2011: Like a Robot Walking into the Sunset...

2011 is coming to a close, and as is the tradition during this time of year, we stop to look back on our achievements from the previous year before diving headlong into the next! 2011 was arguably the biggest year of URIZEN thus far, and 2012 is going to have to put on its big boy pants to top it.

Though there was no official new release from us this year, I like to think of this as the Year of Universe:Red. Officially releasing in December of 2010, Universe:Red was our vessel for adventure this year, and what a vessel in which to ride! Perhaps most monumental (for me anyway) about the release of Universe:Red was that it gave way to the Expanding Universe tour; the first proper US tour in UriHistory!

 

 Touring has been a dream of mine for as long as I can remember, and despite the massive amount of work, money, frustration, and auto repair that went into it, I can very honestly and legitimately say that it met and exceeded every one of my expectations. Most people would look at our very modest tour and not see what the big deal was, but for us, it was a personal triumph and the fulfillment of a lifelong goal. For those of you who attended, helped us book and promote shows, shared the stage with us, or donned jumpsuits and monster costumes to help us bring our show to life, you may never know how much we appreciate you. It would have been entirely impossible without everyone's help, and we are indebted to you all!

Aside from our main tour, we had so many great opportunities to hit the road and perform with awesome people for even awesom-er fans. We continued our beloved tradition of con performances at All-Con in Dallas and Omnicon in McAllen, and had the time of our lives doing a mini-tour of Texas with our good friends and greatest source of career-based inspiration, The Protomen. On top of all of this, we also manged to squeeze in some local shows along the way, and even resurrected the aborted souls of NEZIRU on Halloween.

2011 also saw the departure of two UriMen from the group, but in their absence we had the opportunity to share the stage with a couple of very cool and talented dudes: Dan Sandberg and Cesar Gonzalez. Thank you both for donating your time and talents to us, this won't be the last time you'll be seen on a URIZEN stage, I guarantee it!

Thanks are also in order for the bands that helped us during the Expanding Universe tour: The Protomen, Bat Castle, D&D Sluggers, Children of the Reptile, Earths Collide, Brazen Angel, Prime Mover, Centura, Come See My Dead Person, Broken End Stereo, and every other band that we shared the stage with along the way. Independent music cannot exist without a strong community of musicians, and every one of the people in these bands did us favors that we will happily return anytime they need it!

Thanks also to the people that made our lives a whole lot easier during 2011: Joshua and Loyal Family in St. Louis for your generosity and hospitality; Hoyt Parris and Pathfinder Promotions in Atlanta for your tireless dedication to metal music; Todd at All-Con and Mark at Omnicon for putting a shitload of oft-thankless work into these conventions that we love to play and attend; Rustin and the staff at Tomcats West for giving us a homebase, a great sound system, and a pay scale that helps us keep gas in the Macho Van; and of course the Damask family, who provided us with a home and a family in North Carolina and asked for nothing in return.

Perhaps the biggest thanks of all goes to our friends and family who piled into our stinky (often AC-less) Macho Van to travel great lengths for no pay with nothing provided, all for the greater glory of bringing a robot, goo monster, Kuato, and more to life every single night at every show this year: Gabe Castañeda, Casey Drinnen, Gus Ruby, and David Cerezo, there would have been no URIZEN this year without your help!

 

So how will we top such a monumental year? Simple: More tours! More conventions! New stage show! New album! Maybe even a stop at a little music fest in Austin called... umm... Something By Somethingwest? 2012 will be bigger and URIZEN-ier, so don't take your eyes off of us for a minute. 

Thanks again for making 2011 a year that will live on in our memories forever!

Daniel // URIZEN

P.S. We played with Green Jelly this year. Green. Jelly. Seriously, what an amazingly cool fucking year this was!

Expanding Universe Video Journal: Part Two Ready and Willing

The video journals keep a-chuggin' along with Part Two: Gateway to the East. And remember, each video diary more-or-less corresponds with one of the original blog entries we posted from the road, so if you want a little more context, or a little more info about what happened on the tour during those particular scenes, don't forget to check 'em out. The St. Louis-related blog is right here: http://urizenonline.blogspot.com/2011/06/expanding-universe-onward-to-st-louis.html and you should be able to find the rest easily enough by using the "Expanding Universe tour" tag.

I will say that editing this video was tough, because there was a lot going on in that hotel room that I personally found to be quite hilarious. The challenge in assembling these videos, however, is realizing that not everyone finds you as hilarious and interesting as you find yourself, so sometimes you've gotta pull back a little bit. But who knows, if there's enough interest, maybe we'll revisit these videos in some sort of "director's cut" version, eh?

No?

Awww... c'mon!

Expanding Universe Video Journal: Part One Now Posted!

Hey, remember that thing we did this summer? You know... that thing where you drive around and play music and do fun stuff while losing lots of money? Oh yeah... touring! That's the rub!

 

Well, while we were touring, the camera was rolling... a lot. We ended up with hours and hours of footage (thank you, digital camera with built-in hard drive!), and now we're trickling the juicy bits down to you a little at a time, starting with the video above!

 

In the video above, you'll see what happened during our first night of the tour in our hometown of Fort Worth. If you kept up with the original tour blogs, you already know that our mode of transport, the Macho Van, was in desperate need of a radiator transplant, lest our entire tour be effed in its stupid A. Now you can live the experience as if you were standing around with us, watching awesome dudes save our tour and our asses! (For the full experience, watch the video while sniffing a nice stinky bottle of coolant.)

 

Part Two is in the can, and Part Three is already underway, but frankly, the only way I'm going to know if you guys are actually enjoying these videos is if you tell me so! So if you're enjoying what you're seeing so far (and I hope you do), and you want to see more, just let us know by commenting on the YouTube page, or on Facebook, or even here on the blog.

Stay tuned for more, and if you haven't already, make sure to head to our YouTube Channel and click that big, tasty "Subscribe" button so you don't miss out on any shenanigans! SHENANIGANS!!!

Expanding Universe: Gooblins, Blizzies, and the Father of Death

Prologue
As you probably read in the last blog entry, we were supposed to spend this week traveling to and from WorldCon in Reno, but had to pull out for horrible, stupid reasons (namely money). In an act of desperation last Saturday (mere days from the time we were supposed to leave for Reno), I contacted mankind's (and my) last hope, The Protomen, to see if we could join them on their latest run through the non-DFW portions of the state of Texas. To my great delight and surprise, I was contacted that night by Murphy Weller himself, and the wheels were set in motion. Before I knew it, it was Tuesday morning, and we were loading up the trailer and hitching it to the Macho Van to meet our friends The Protomen in Houston.

Expanding Universe: A Risque Cafe and the Atlantian Re-exploration

Sunday, July 3 2011
I left the following bit of information out of the last blog because I didn't want to cheapen the sincerity of my words expressing thanks to people like Ed at Backstage and the fans who make us feel loved and needed. But this story needs to be told, because after our show in Gainesville, Matt, Gabe and I paid a visit to the most magical place on Earth (well, the southeastern US anyway): Cafe Risque.

You can probably see where this is going...

Expanding Universe: Redemption in Gainesvile

Saturday, July 2 2011
At the end of the last semi-angry, semi-bitter (well, mostly bitter) blog entry, I begged for Gainesville to redeem Florida in our eyes. The first thing that happened when we piled out of our van? We noticed this:

...the fuck?

Expanding Universe: A Tale of Tampa

Friday, July 1 2011
Now look... I'm not usually one to judge something based entirely on one experience, but with that said, I'm pretty sure Tampa is a shithole. Now if you're from Tampa or you like Tampa or you have family from Tampa, please don't be offended. I'm sure there are good people and good places in Tampa, just like with any place in the world. But the Tampa we saw yesterday was just a rundown desperate shithole with shitty people and shitty places. But maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start from the beginning.

Expanding Universe: URIZEN vs. Old Man Ocean

Thursday, June 30 2011
The "next day" of the tour began right after the Charleston show, as we had no hotel for the night, but also because we were eager to get to Jacksonville to hit the beach for our day off. Since the drive between Charleston and Jacksonville was relatively short, we dragged our feet by hanging out at Walmart for a while, gathering $1 kites with which to build our epic, patented 6-tier kite monstrosity. 

After Walmart, we hit the road. We all wanted to experience a proper east coast sunrise at the beach, so Thomas planned to pull over to an oceanside stop around 6am for us to have a look. Unfortunately, we ended up outside of Savannah, GA just before sunrise, and we learned a harsh lesson about Georgia beaches: 

Expanding Universe: Like Regular Carolina, but Further... South

Wednesday, June 29 2011
From the moment I booked the South Carolina stop of this tour, I had a weird, bad feeling about it. I couldn't place what it was exactly, just this feeling that something was going to go wrong. But waking up this morning proved to be not only uneventful, but very pleasant! In a final act of hospitality, the Damasks provided us with an enormous bag of delicious bagels, and packed the numerous leftovers for the road, along with some bananas, a bunch of cookies, and various other goodies. 

Thomas and Julio were ecstatic.

But gut feelings usually happen for a reason, and at around 3pm on the drive down to Charleston, I finally found out what was going to go wrong. To make a very long story short, the club we were supposed to play at decided to bump the show in favor of... 

Expanding Universe: Son of North Carolina

Tuesday, June 28 2011
The hospitality from the Damasks continued today in the form of free pizza and a TV, on which we watched a documentary about rumspringa, followed by more sleeping on the floor.

He might just be planking.

Eventually we were forced to leave the comfort of this temporary home in favor of a show at Night Light in Chapel Hill, so into the van we piled, and on the road we went. The road from Raleigh to Chapel Hill was, of course, accompanied by a torrential downpour, as has been the tradition during this tour, and it pretty much always lets up right before we arrive at the club, so I guess we should be happy about that.

Expanding Universe: From Beautiful Green Mountains to Horrible Red Stoplights

Monday, June 27 2011 
The goal for today was to complete the unforgivingly long journey from St. Louis to Wilmington, and we still had a good 8 hours, a punctured trailer tire, and some Appalachian mountains to deal with. With the tire quickly patched and switched out, it was time to put the Macho Van's little V6 heart to the test and see how it dealt with mountain ranges. 

...Prepare for Van Death

The result? 

Expanding Universe: Superman and Friends

Sunday, June 26 2011
Woke up this morning and waded across the hotel room to take a shower. Decided to wake everyone else up with Erasure's "A Little Respect" and was treated with a 98% nude dance from the banana-hammocked Gabe.

Not pictured: Gabe

 No show today so we took our sweet time traveling between St. Louis and Knoxville on the way to Wilmington for a show on Monday night. That meant some casual dining at Taco Bell, some upscale shopping at Wal-Mart, and of course, a stop at one of America's most revered landmarks. Yeah, you know what I'm talkin' about...

Expanding Universe: Onward to St. Louis

Saturday, June 25 2011
We departed from Fort Worth at about 3am and began a long sleepy journey through Oklahoma and Missouri. The trip was largely free of difficulties, as the formerly overheating Macho Van was now ice cold and problem-free.

The fuel gauge, however, is still quite broken.

 There were only two problems to speak of. The first is that we somehow acquired a metal shard of some sort that is slowly draining one of our trailer tires of precious life. The other problem was the return of...

Expanding Universe: The Journey Begins

Friday, June 24 2011
If there is one phrase that best describes the condition of our trusty (/not trusty) van, The Macho Van, that phrase would be: riddled with problems. Since we returned from our mini-Texas tour, Macho has been in and out of various shops to fix various problems for various costs. The one constant, however, was that the Macho Van was overheating, and no amount of work ever seemed to fix that.

Pictured: Every tour by every band ever.

On Friday afternoon, I picked up the van for the last time before hitting the road for the eastern leg of the Expanding Universe tour. But before we could even strap on the trailer, that bitch was overheating once again. With no time left, we geared up and prepared to hobble across the US in an overheating van with the heat a-blastin' all the way across America. We had no choice; this tour was happening one way or the other.

Tour-pollo 13: "San Antonio, We Have a Problem"

So today marked the beginning of the URIZEN Texas Mini-Tour, and the official start of our summer of touring... and I don't think it's possible that any more shit could have gone wrong! Truly it was the Apollo 13 of tour kickoffs.

Let's start from the beginning, shall we? The fun began with us making about a thousand new friends that all looked a lot like this:

Hello there.

In the time since our last excursion, the UriTrailer became less a transport unit for musical equipment and more an apartment complex for legions of wasps. They were none too happy about us trying to reclaim our property, and an epic battle ensued. Many wasps were killed, much time was wasted, and much sunburn was acquired.

But soon, the trailer was loaded and were on our way. Smooth sailing from here, right? Man... did you even read the title of this blog entry?

Once we got to Dallas, we noticed a little problem: the van was very much overheating. So we checked the coolant, and hey, it was bone dry! Throw some coolant in there and problem solved... right? *sigh* No... not right.

So after some fresh coolant, some stop leak, and a new radiator cap, we were still blazing hot, so we had to kiss our ice cold, wonderfully breezy A/C goodbye and crank up the heat to keep the engine from es'ploding.

Back on the road, heat blazin', windows wide open and loud as shit, but at least we're on our way to San Antonio at last.

Well... almost.

Oh I'm sorry, did you guys want to drive on me?

The left tire on our trailer just fuckin'... disintegrated. So we pull over, jack it up, take off the pile of scraps that was once a tire, and throw on the spare. But wait! The spare is totally flat! Hooray! So... trailer is jacked up again, wheel is removed, and half of the party is left behind to defend the crippled trailer. The rest of us take the van in search of air, but everything along the interstate is conveniently out of order. We finally find air in fuggin' Abbott, TX (birthplace of Willie Nelson!) and head back to our near-dead roadside associates.

Alright, alright... we change the tire, we hit the road, we finally put some miles behind us, and all is well. I mean, except for the fact that we're four hours outside of San Antonio, and we're set to hit the stage in four hours. Aye aye aye!

Don't be sad, Matt, we'll get there someday.

The rest of the trip actually went off without any problems, and we arrived at Clicks with about an hour to spare. Despite taking 10 full hours to complete what should have been a 4 or 5 hour trip, the day of bullshit was totally worth it! The club itself was awesome, the staff was friendly and generous, and the crowd was excited and rockin' out despite it being after midnight. We met some awesome new friends, hung out with a few old ones (Rik Buddha in da house!), and spread a great deal of CDs and shirts across the land of San Antonio.

But the best part of the entire trip so far...?

Burrotote HUGE! God I love you, El Taco Tote...

Headhunters in Austin tomorrow, let's see if we can make the trip without incident!