We sincerely hope you're having a great summer! It's been a fun one for us - and things are about to really speed up over the next six weeks!
First of all, "Tribal Fires" has been out for almost five months now, and is doing great! We've received half a dozen excellent reviews so far, and we expect a few more to come. We've also gotten many truly nice words about the CD from you, and we are both grateful and very happy to hear them. Double Crown tells us that they are very pleased with the sales so far, so thank you for that as well!
Second, we've been getting out and about over the past few months: We had a great weekend in early May in North Carolina, playing the AWESOME Instro Summit in Chapel Hill, where we got to meet one of the newest of our favorite people, Cousin Crispy, and shared the stage with many great bands such as the Mystery Men?, Kill, Baby...Kill!, and in particular the amazing Aqualads, who we were privileged to play with twice that weekend! We were also very lucky that we got to play twice in mid-June with the simply awesome Exotics, both on their home turf of Milwaukee, WI and in the Chicago burbs! Both weekends were a real blast - thanks to all the people that made these shows happen, we really hope we get to do it again soon!
Finally, we're about to commence a super-busy period (at least by our standards!) - nine shows in four different states in six weeks! We start our five-show California tour in just ten days, followed shortly after returning from CA with back-to-back shows in Indy and Champaign, IL, and then Chicago and Oxford, OH just a couple of weeks after that. The five California shows should be quite epic - playing two gigs around San Francisco with two completely different setlists (one highly energetic, one completely mellow), then San Diego followed by the world-famous Surf Guitar 101 Convention in Los Alamitos, then finishing up at the Huntington Beach pier, four years almost to the day since our last time there! And we get to play with so many of our good friends and some of the best surf bands in the world today: Jon & the Nightriders, El Ray, the TomorrowMen, the Exotics, the Secret Samurai, the Cocktail Preachers, and many, many more! (For full details on all these shows, please check out our Shows page.
Lots of good stuff ahead! We very much hope to see some of you at some of these shows. And if not, well, we're already working on setting up some Fall gigs, so stay tuned!
Enjoy the rest of the summer - and we highly recommend you make Tribal Fires its official soundtrack! :)
It’s been three weeks since the official release of “Tribal Fires”, and it’s now widely available, both in physical and download versions (including through Amazon and iTunes). We very much hope that if you’ve picked it up you’re enjoying it. If you are, please consider leaving a few comments on Amazon and/or iTunes and hype it up for us a bit!
We have big plans for the next six months or so, playing all over the US in order to promote the new album, including a couple of shows in North Carolina in early May; Chicago and Milwaukee (our first time there) in mid-June; five shows in California in early August; and several other shows in the works for August and September, including another show in Chicago, as well as Champaign, IL and Oxford, OH – stay tuned for those.
We wanted to in particular draw your attention to two amazing shows we’re honored to be part of this spring and summer. First, the Instro Summit, a 3-day festival held on May 4th-6th at the Cave in Chapel Hill, NC, and featuring bands from all over America performing surf and instrumental rock. We’ll be playing on Friday, May 4th, along with our Indy brethren Destination: Earth!, as well as an incredible lineup of surf bands including Aqualads, the Mystery Men?, Kill, Baby…Kill!, Killer Filler, and Weisstronauts. If you’re a surf/instro nut living anywhere close to the East Coast, then this is a must-attend event!
Second, we’re incredibly excited to also be playing the 5th Annual Surf Guitar 101 Convention at the Starting Gate, in Los Alamitos, CA, on Sat. Aug. 11th (10am to 8pm), along with a mind-blowing collection of bands from the US and Europe, including the reunion of Jon & the Nightriders (!!), El Ray (Denmark), the Exotics (Milwaukee), Los Venturas (Belgium), the Dynotones (SoCal), 9th Wave (CT), and the Intoxicators (FL). There will also be the SG101 members jam, the legends jam and tribute hour, a huge vendor room, raffles and giveaways. and much, much more… It’s going to be an unforgettable party, and we sincerely hope you can join us for it!
Please check out our Shows page for all the details as well as an up-to-date listing of all of our upcoming shows – and keep a close eye on it for continuing updates. We’ll be starting our US blitz with return to Lafayette, IN on Friday, April 14th, and we’re thrilled that we’ll be joined on stage for the first time ever by Brad Harner, the percussionist on both “Tribal Fires” and “Carpe Noctem” albums! It should be a blast!
We hope to see you somewhere in the US in the next six months! Until then, have a great spring and summer!
You can now pre-order the Tribal Fires CD through the Double Crown Records website (or you can get a copy from the band at the March 2nd CD release show at the Melody Inn). The CDs will begin shipping March 3rd. If you are a Double Crown Music Club member, it will automatically be shipped to you.
We are extremely excited to announce the release of our third full-length album “Tribal Fires” (Double Crown DCCD 46)! After eight years of adventures through the Saharan deserts, with “Tribal Fires” the Madeira have gone Sub-Saharan, into the dark and mysterious depths of central African jungles. It’s a journey that finds the band exploring new sounds with a highly diverse album, ranging from the most aggressive to the most melodic songs (including a loving tribute to the British instrumental heroes the Shadows) the band has ever done – and everything in between. There are 13 songs in total, of which two are covers: an original arrangement of Ernesto Lecuona’s “Jungle Drums,” and the Atlantics’ “Giant”. Here’s the full tracklist:
Tribal Fury
Cities of Gold
Twilight
Fire Sacrifice
The Expedition
Witch Doctor
Jungle Drums
Arcadian Voyage
Mar Vista
Giant
Pre-Ritual
The Ritual
Zanzibar
You can now hear three songs (“Tribal Fury”, “Cities of Gold” and “Twilight”) on our MySpace site. The release date is March 6, 2012, though we will have CDs available for sale at our album release show on Friday, March 2, 2012 at The Melody Inn, Indianapolis, with the Cocktail Preachers and the Mystery Men?
More info soon – stay tuned. Until then, hope you enjoy the three new tracks, and that we’ll see you in Indy on March 2nd!
We are very very pleased to let you know about the imminent release of Brave New Surf (Double Crown Records), a new compilation of modern surf music, with a brand new Madeira track! This is a collection of the best of modern instrumental surf music from around the world, compiled by Madeira’s own Ivan Pongracic, as well as Sean Berry, the head of Double Crown Records. It features 20 tracks by surf bands from around the world, all from 2008 or later, four tracks being previously unreleased. Among those is the Madeira’s “Witch Doctor.” Here’s the full tracklist (with the previously unreleased tracks in italics):
El Supernaut – Wonderman from Intiö
Los Twang! Marvels – Sea of Glory
El Ray – Cherry Cheeks
The Coffin Daggers – Borgo Pass
Aqualads – Washout
The TomorrowMen – Momentium
The Phantom Four – El Palmero
Atomic Mosquitos – Mosquito Royale
Los Kahunas – 7 Mares
The Bambi Molesters – As the Dark Wave Swells
The Barbwires – La Caja del Muerto
Frankie & the Pool Boys – Ewa on the Beach
The Thunderchiefs – Estratosfera
The Secret Samurai – The Khazar
The Madeira – Witch Doctor
The Eliminators – Walking Tall
Surfer Joe – The North Swell
The Deadbeats – Karabasan
Daikaiju – Laser Runner
The Anacondas – Floating Home
The CD will get a huge promotional push by the label, as our goal is to get it in the hands of as many radio shows, press outlets, zines, blogs, etc., as possible in order to expose the maximum number of people to the creativity, vibrancy and excitement of the modern surf scene. A Kickstarter campaign intended to raise some extra promotional funds was kicked off last night, and has reach the minimum goal of $300 within the first 12 hours! However, any extra money raised by the campaign will also go towards promotion, allowing the label to send more copies to more media outlets, so if you are interested in supporting the modern surf music scene, please consider donating.
There is also a new dedicated website for this release (BraveNewSurf.com) which features samples of the songs, band videos, plus a lot of information about the comp and the bands involved.
We think this is an extremely exciting project which could potentially expose many more people to our favorite music and build up our audience. We hope you will pick up the CD, maybe give a bit of money for promotion – and maybe even pick up a few extra copies to stuff in the stockings of your family and friends!
Also, we will play our final show of the year at the Melody Inn on Friday, December 2nd. We’ll be playing with two non-surf bands, which is always fun – we get to mix it up and play our music to a new audience. The other bands are excellent, and it promises to be a very fun night! We hope some of you can join us – here are the details:
Friday, December 02, 2011 The Melody Inn, 3826 N. Illinois St., Indianapolis, IN 317-923-4707 With: Deadbeat Darling (from NYC) and Dream Thieves (from Iowa City) Doors at 9 pm, show at 10 pm (the Madeira goes on second, around 11 pm) $5
This will be our last show until the CD release show on March 2nd. The album is currently being mixed. Stay tuned for more info about all this soon.
Happy holidays, and hope to see you on Friday! And hope you all like Brave New Surf, and our new track on there!
We set up our own YouTube channel, with playlists grouping different special shows and events, as well as collecting pretty much all the Madeira videos currently on YouTube (77, if we counted correctly!). Check it out, and if you like it, please subscribe. We hope to be adding some comments and reminisces to each playlist in the upcoming weeks. It’s also a nice way to see us changing through the past seven years (some of the really early videos are a trip to watch now).
A quick heads-up to let you know that Thomas Duncan, the producer/director of the upcoming surf music documentary Sound of the Surf has just released another video of the Madeira, this time of Sandstorm.
This comes from the 2008 SoCal studio shoot where we also did Crescent Moon, one of our most viewed videos on YouTube. We shot a total of seven or so songs on that session, and we hope they all eventually see the light of day. But we certainly can’t fault Tom for taking some time to release it when the final results are so great!
We hope you all made it through the nasty winter mostly unscathed, and are looking forward to the warmer weather ahead! It can’t be here soon enough! Hard to believe it’s been almost eight months since the last official update, so here’s a long-overdue one on the latest developments in the Madeira camp.
The big news is that we will be recording our third full-length album this summer! The studio is booked, and the songs are almost ready. We are very excited about the new songs, and have been playing six of them at our recent shows – see videos on our site’s front page, recorded in February at Mahogany’s in Latonia, KY (Cincinnati suburb), our most recent show, which incidentally was a blast!! Cincinnati has become Surf City Midwest, with monthly all-surf shows at Mahogany’s and the Rockin’ & Surfin’ Show every Saturday from 6-8 pm on WAIF 88.3, hosted by Rockin Rick and The Midwest Surf Guy. They’ve really built a great surf music scene in a somewhat unlikely location, and we thank them for inviting us to play there. We definitely hope to be back this Fall.
In more personal news, Todd will soon be getting married to an absolutely wonderful woman – and also a Madeira fan! (The two inevitably go together, of course. :) ) Todd and Kristin will be tying the knot on June 4th. We couldn’t be happier for them, and we wish them a wonderful life together (which is pretty much guaranteed since it’s rare to see two people better suited for each other)!
Also, Patrick continues to get a great deal of attention with his awesome new Star-Trek-themed band, Five Year Mission and their debut CD “Year One”, and we highly recommend that you check them out live if at all possible. And don’t forget Patrick’s other two bands, the Shake Ups and Destination: Earth!, both of which also continue to gig AND have imminent new releases – we have no idea how he’s able to do it all!! It’s mind-boggling!
Due to these major developments in Todd’s and Patrick’s lives, as well as us getting ready to record the new album, we will not play out very much this summer. We have a gig coming up in eleven days in Cleveland (more on that below), but then nothing for four months, until the end of August, when we’ll be back at The Mel. But what we may lack in quantity, we’ll make up for in quality with the Cleveland gig! This is going to be one for the history books, as we’re playing with our friends, the iconic Volcanos from Detroit! This is our first show with them in five years, they’ve been on a bit of a hiatus for the past few years, but I’m sure we speak for surf music fans around the world when we say that it’s GREAT to have them back! We’ll be returning to the Beachland Ballroom in Cleveland, where we had a fantastic show with the Cocktail Preachers in October.
April 30, 2011 Beachland Ballroom, 15711 Waterloo Road, Cleveland, Ohio www.beachlandballroom.com 216-383-1124 With: The Volcanos Tickets: $8 advance, $10 at the door.
Eric Moore, the man behind the “Induct Link Wray Into the Rock’n'Roll Hall of Fame” campaign, has been giving Cincinnati a run for its money by booking regular surf shows in Cleveland. With the support of the Big Surf radio show on WOBC 91.5 on Tuesdays, 6-8 pm, hosted by Tom Hinders, Cleveland has developed a dedicated group of surf music fans which received us very enthusiastically this past October, and we’re thrilled to be returning there for what is sure to be another great surf show! (Between the growing surf scenes in Cleveland and Cincinnati, the Hot Rod Hula Hop festival in Columbus, and the Surf Ohio FesTiki festival in Dayton, Ohio is quickly – and most unexpectedly! – becoming a contender for the title of “California East” for surf music! God bless 'em, and we certainly hope this trend continues and grows!)
Have a great Spring and Summer, and we hope to return with another update in a few months with some good news about the next album!
After excitedly looking forward to the Surf Explosion weekend for months, it came and went – and left much exhilaration and exhaustion in its wake! We hope you were able to join us for this unforgettable weekend. Friday night was completely crazy, with Ivan pulling triple-duty, and Patrick and Dane pulling double-duty. But all the bands sounded really great, and we had a fantastic turnout, no doubt heavily aided by the nice press in Nuvo. If you stuck around all the way until the crazy-late end just before 3 am, you witnessed an once-in-a-lifetime event of the Madeira AND the Space Cossacks playing the song “Transylvanian Orbit” AKA “Ricochet” TOGETHER on the small Melody Inn stage! We never tried it before, there was no rehearsal, but we somehow pulled it off – see for yourselves!
The FesTiki festival in Dayton, OH the next day was dogged by a lot of rain throughout the day, but it had all gone away by 6 pm and the sun was shining as soon as the four top bands went on, only slightly behind schedule, the only downside being the astounding humidity! But it just made it feel more like a hot and sticky club show, which is familiar territory for us! We had a total blast playing the big stage with professional lighting and sound, and the audience was very into it! We really hope we can play this event again in the future, as it was truly something special. Even with the rain making things damp, it was simply remarkable to see all the vendors and all the decoration amid the beautiful scenery. We’re very grateful to Surf Ohio and the Fraternal Order of Moai for inviting us to play, we were honored to be there. (You can see some videos here and here, as well as some photos here and here)
Ivan’s summer reunion with the Space Cossacks has come to an end, and it was an unqualified success! They had a total of seven shows (Baltimore, Arlington, VA, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Indianapolis, Dayton, OH), and it was really wonderful to have the two bands play the last two shows together. Hopefully there will be more chances for that in the future. But now it’s time to get back to work on that next Madeira album! We hope to have that one out sometime next year, and we’ll keep you posted on our progress.
Meanwhile, we do have a couple of shows coming up this Fall: October 2nd in Cleveland, OH, and November 13th in Lafayette, IN (check our gigs page). We hope you’ll be able to join us for those, and who knows, we might break out another brand new song at one or both of these shows (as we did in Indy and Dayton with “Cities of Gold”).
Have a great rest of the Summer, and we hope you enjoy the Fall! Thanks again for coming, if you did, to any of our summer shows, whether in Atlanta, at the IMAX, the Mel or FesTiki!
We got some wonderful press in today’s Nuvo (Indianapolis’ free weekly city paper) – they did a full feature story on the Madeira! Check it out!
Just in time for our shows tomorrow night in Indy at the Melody Inn, and Saturday in Dayton, OH (the FesTiki festival)! We very much hope you will be able to join us for these two VERY special shows – see you this weekend!
