And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead --> 
Adult Swim Tour Re-revelationsPosted 10/17/2007 by Merlin As promised, here is a full listing of the Adult Swim/non-Adult Swim tour dates. Please take note of which are which.
October 18th -- Highline Ballroom -- New York, NY
October 21st -- Black Cat -- Washington D.C.
October 23rd -- Cannery -- Nashville, TN
October 24th -- Spanish Moon -- Baton Rouge, LA
October 27th -- Emo's -- Austin, TX
October 29th -- University of New Mexico -- Albuquerque, NM *
October 30th -- Club Congress -- Tucson, AZ
October 31st -- UNLV -- Las Vegas, NV *
November 1st -- UCLA -- Los Angeles, CA *
November 2nd -- UC-Berkeley -- Berkeley, CA *
November 5th -- Colorado State -- Fort Collins, CO *
November 7th -- University of Minnesota -- Minneapolis, MN *
November 9th -- Canopy Club -- Urbana, IL
November 10th -- Waiting Room -- Omaha, NE
November 11th -- CU-Boulder -- Boulder, CO *
November 13th -- Southern Illinois Carbondale -- Carbondale, IL *
November 14th -- University of Wisconsin -- Madison, WI *
November 16th -- Hi-Tone -- Memphis, TN
November 17th -- University of Kansas -- Lawrence, KS *
November 18th -- Northwestern -- Chicago, IL *
November 19th -- Crofoot Ballroom -- Pontiac, MI
November 20th -- Lee's Palace -- Toronto, ON
November 21st -- Grog Shop -- Cleveland, OH
November 23rd -- Bowery Ballroom -- New York, NY
* - Adult Swim date with Dethklok taking place on campus. Get in free with your student ID. More info available here.
All other dates are regular club shows with tickets. Buy links coming soon.
See you there,
merlin  Digg |  Del.icio.us |  Facebook | 
Trail of Dead Back to NorwayPosted 9/25/2007 by Merlin That's right. The boys enjoyed their time in Norway so much during the recent European tour that they will be flying back to play a special one-off on October 14th! Here are the specifics:
Date -- October 14th, 2007
Place -- Trondheim, Norway
Venue -- Storsalen, Studentersamfundet
Tickets -- Online pre-sale here
Phone -- 815 33 133
Also, don't forget to keep voting for us in the Digital Music Awards. Voting ends soon and we're probably losing.
Salutations,
merlin Digg | Del.icio.us | Facebook | Digital Music Awards 2007 VotingPosted 8/10/2007 by Merlin Help us out and vote for your favorite website:
We've entered this each of the last three years and improved steadily every time, topping out last year in 13th place. Not sure if we can go any higher than that to be honest, but we'll give it a go.
Spread the link around. Tell your friends. Vote as many times as you like. If we do well I'll give you all something nice.
Cheers,
merlin Digg | Del.icio.us | Facebook | News Update from ConradPosted 7/25/2007 by Merlin From Conrad Keely:
As a last minute huzzah before embarking on the tour we've decided to book a show at the Luna Lounge here in Brooklyn, on August 2nd. It will be our first show with Aaron Ford, the newest in our line of hyper-skilled Nashville drum androids.
When I wrote that last piece of news, my mention of our replacing Doni with a human seemed to have either gone unnoticed, or else everyone already knew, which is probably the case. When we posted up on Pitchfork for two days we were flooded with about two-hundred responses before I asked them to take it down. I would like to thanks all of those people brave enough to have volunteered for such a dangerous mission.
We were fortunate, however, that our scientist friend Max Brenner happened to have had another prototype lying around in his studio, the Aaron 3.0. Aaron was developed alongside the Doni and performs with equally superb skill and efficiency, albeit slightly faster and even a bit harder at times than the Doni. Although not yet tested under extreme environments such as spilt beer and shards of glass, Brenner has convinced us that the Aaron's newly-updated circuits are robust and capable of withstanding the extreme pressures of a live TOD show.
So for those of you in the Brooklyn and general New York area who would like to attend the show, I believe pre-sales are almost sold out, but we have reserved about seventy tickets for walk-up, priced at $5.
I'm excited to be doing a show in the neighborhood, walking distance from my laboratory. Our last show in this area at North Six was an absolute disaster. I inadvertently hospitalized one spectator that evening, and nearly severed our already tenuous relationship with our publicity department. I hope that for those people who witnessed that show, we can somehow make it up to them with a less inebriated and physically hazardous performance on the 2nd of August. I'm hoping we'll be rehearsed enough to perform Naked Sun for the first time live.
Plans are currently underway for us to begin work on our next record upon returning from tour. We were throwing around various names for the record, but were reminded by the label that our contract states that the label has the option to choose the title of our next record, and Interscope informs me they have decided to call it "Trail of Dead VI". I for one am thankful, because I hate choosing titles for records. By the way, that's a joke, don't use it as fodder for any more criticism of Interscope. Digg | Del.icio.us | Facebook | Europe, Eastward Ho!Posted 7/12/2007 by Merlin Hello everybody! I apologize for the scarcity of which we've been available to our cyber friends as of late, but the boys have been on a well-deserved holiday and I've been in Wales studying with the foremost theologian professors outside of Rome. Needless to say we've been assiduously detained.
As you may or may not be aware, Trail of Dead will be embarking on a European tour throughout August and the beginning of September, playing festivals (and a few club shows) large, medium, and small. Voilà:
August 2nd -- Luna Lounge -- Brooklyn, New York
August 5th -- Sudoeste Festival -- Odemira, Portugal
August 7th -- La[2] -- Barcelona, Spain *
August 9th -- TBA -- Gothenburg, Sweden *
August 10th -- Oya Festival -- Oslo, Norway
August 11th -- Jurassic Rock Festival -- Mikkeli, Finland
August 13th -- Hard Rock Cafe -- Warsaw, Poland *
August 14th -- Roxy -- Prague, Czech Republic *
August 15th -- Frequency Festival -- Salzburg, Austria
August 16th -- K4 -- Nuremberg, Germany *
August 17th -- Highland Festival -- Erfurt, Germany
August 18th -- Pukkelpop Festival -- Hasselt, Belgium
August 20th -- Leadmill -- Sheffield, England *
August 21st -- Islington Academy -- London, England *
August 22nd -- Concorde 2 -- Brighton, England *
August 24th -- Rocco del Schlacko -- Puttingen, Germany
August 25th -- Minirock Festival -- Horb, Germany
August 26th -- Area 4 Festival -- Ludingshausen, Germany
August 28th -- Alte Feuerwache -- Mannheim, Germany *
August 29th -- Doornroosje -- Nijmegen, Netherlands *
August 30th -- Patronaat -- Haarlem, Netherlands *
September 1st -- JKF Festival -- Basel, Switzerland
September 2nd -- Independent Days Festival -- Bologna, Italy
September 3rd -- Konzerthaus Schuur -- Lucerne, Switzerland *
* = Club show.
If this Lilliputian update isn't fulfilling, feel free to visit trailofdead.org, a site which I still update periodically with breaking news and media goodies.
Bien à vous,
merlin Digg | Del.icio.us | Facebook | The Least Organized Band EverPosted 7/11/2007 by trailofdead Tuesday, July 10, 2007
I just finished reading someone’s post about how we are the most disorganized band ever, for not having posted our tour dates yet. I like that distinction. I think it would make a very appropriate subtitle to a future biography: “Trail of Dead: the Least Organized Band Ever”. I think it would be true.
I think that to me the band is a group of people unified by a desire to play a certain type of music. That’s pretty much what we do. We’re not web designers, we’re not a video production team, we’re not even visual artists. The fact that I happen to make art on the side is purely a happy coincidence, for me. But my role in the band is in no way dependant upon it.
Duty does, however, insist that I write music. So when we’re not touring, that’s what I’m doing. And anyone who is obsessively creative (obsessive being a key factor here), the last thing you want to do when you’re working is stop and take out the garbage, or pay your phone bill, or talk to a video director, or update the tour dates on the website. I mean, some people might like doing those things, but I generally tend to hope that some other person gets to them before I have to.
I wish I weren’t that way. I wish I were able to oversea every single aspect of everything involved with being in a band. But the truth is, there is simply too much. However I do appreciate being reminded every so often, because it reminds me that other people do care about us enough to wish we would be better than we are.
So for you fans of our music, thanks for continuing to think about us during these periods of (relatively) low activity. It doesn’t mean that we are not still plowing away doing what we love to do, which is write music that will eventually get recorded using other people’s money, preferably that belonging to large corporations who might otherwise spend it less wisely.
As some of you already probably know, we’ve been trying out new drummers for our upcoming European tour. It’s not easy replacing a Doni. Doni was developed for us in a laboratory by a scientist named Max Brenner. Max has since gone into retirement, so we are faced with the challenge of having to replace Doni with a human being. I hope that those who see our upcoming shows in Europe in August will be sympathetic to the fact that we will be playing with a human who might not exhibit all the precision and skill that we have all come to rely upon with the Doni computer version 2.9, and forgive any straying from our previous standards of performance due to this.
We will have our new tour dates up for you pronto.
Conrad Keely
Williamsburg, 2007
Digg | Del.icio.us | Facebook | News update? And notes regarding our ridiculous videoPosted 4/13/2007 by trailofdead Friday, April 13, 2007 I've been getting a lot of people asking me are the rumors true, is ...Trail of Dead going to break up? Yes, it's true, the band will break up, eventually. Unless they can find a drug that will keep us alive forever, like the one Keith Richards takes (I believe you have to snort dead people's ashes). Are we breaking up anytime soon? No. Sorry to disappoint you. That means, for all those people who've asked for our autographs, they won't be worth anything for a long time yet, so keep your day job. I've also been getting a lot of people asking me (actually, not really a lot - maybe one or at the most, two, and one of those was my mother), "When are you going to write something for the news, or post a forum update?" The answer is, maybe soon. Sooner than you know. I recently moved to New York City. City of sin, city of boxes and newspapers, city of loud conversations everyone can hear, city of skylines and clotheslines and coke lines and traffic lines and dole lines. I think I was expecting New York to be a big change, but I suppose if you've spent the last seven years on and off of tour busses, nothing comes as a surprise anymore. Mogadishu, maybe, that would be a surprise, or Ulaanbaatar. But New York? No. Not so much, unless you find crazy people ranting to their imaginary comrades particularly shocking. There are only three things I miss about Austin. One is, of course, my friends and family (those could be counted separately I suppose). The other are my favorite hangouts, like Emo's and Casino El Camino, and Ruby's, and back yard barbeques (again, I could count each of those separately). But the third thing, the thing I miss the most, is all my friends and family hanging out at my favorite hangouts, together. You see, in New York it is pretty much next to impossible to expect to find all your friends all together in one place, all doing the same thing. Some live in Manhattan, others live in Queens, others live as far off as New Jersey or Cobble Hill (which is really frightening). And most of them, because of this, don't know each other, they just happen to know you. Ironically most people agree with me about this fact, that "community" as we knew it in our small towns is hard to come by in the big city. But, true to city folk, they will readily agree with you but do little to change this fact. They've learned to accept it, in the same way they accept rude service people and loud traffic, the same way they accept adrenaline and constant stress. Will I learn to accept it? I don't know. If I don't, I'll either try to change it, or I'll leave. Of course there are a few things I don't miss. Mainly, driving. Driving in Austin is a necessary evil that grows increasingly more hazardous year after year. In New York, don't even bother. Oh, I suppose you want me to talk about the band. Well, we're working on composing songs for a new record. And we're planning another trip to Europe because it's fun, and another trip around the States, not because it's fun, but simply to keep our American booking agent happy. Oh, and another thing people have been commenting on is how atrocious our latest video is. I'd like to address this issue right now: Firstly, we had absolutely nothing to do with the video for Naked Sun. We were sent this treatment before our last American tour. I read the treatment and I thought it was stupid. I told our managers and our label "I think this treatment sucks". Two weeks later, while on tour, I was sent a rough edit of a finished version of the video made from the treatment I thought was horrible. And we sat around and watched it and we all thought it was horrible. I jokingly suggested that one way to improve this video would be to have a shot of us sitting in a room watching the video on a television, laughing, and throwing things at the television. This never got done. My favorite thing about the video is that we aren't actually in it, and so our disassociation with its complete lameness is punctuated. As for the director of this worthless piece of crap, we never had a single conversation with this person. They never once called and asked "What is your vision for this song, what do you think of this treatment, what do the lyrics mean to you?" I partly suspect that she was told we liked the treatment, either by our label or by our managers, or some other nameless middleman who I wasn't aware of whose job it is to befuddle and confuse the music industry. But the fact still stands that she expressed no interest in consulting the band as to their thoughts and opinions of a video for their music, which I consider a grotesque breech of ethics, and harkens back to the dark periods before the 60's where artists were not in control of their advertising, promotion or even their public image, but were at the whim of the record industry and their cronies. Blame is easy to throw around, but it would be unfair of me not to take partial responsibility myself. The truth is, I can't stand making videos. After the fiasco of trying to direct Relative Ways, to the complete strangeness of Rest Will Follow, I've completely lost interest in the medium, and any hope in using it as a vital way to express our vision artistically. To me, videos have become more an industry farce than anything. At one time they affected change and generated profit, now they appear to be shallow indulgences in image and fashion, now more than ever. In fact, arguably the most popular videos are those made for little or no money by amateurs hosting for free on You Tube, whose work often directly ridicules mainstream video culture. At the end of the day, does it really matter? I seriously doubt it. In fact, as awful as this video might appear to me now, it might one day be looked back upon like all the many disasters this band has faced, as something to be laughed at, a humorous episode that seemed serious at the time but really had little more than anecdotal significance in the long run. Anyway, to keep all of you thinking, I just watched a documentary called "The Great Global Warming Swindle": http://www.channel4.com/science/microsites/G/great_global_warming_swindleI'd be curious to see what people thought about it. Sort of a different perspective than the current popularly-held belief. You can find this documentary on torrent sites. Conrad Keely Digg | Del.icio.us | Facebook | Glorious Mainland ConquestPosted 1/9/2007 by Merlin
Here are the upcoming European dates for February/March. Britain, Bavaria, and most places inbetween:
February 12th -- Birmingham - Carling Academy - Tickets
February 13th -- Dublin - TBMC - Tickets
February 14th -- Glasgow - Oran Mor - Tickets
February 15th -- Manchester - Manchester University - Tickets
February 17th -- Leeds - The Cockpit - Tickets
February 18th -- Bristol - Thekla Social - Tickets
February 19th -- Oxford - Zodiac - Tickets
February 20th -- London - Koko - Tickets
February 22nd -- Brighton - Concorde 2 - Tickets
February 23rd -- Northampton - Roadmender - Tickets
February 24th -- Liverpool - Carling Academy - Tickets
February 25th -- Nottingham - Rescue Rooms - Tickets
February 27th -- Hamburg - Uebel and Gefahrlich - Tickets
February 28th -- Berlin - Postbahnhof - Tickets
March 1st -- Vienna - Arena - Tickets
March 2nd -- Zagreb - Pauk - Tickets
March 3rd -- Bologna - Estragon - Tickets
March 4th -- Zurich - Aktionshalle Rote Fabrik - Tickets
March 5th -- Fribourg - Fri-Son - Tickets
March 7th -- Frankfurt - Mousonturm - Tickets
March 8th -- Munich - Muffathalle - Tickets
March 10th -- Cologne - Live Music Hall - Tickets
March 11th -- Paris - Trabendo - Tickets
March 12th -- Utrecht - Vredenburg
March 13th -- Luxembourg - Den Atelier - Tickets
March 16th -- Athens - Gagarin205 - Tickets
Hope everyone is having a great start to 2007.
Digg | Del.icio.us | Facebook | Not-So-Subliminal AdvertisingPosted 12/9/2006 by Merlin Anyone in need of high-quality equipment for their band should check out our friends at Core One Creative Inc., based out of the beautiful Torrance, California. Look into their deals here. Digg | Del.icio.us | Facebook |
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