LOTS of stuff to tell you about, so grab a cool drink and get comfy! First of all, it’s hard to believe it’s already been three weeks since our 10th anniversary show - it was an AMAZING night! (Check out some reviews) We had people trek from all over the country, even SoCal! We are very grateful to all that traveled such long distances - it was wonderful to see so many friends again and get to hang out, catch up, and share some surf talk. It really was a big party! And of course, the biggest thanks go to the Volcanos and the Mystery Men, who also traveled far and sounded incredible! It was so good to see and hear them again – thank you, fellas! (The Volcanos also played with us at our very first show in June of 2004 – we’re very lucky to have a world-class surf band willing to come out to Indy and play with us so often, especially as they’re such great people, too!)
“Sonic Cataclysm” has now been out for a few weeks, and the reviews are starting to roll in - so far they’re glowing! Check out the Press page for the first two, from NUVO Indianapolis Weekly and SurfRockMusic.com.
We’ve got some killer shows coming up. First up, opening for the King of Surf Guitar himself, Mr. Dick Dale, at the Melody Inn in less than three weeks! We’re absolutely thrilled that we’re finally getting this chance, it’s sure to be a show to remember! (It’s been sold out for a while, so if you don’t have the tickets, sorry, you’re out of luck!) Then just ten days after that, on Saturday, August 2nd, we get to repeat the Milwaukee harbor surf cruise, one of our most memorable gigs so far, this time playing with the Milwaukee surf mavens The Revomatics. We'll again cruise around the Milwaukee river and harbor on a party boat for two hours, while rocking out! And for the first time ever, we'll be playing without Patrick, who unfortunately has a conflict - filling in for him will be the immensely talented Chad Shivers of the Mystery Men, coming all the way from Atlanta! It'll be another epic show, no doubt, and we sincerely hope to see some of you there. (See our Shows page for more details)
We recently accidentally stumbled on a NUVO Indianapolis Weekly article from April titled "100 Best Hoosier Albums Ever" – and to our utter shock, our own "Carpe Noctem" made the list, keeping company with Wes Montgomery, the Jackson Five and John Mellencamp! WOW!! Thanks, NUVO!
Ivan and Dane will be performing a 30-minute Atlantics tribute set at the 2014 Surf Guitar 101 Convention in Los Alamitos, CA on August 9th (and the day after at the Huntington Beach pier), joined by Danny Snyder (of the TomorrowMen, Frankie & the Pool Boys and Meshugga Beach Party) on second guitar, and Jonpaul Balak (of Insect Surfers and Tikiyaki Orchestra) on bass! This will be an once-in-a-lifetime event, so if you’re a fan of the Atlantics, make sure you don’t miss it! There are many other reasons not to miss the SG101 convention this year, such as: the Surf Coasters, Slacktone, the reunion of the Boss Martians, Frankie & the Pool Boys, the Kilaueas, Threesome, and on and on – it’ll be an unforgettable event!
Finally, in case you haven’t heard yet, Ivan has been invited to write a monthly blog/column on surf music for the Guitar Player Magazine! It will be primarily for their website, but will probably on occasion also run in the print version. This is an incredible opportunity to spread the word about modern surf music to a potentially large and international readership.
Whew, yep, LOTS going on! Thanks for reading, and here’s hoping you all have a great summer (can we make it ‘endless’??)!
Hello Madeira friends! We are very happy to announce the release of our fourth full-length - and first live - album, “Sonic Cataclysm - Live” (Double Crown DCCD 54), marking our tenth anniversary! It's been a remarkable ten years, surpassing any of our hopes and dreams, and this album is a thank-you to all of you, our wonderful fans. The album was recorded over two nights in December at our home-away-from-home, The Historic Melody Inn in Indianapolis, whose owners and staff have treated us so great this past decade. It was recorded through a heap of vintage gear by Tommy Schichtel (AKA Dick Chiclet of the Grand Rapids instro-wonders the Concussions), and he captured something truly special on this album - the sound is absolutely remarkable! The final mastering touch was provided by Glenn Brown of GBP Productions, Lansing, MI, whose CV reads like a rock'n'roll hall of fame (including Kid Rock's most recent album). The album features 19 songs, making it a nice overview of our time together so far, with three songs from Sandstorm, five songs from Carpe Noctem and five from Tribal Fires. There are also five songs we had not recorded before, including two brand new originals ("Caravela" and "Farthest Shore"), and three covers (Dick Dale's "Night Rider", the Fender IV's "Everybody Up!", and Los Relampagos' "Macarena"), the whole shebang wrapping up with an OTT version of the Surf Coasters' epic "Intruder". It's a high-energy journey (with a couple of breathers along the way) through the world of the Madeira!
Here’s the full tracklist:
INTRODUCTION
TRIBAL FURY
EVERYBODY UP!
SURF FIDELIS
CITIES OF GOLD
WITCH DOCTOR
JUNGLE DRUMS
BURNING MIRAGE
MACARENA
CARAVELA
FARTHEST SHORE
NIGHT RIDER
MAR VISTA
THE SARACEN
TANGAROA
WREAK HAVOC!
UNDERCURRENTS
RICOCHET
SANDSTORM!
INTRUDER
You can now hear three songs (“Farthest Shore”, “Burning Mirage” and “Everybody Up!”) on Soundcloud. The album release date is June 17, 2014, and we will have CDs available for sale at our 10th anniversary and album release show on Saturday, June 14th, 2014 at The Melody Inn, Indianapolis, with the Volcanos and the Mystery Men?
Hope you enjoy the three new tracks, and that we’ll see you in Indy on June 14th!
Thank you all very much for these great ten years!!!
Happy New Year, Madeira friends! We hope you are getting through this horrible, horrible winter and anticipating the spring - just five more weeks to go!
Here's some BIG news: we are beyond thrilled to report that the March issue of the legendary Guitar Player magazine has a full-page feature on the Madeira! We are in the section titled "Now Hear This - Snappy Profiles of Players You Should Know," which in the past half a year has featured two other surf bands, the amazing Insect Surfers and Crazy Aces. The March issue (with the Rolling Stones on the cover) should be available at newsstands everywhere any day now, and we hope you will thank the magazine for supporting the band, as well as our beloved surf music, by buying a copy!
In other news, the December live shows turned out really well and gave us some fantastic material for the live album. Thank you VERY MUCH to all who braved the awful weather and supported the band on this important occasion. The live album will be out for our 10th anniversary on June 14th, which we'll be celebrating at the Melody Inn with the Volcanos and the Mystery Men. We very much hope you'll be able to join us for that. We'll also be hitting the Melody Inn one time before that, in just three weeks, on Saturday, March 8th, with our good friends the D-Rays and the Grinning Man. Then we'll be taking a short break so Patrick and Savannah can get married in peace in late April! :) Plans are already brewing for this summer, including another boat cruise show in Milwaukee and a tiki/exotica show in Indy - stay tuned for more details.
Don't forget to pick up the March Guitar Player, and here's hoping you all have a wonderful 2014, filled with surf music - and we hope to see you in person at one of our shows at some point! And happy Valentine's Day - the Madeira loves you and thanks you for all your support!
Update March 23, 2014: You can now read the article on our press page!
We are only FOUR weeks away now from the two shows we'll be recording for a live album! Just to remind you, they'll be on Friday, December 6th (joined by the Volcanos and the Concussions) and Saturday, December 7th (joined by Patrick's OTHER two bands, Five Year Mission and the Shake Ups, both of whom will be playing their CD release shows), at the Melody Inn in Indianapolis. We very much hope you'll be able to join us for this epic event!!! (Well, at least we really, REALLY hope it'll be an epic event! :) ) If you're anywhere in the vicinity - defined as a 500-mile radius around Indy!!! - that weekend, please consider coming - we guarantee it's gonna be a BLAST!! In fact, a real CATACLYSM! AND, how many times do you get a chance to be recorded for a live CD (assuming you shout and clap loud enough, of course)???
Here are the Facebook event pages for both nights:
We hope you've been having a great summer so far! We have some BIG news: we're going to be recording a live album on Friday, December 6th and Saturday, December 7th at the Melody Inn in Indianapolis!!! We'll be joined on Friday by the legendary Volcanos and the incredible Concussions!!!! And then on Saturday we'll be playing with Patrick's OTHER two bands, the epic Five Year Mission and the gorgeously melodic and hummable Shake Ups!! Come take advantage of this opportunity to see a legendary third wave surf band, one of the best modern surf bands around right now, the greatest Star Trek themed band in the Universe, Indy's best indie band - oh, and US! - and be a part of something a bit special, a live CD recording! Those don't happen very often! We hope to make these two shows pretty special and unforgettable. Stay tuned for more details coming soon.
We've got a few 'live recording warm-up' gigs before then, including our return next weekend to Champaign, IL for another always-amazing Surfabilly Freakout Surfy Murphy's Beach Riot, as well as the raucous Melody Inn's Punk Rock Night in Indy! Then on Saturday, October 5th, we'll be hitting Athens, OH for the first time, with the local surf favorites, the D-Rays - really looking forward to that! We hope to see you at some of these shows, and DEFINITELY hope to see you in December for the recording of our live album!
Our show in Milwaukee with the Exotics and the Cocktail Preachers on a cruise boat on July 12th was absolutely AMAZING! In fact, it was one of our very favorite shows we have ever played. The boat was full (200 people), and everybody came to have a good time! Cruising for two hours, first on the Milwaukee river with all the outdoor restaurant patrons on the shore waving at us, then around the harbor and into the darkness of Lake Michigan, well, it was unforgettable, especially since we were able to share it all with our good friends the Cocktail Preachers and the Exotics. (There were even fireworks just as we started playing! Nice!!)
Greg and Inga Gardner drove 16 HOURS ONE WAY to be at this show, all the way from Manitoba, Canada!!! Absolutely incredible! Greg has a surf radio show and is a huge fan, and he shot our entire set on video (in three parts), for which we are very grateful - of the many shows we've played, it's really nice to have this one in particular preserved for the ages. Check out the videos (see below) - the second of which contains TWO brand new Madeira originals: Caravela and The Farthest Shore. Hope you enjoy the videos a tenth as much as we've enjoyed this show, and special thanks to Jon of the Exotics for organizing the whole thing, to Greg and Inga for driving so far and shooting these videos, and to all the wonderful people on the boat that night (maybe some of you)!
We hope you're all enjoying your summer! The Madeira
The long-running UK surf/instro magazine Pipeline has selected "Tribal Fires" as the runner-up for the album of the year for '12! (The winner was the Finnish band the Dangermen with their great debut "Meet the Men of Danger".) Given that so many phenomenal releases came out this past year, this is a great honor. Pipeline in the past selected "Sandstorm" as runner-up for the album of the year for '06 and "Carpe Noctem" as one of two albums of the year (with Los Jets) for '08 - this kind of recognition is rare, especially for a surf band, and we are deeply grateful to Pipeline's support over the years!
The other recent big news is that on January 10th the "Morning Edition" show on National Public Radio (NPR), the most widely-listened morning show in the country, featured our own "Tribal Fury"! It was used as 'bumper music' into the bottom-of-the-hour news. The show is played on all NPR stations nationwide, so the song was heard by a lot of people. (And we did indeed get coast-to-coast reports.) You can hear the original segment here (Tribal Fury starts at 3:39). Thanks to Morning Edition and NPR!
We had a *blast* playing the Punk Rock Night to a packed house at the Melody Inn last month, and thanks to them for inviting us - we hope we get to do it again very soon. We're returning to Dayton, OH for a show with Team Void this Saturday (see the Shows page for all the details), and we hope to see some of you there! We're also returning to Michigan in April, and then off to North Carolina again for another fantastic Instro Summit in early May! Good stuff ahead - and new songs are coming along, we hope to unveil a few of them at the upcoming shows.
Finally, happy Valentine's Day - the Madeira sends you our love! The Madeira
We hope you are greatly enjoying the holidays, and your stockings are overflowing with surf CDs! We wanted to give you one final update for the year, as there are a few items worth noting. First, we will be playing the Punk Rock Night at the Melody Inn in Indy for the first time ever on Saturday, January 12th. It'll actually be more like a Surf-Punk Night, as we'll be playing with our friends Team Void from Dayton, OH, as well as two other surf(y) bands. We very much hope you''ll be able to join us for that show, and kick those January blues with some hot surf/punk music!
Second, we were thrilled to find out that El Sotano, the weekly surf music show on Spanish National Radio hosted by Diego R.J., selected our song "Tribal Fury" as #3 of the best 20 surf tracks of 2012! Thank you very much, Diego! You can hear the show online - check it out!
Third, we are happy to announce that our good friends at Surfabilly Freakout Radio in Champaign, IL, just released a fantastic new compilation CD "Throttlebilly Beach Riot!", chock full of surf, rockabilly, psychobilly, garage and more - and among these 20 tracks of doom is our own "Burning Mirage"! Thanks to Jet Sterling, Chelsea Bandita, Koffin Keith, Motorhead Mike, and all the rest of the Surfabilly crew for doing us the honor of including us among all the great bands, the Nebulas, Daikaiju, the Cocktail Preachers, the Love Me Nots, Knuckel Drager, the Men from S.P.E.C.T.R.E., Vegas 66, etc. We also greatly appreciate all your support through the years! Learn more about the CD - or simply order it for ONLY $10, here.
Finally, we thought we'd mention that we will be starting to work on some new songs again (hopefully for the next CD) at our next practice in less than two weeks! With Tribal Fires now almost a year old, we figure it's time... We hope to unveil the new songs at our upcoming shows, and we've got some great ones planned for the next six months, with return visits to Ohio, North Carolina, and hopefully Michigan (working on those right now). Keep checking our shows calendar, and hope to see you at one of them. Until then, we wish you a very HAPPY NEW YEAR!
We hope you're having a pleasant Fall, and (always!) enjoying some good music. There are a few things going on with the Madeira that we'd like to let you know about. First, we will be playing our final show of the year tomorrow night (Friday) in Cincinnati, OH, with three other great surf bands, and it'll be a Halloween show, so full costume - see all the details on our gigs page. We've had a great year, having played more shows than ever before, from North Carolina to Wisconsin to California, some of them being our best ever! Thanks for coming out to see us if you did, we greatly appreciate it, and maybe we'll see some of you tomorrow.
Second, we were thrilled to learn that the new issue of Pipeline Instrumental Review gave "Tribal Fires" a fantastic review, and editor Alan Taylor selected it as #1 in his Top Ten for the issue! (You may recall that Pipeline selected "Carpe Noctem" as one of the two albums of the year in '08, and "Sandstorm" as one of the three runner-ups to the album of the year in '06.) We also found out that the Indianapolis free weekly paper Nuvo ran a cool comic (!) about the Madeira on August 23rd, right before our Melody Inn show - we completely missed it! You can see it here or on Nuvo's site.
Finally, we've added a ton of videos from this summer to our YouTube channel, many of them from the SG101 Convention in California and the Oxford Battle of the Surf Bands in Oxford, OH, both amazing shows. Check them out!
We hope to start working on some new material at the beginning of the year, so stay tuned for that. Until then, we hope you have wonderful holidays, and hope to see you in person in 2013!
We hope you're having a great summer, and listening to a LOT of surf music! :) We just returned from our California mini-tour which was simply EPIC! Suffice it to say, we played some of our best shows ever with some of the best surf bands ever! You can read Ivan's report of the tour here. And here's a great video from the Surf Guitar 101 convention of us doing Intruder. Thanks so much to all of you that came to support us at any of the five CA shows - we greatly appreciate it.
Ivan recently did a lengthy interview with Warren Springfield for the online publication Fine Print Magazine - check it out here.
Finally, we have four shows coming up in the next four weeks, covering Indiana, Illinois and Ohio. We start next weekend with our return to the Melody Inn in Indy, followed the next day by our return to Mike'n'Molly's in Champaign, IL, then followed two weeks later with a very special show in Chicago and a week after that in Oxford, OH - you can check out the details on our Gigs page.
We may play one more show this Fall, but this will be basically it. It's been a busy six months of playing and traveling, and we need to regroup a bit. So, we very much hope to see you at some of these shows! And of course, we'll have the new super-cool, Steve-Blickenstaff-designed t-shirts for sale at all of these shows, as well as our new CD "Tribal Fires"!
Hello Madeira friends! We are very happy to announce the release of our fourth full-length - and first live - album, “Sonic Cataclysm - Live” (Double Crown DCCD 54), marking our tenth anniversary! It's been a remarkable ten years, surpassing any of our hopes and dreams, and this album is a thank-you to all of you, our wonderful fans. The album was recorded over two nights in December at our home-away-from-home, The Historic Melody Inn in Indianapolis, whose owners and staff have treated us so great this past decade. It was recorded through a heap of vintage gear by Tommy Schichtel (AKA Dick Chiclet of the Grand Rapids instro-wonders the Concussions), and he captured something truly special on this album - the sound is absolutely remarkable! The final mastering touch was provided by Glenn Brown of GBP Productions, Lansing, MI, whose CV reads like a rock'n'roll hall of fame (including Kid Rock's most recent album). The album features 19 songs, making it a nice overview of our time together so far, with three songs from Sandstorm, five songs from Carpe Noctem and five from Tribal Fires. There are also five songs we had not recorded before, including two brand new originals ("Caravela" and "Farthest Shore"), and three covers (Dick Dale's "Night Rider", the Fender IV's "Everybody Up!", and Los Relampagos' "Macarena"), the whole shebang wrapping up with an OTT version of the Surf Coasters' epic "Intruder". It's a high-energy journey (with a couple of breathers along the way) through the world of the Madeira!
Happy New Year, Madeira friends! We hope you are getting through this horrible, horrible winter and anticipating the spring - just five more weeks to go!