked to leave the conference based on our infraction if we hadn’t been planning on leaving anyway. Travis more or less got a strike against him, but had a perfect record before this. Travis seemed cool with how it all went and the net conclusion was basically zero (disregarding the possibility that we may have difficulty in getting a showcase next year).

I guess the lesson here is that we really underestimated ourselves. I do not regret our decision to play the show, because with what we knew then, it was the right decision. But, we made the error because we were insecure, arrogant, and, uh, stupid. The stupidity and arrogance, well… the insecurity I can comment on. We actually did the Double Tree late night hang out again on our second night with a much bigger crowd, the folks unanimously commented on this: We were the only band doing that kind of thing. That is, out of all of the performers out there that they had been networking with, we were connecting with students the most… by far.

My long-winded lesson being: Basic concepts in valuing relationships higher than all has ended up trumping the effects of the show 100 fold. If we carefully considered this before booking the show, maybe we wouldn’t have done it… maybe we would have. I guess the lesson I learned is to not underestimate the power of a personal contact.