Wednesday, 11 February 2009

Lavotchkin/ Take A Worm For A Walk Week January tour

Alright people

i'll make this a short one as i dont wanna rant to much this time, as the photos is where the fun is. So we did a short tour with Glasgows Take A Worm For A Walk Week tour, stopping at Leeds, Yeovil, Manchester and Huddersfield. Unfortunately due to Huddersfield being the day the Uk got submerged in snow, the show was cancelled. Win some and you lose some though!!


Friday in Leeds - Went amazingly, big thanks to the guy in Chicken Hawk for doing a show.
Saturday in Yeovil - Was real good! Free beer and toasties was to good. Props 2 Liam And Co
Sunday in Manchester - For some reason we are cursed with disaster each time we play Manchester and this time was once again like our track record. Not a total write off but it happend :-D

Big Thanks to Jenna for helping out the tour, thanks to Jason Sanderson + Gibb, Mikee + Cheryl and Janine + Katie for putting us up each of the nights. Thanks to Errander, Joe and all the Barnsley people for having the birthday party for Hub. We love you all dearly.

Take A Worm For A Walk Week were sweet every night and you should definately check them out! Get drunk with them as well, they are fucking mental :-D

Heres a few pics take whilst on tour. Hope you find a few entertaining!



Rik Errander modeling the New Pure Graft shirt

What a Tash Jase has. Amazing!

Someones definately got some explaining to do.............





What a shot!


Happy Birthday Hub!




When Sunderland Scored against Newcastle



Jenna rules her camp with the reign of Terror


Hi Ben, do you wanna get up after 3 hours sleep and a heavy night to record feed back.......?






Hope you enjoyed them! Next stop europe for us. Then a tour with Human fly, some dates with OutCry Collective and then recording our Album. We are busy fuckers so watch this space!

Martin + The Lavotchkin's

Tuesday, 3 February 2009

Recording blog from Jan

Hey hey

how the fucks it going??? We have been busy fuckers lately recording in Barnsley for a weekend and we just got back from doing a short tour with Take A Worm For A Walk Week, who i must say were fucking awesome. Check that band out! Anyway, i'll put something up about that tour when i get my hands on some of the photos, though for now welcome to my Recording rant.

So to lay out the jist of things, we were booked in for Recording/staying in Barnsley with our good friend Jason Sanderson over Sunday the 19th of Jan to Jan the 21st. We didnt finish over those days unfortunately, but no big deal, we stopped by on Sat the 31st whilst on tour with Take A Worm to finish. If your in a band, make sure you check Jason out as he is awesome, worth every penny and has worked with some fucking cool bands, for example: 65 Days Of Static, Rolo Tomassi, Mirimar Disaster, The Plight, Data Select Party, LAVOTCHKIN haha etc etc ........... ;-)

www.myspace.com/jasonsandersonrecordingmixmastering


To keep anyone up to date who has never had the pleasure of reading my rants, the recording session that i am currently talking about is our contribution towards a split Record with our good friends from the south, Crocus. Check them out via the link bellow!

www.myspace.com/crocusband

So we recorded 3 tracks to go towards it and i can assure you that although we have only heard rough mixes, it sounds really fucking good, so we are really excited for it coming out. The split is forth coming curtious of a joint label venture that we are really excited about and there are also current talks about a possible euro pressing. All secrets till it goes to press for the moment, though that should be late feb/early march. The split will be coming out in JUNE 2009, there will be a Uk tour to support its release in July and is looking like could well be supporting euro tour in August also. Keep an eye out anyway.

Back to Recording though. So we headed down to Barnsley to party the night of Saturday 18th since recording started the next day. Lots of friends down that way, so a lot of catching up is always to be done whenever we are round. There was Booze, Blood and a lot of man on man. Party with Errander. Enough said.....



Day 1

We started by getting some rough guitar and bass tones whilst drums were set in stone. To warm us up/lay some guide tracks, we began by doing some live recording of the tracks we were going to be recording as well as a couple of rough new songs for our album. Once that out of the way the real drum takes began. All in all there was no major problems and it all went pretty sweet. All good in the hood. Having the live recordings as well as our actual drum recordings now we finished the day by recording the vocals to the first of the three tracks we were recording.


Day 2

Guitar tone and recording were the goal of today. A long process of experiment took place for both and we ended up settling with 5150 teamed with a Selma clear channel head for the more high end guitar (Martin) and for the beef (Ben) a Marshall Jcm 800 teamed with a marshall jubilee. The telecasters were the weapon of choice in both cases. We had a few problems with random noises and all sorts of other little things though by the end of the day it was all done. No time for the 2nd tracks vocals tonight though no biggy.



Day 3

Bass and vocals time. To be honest things with bass went pretty wrong due to equipment not working the way it should though it was all good in the end. We got vocals for the other two songs as well as a few back ups though it was crazy late by the time that was all done so we had to give in and let another half day to allow for finishing.

Morning 4

So we partied till 5:30am/6am the night before after our Leeds show with Take A Worm For A Walk Week as it was Hub's birthday. Recording feed back began at 9:30am. What a fucking sorry fucking sight............ After taking 2 hours on a job that should have taken about 30 minutes due to being a complete wreck and a further half an hour adding an extra guitar track to a part and we were finished. I would like to state that Jason was up awake, sober and fully ready for the day having gone to bed early, the task taking so long was down to the shell of a guitar player (Martin).



Our tracks are currently being mixed/mastered so not long till we get our finals sorted. We will not be putting up a track from the split until close to its release, so expect to hear some new shit April/May time. Long wait i know, though in May we are recording our Album so by the later half of 2009 you are going to have too much of our new stuff to listen to.

On a last note. If you do one thing in 2009. Meet our guitarist Ben Wishlade. I dont know what happened to him as a child, but he is one twisted funny fucker. Enjoy bellow this, my small collection of Ben photos from Recording. Sort of a mini online shrine.............




Oh and last last thing. We might have all taken cameras and fully intended to get a lot of photos to put into the blog......................... however instead we got intoxicated and mostly forgot about it. Here is the few we did get though.

Cheers for reading

Martin + The Lavotchkins

Saturday, 27 December 2008

Lavotchkin/ Crocus Uk Tour!

Hey Hey

Firstly i would like to thank everyone who came out to our shows on our Recent southern England tour with our good mates Crocus. The shows were all cool and bar everyone sharing illness towards the end of the tour all in all it was a sick week away. Oh and big thanks to everyone who bought cds, shirts, gave us food, promoted a show, gave us a place to sleep and joined in going nuts. None of us brought a camera though there are pictures out there which i will try my best to get hold of and get up here as soon as i can.












So its reaching the end of 2008 and to be honest as far as Lavotchkin goes we are fucking stoked its over (it wasnt all bad, though a lot of bad stuff did happen). So without meaning to sound like a whinge, heres more a look back and laugh at all the stuff that went wrong for us in 2008: -

+ Wrecking the engine in our van without having any money to replace it

+ Eventually paying for the van to be repaired (£1500), getting it back two weeks before going on tour in Belgium, then finding that they had put the wrong engine in that needed to be taken out or we were stuck with it. Hahah the bastards held the van telling us they would be able to sort it out, then the afternoon before setting off on tour they told us theres no chance its going to be done, forcing us to cancel.

+ We got our van back once again right before going on tour once again (with Crocus + Hitcher) then after the first show our van dies again! We get a guy out and apparently its yet ANOTHER problem, totally different to the last problem and it was going to cost £1000. We did manage to do the tour in a transit we managed to higher last minute, though after spending all the money hiring we found out two months later when coming to fix our van, the part that was broken in the van actually cost just £75 to fix and the guy who looked at it was trying to rip us off. Thank god we took it else where and didnt pay £1000!! Still shit as we could have got our van fixed right then and there and wouldnt have had to spend a lot of extra money hiring.

+ We were forced to drop out of two Scotland tours thanks to firstly extreme weather problems and secondly a bloody fuel crisis. Really fucking sucked but with our luck and meaning we would have risked not making it back for our jobs (that already dislike us all for constantly bugging for time off), so long story cut short we couldnt risk either occasion at the time. What a jip.

+ We recorded for a split with the awesome Attack Vipers in January, though through a heap of set backs looks like its not going to see the light of day till early next year. Not bad news at all really as it is coming in Feb now, though we have been dying for our first 7inch since Lavotchkin first began so its killing us waiting to get it! Its guna be a fucking sweet split though so do check it out :-D

+ Through family problems we had to drop out of our tour with Whitemare in September :-(

+ Us having to drop out of shows with our friends the fair fight as our singer Si got real real sick the week before going and rather than getting better he got worse till the day before tour having to check into hospital.

+ The big ones which wasnt funny at all was we had two real real close brievements to two members of lavotchkin, which i wont go into detail about though were really big blows to members of our band. There both doing ok, though October through to early December has been pretty fucking low periods for them .



So as you can tell, there was a fucking lot of things that went wrong in 2008. Shit happens though!! We are still having a laugh and even though so much bad stuff happend the good things that did happen were pretty good and as cheesey as it sounds it has made us a lot stronger as a result. (I am pretty sure that we have officially had all the bad luck we can have now so that just leaves good luck yeah???? hahaha or fingers crossed anyways.)

Some of the good things that happend in 2008 were:

+ Through all of the problems we have been writing fucking loads for our album. So far since beginning writing for it we have written 13tracks of which 7 or 8 tops out of those tracks will make it on our record. We have let two tracks go to our split with Attack Vipers and another three tracks for our forth coming split with Crocus.

+ We managed to demo a shit load of our new tracks! Its a fuck on though we got it done. We didnt wanna throw em round to much as they are real rough but if you do wanna hear any, drop us a line over myspace or something.

+ We managed to tour with our good friends Crocus twice as well as also good friends Brides, Hitcher and a short tour with Manatees. We did make a shit load of one off shows or weekend dates though they were all mostly northern England due to transport problems. (You bands who can get by in cars are lucky lucky fuckers!).

+ We met the Newest edition to Lavotchkin, our lovely manager Jenna Lee who has managed to turn around our wreck of a band.

+ Although a lot of shit fell through for different reasons, we did still manage to catch up with a lot of our mates round the country. Thats always the real good bit about touring for us.



Anyways, as for 2009. This for Lavotchkin is the turn around year so be expecting to hear a fucking lot more from us. In January we will be recording for our split with Crocus with good fucking friend Jason Sanderson, who as worked with bands such as Rolo Tomassi, Mirimar Disaster, The Plight, The Legacy and fuck loads of other sweet bands. The Track listing for this from ourselves is going to be:

Track 1 - You were dawn
(Heavy, Up Beat, a little rocky with a big fucking ending)
Track 2 - Abandon
(Slower, Heavier and really pissed off)
Track 3 - Clouds
(A little more punkier with some heavy bits with a lil bit of slide guitar)

That split is coming out June 2009 on Small town records and no doubt we will stick up a Track or Two round March.


The big recording planned for next year however will be in May, as at bloody last we are going to be recording our Album. Although recording in May it looks like its release will be October/November 2009 which is ages away, but fuck at least its gunna be coming out. Unfortuately that is as much of the details as i can disclose atm, though i am sure as it comes closer the time i will be telling more about whats going on for it. The current title we have for the record is "This Is Widow Country" and it will be 10/11 tracks long.

As for touring, we have a lot planned and 2009 will see us touring more than we ever have by a long shot. We will be doing some touring before recording our album, though the main bulk of our traveling will be set around after we have finished recording our album. For the minute though! In Late Jan/ early Fed we are doing a short 4 date tour with the mighty Take A Worm For A Walk week which will be suuuuuuuuuuuper sweet. Also Late Feb we are heading out to mainland Europe once again with a super special festival appearance that we cannot disclose yet. hahha trust us though once the line up is 100% you will hear about it as we are totally over the moon to be playing. We will also be coming back to the south in late March with a couple of real real sweet bands though thats all a bit hush at the moment still, though keep an eye out.

I have ranted for fucking ages now so am gunna draw this to a brief conclusion. Fuck 2008, roll fucking on 2009. If we are playing near you and you are free, come down to a show and if you have some time check out our webstore at http://lavotchkin.bigcartel.com as we have some new merch up and any purchase really helps.

Cheers for reading and giving a fuck enough to get to this point in the small essay i seem to have written!

Martin + The Lavotchkins

Ps: Thanks so much to our friend Tom Lacey of Ghost of a thousand fame for propping us as a band to watch for 2009 on the rocksound website. We are definately gunna be one to watch for 2009, not that you'd have thought given the disasters 2008 brought though seriously watch this space and thanks Tom for having some fucking faith in us. Props!


http://www.rocksound.tv/features/article/onestowatch2009pt2

Tom Lacey, Ghost Of A Thousand picks Lavotchkin
''I've been waiting fucking ages for their album and it's finally on it's way. We played a show with these dudes in Middlesborough about two years okay, and even though it was pretty shitty show they tore the place apart. They're just the most fucking ferocious band this country has at the moment, and they really need to be heard by a lot more people. We used to stay at Martin the guitarists house , and his basement has this weird pile of rags that looks just like a body lying down there. Martin denies any wrong-doings, but if that's not fucking hardcore then i don't know what is.''
www.myspace.com/lavotchkin





Friday, 14 November 2008

A fucking dark tunnel yet still theres a light

Firstly, some really shit news. Within a short space of time we have managed to two very close brievements to members of Lavotchkin, a parent and a close friend. Both have been being really shit losses and as a result have caused us to have to drop out of the shows we were set to play in November. I wont lie, bar a couple of things 2008 has been a fucking shit year for us and it has definately tested us as a band as far as keeping our shit together goes. Though hey, what doesnt kill you brings you together and definately make you stronger. So your fucking stuck with us for the moment, so kick back and read the rest of my ramblings.

On a much lighter note, we are stoked to be finishing 2008 with a pretty sweet week long tour with our good friends Crocus + New'ish upstarts The Bear Fight. One more show is yet to be firmed out, though heres the poster with the current dates below. (Poster created by our boy John from Brides.)




Also big news for us, it looks like before our album is to be released we will be doing one more split record with our good friends Crocus. This is sheduled to be recorded in January'ish time and will feature two tracks and a cover from ourselves. Crocus are an amazing band and sweet as fuck guys, so needless to say we are very stoked about this and are really looking forward to its release.

Even bigger news! As of a few weeks ago we have joined forces with lovely Jenna Lee (some might know from her work with smalltown records) who will be joining team lavotchkin tackling the business side of things. We are really fucking stoked as Jenna is a friend and a fucking hard worker, so 2009 is definately looking like our light at the end of a dark tunnel.

At the moment whilst a lot of our peronal shit is going on, we have been finishing the first demo'ing parts of our album which we are currently mixing at the moment. We are totally stoked with how everythings coming out and are really looking forward to recording properly. (We have been working on this with our good friend phil conway. check him out!!)

However, although doing a lot of recording, we dont really wanna put anything online as we dont wanna really let to much go. HOWEVER if you are actually really interested, drop us a mail and if there isnt to many people asking we will send some sneek previews. As for our album, we have dropped a couple of other tracks, leaving us currently in the process of writing the 8th installment. If we werent so fussy we would have finished our album already, though it will be for the best in the long run as far as us feeling we have done the best job we could of.

Cheers for reading my rants anyway and come see us tear it up with Crocus in December. It will be a fucking sweet tour.

Props

Martin + The Lavotchkin's

Wednesday, 15 October 2008

Out the loop but still busy

Alrightttt

So this month we have been working our bollocks off with our boy Phil Conway, demo'ing tracks that are possibly going towards our debut album. We are just beginning recording the vocals now so wont be long till we are back writing and playing shows again. Quite startings to miss it now!

Anyways, since the initial writing for our record began we have so far written 10 Tracks, of which it looks like just 5 or 6 will be going towards it. I guess we are just in the mind frame where we wanna just make our first record as special as we possibly can, so we're really trying to take a lot of time over it. I Guess just to make sure we are putting out the best we can possibly give. Blah Blah Blah...... i think you get what i mean. Anyway, we will keep you informed on here as it goes. So keep checking back if your interested ;-)


As for other News, with a lot of help from friends it looks like we will be coming back over to Europe in late Febuary. We are totally stoked and are hoping that the dudes sorting the shows out have good luck in firming everything out. If your interested in doing a date drop wtfoctopus bookings (Belgium) and Voltaire Booking (Austria) a message, both good fucking dudes and have there hearts in the right place. Myspack links bellow: -

http://www.myspace.com/wtfoctopus

http://www.myspace.com/voltairebooking

Also, we are going to be doing four shows with the awesome Take A Worm For A Walk Week (Undergroove Records) at the end of Jan 09. This we are stoked about as we have been fans for a long while as well as previous Label mates on the awesome MidMarch Records. Check em out anyway and check our page for show details!

http://www.myspace.com/takeaworm

Merch News, we are going to be getting Two new shirts printed up at the end of October. One a design we have been sitting on for a while by our boy Jonas from The Grizzley Twister over in Sweden and the 2nd by the awsome BlackSails Design over in Italy. You can check the designs bellow:-



Jonas Grizzley Twister Design



Last bit, we are going to be playing with Flood Of Red in The Basement at Newcastle University in the early half of November. When your in a band, i guess theres always that one place that you always wanted to play cos of seeing all the bigger bands when you were younger etc etc......... Anyways the Basement at Newcastle University was that venue for us and we are so stoked to be playing, so big thanks to our boy Chell for putting us on. We definately owe him more than just one and please come down to make it a memourable one. If you're after tickets a couple of pounds cheaper drop us a line and we will hook you up.

Cheers for reading once again.

Martin + The Lavotchkin's

Sunday, 21 September 2008

Ups and Downs

Alrighttttttt!!

So a few things have been going on this month in our camp.

Right at the start of the month we hooked up with our friends from Southampton The Fair Fight, though shock horror once again we were struck with shit luck, this time it being down to Si getting so sick he had to go to hospital. We managed to find a replacement singer or singers for the Newcastle date of the two shows we were playing, though we had to drop out of the boston show. Fucking pain and i think thats the 3rd time we have had to drop out of a show there, but driving a 5 hour round trip with a dude who barely knew the words would have sucked for everyone. (Especially the people coming to the show!) Shit happens though right?

Next bit of amazing news came not long after when we discovered we were going to have to drop out of shows we were set to be playing with friends Whitemare from Brighton, towards the end of the month. A kick in the balls like, but one of us had family issues over that period and you have to put the other important stuff first sometimes.

Anyway although we had our set backs, we did manged to fit in playing with Glasgow's awsome Take A Worm For A Walk Week and The Dead Eyes of Quint from Leeds. Both sweet bands, check them out! Also we supported Philadelphia's hardcore legends Blacklisted, where we were lucky enough to have the last 3 songs of our set recorded. This can be viewed online via the link bellow: -

http://myspacetv.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=42738557

The video contains three brand new songs which will all be featuring on our forth coming record.

1st - The Wether Effect
2nd - Abandoned
3rd - Untitled

Next up, we got our van back at last. Fully working with no problems and fingers crossed no more for a fucking long time. We have had our fair share now. However, funny story about it. So basically when our van died the 2nd time we got an emergency guy out to come and look at it. So he came, told us it was something or other (i know fuck all about vans/cars, the others do though so don't think we are clueless.) Anyway, he told us it would cost 1000 to get fixed which we thought sounded a bit crazy considering we had just had it fixed and looked over. So after much bugging a family friend we eventually got another mechanic to double check it and he says he can fix it for 75 pounds. Turns out the first guy was trying to pretty much rape us for all we were worth. So first hand advice, never trust a mechanic first off!

With the Whitemare tour cancelled and Hub going on holiday in October for 2 weeks, we have come to the desicision to spend the next months concentrating on doing our debt record a bit more than we have been. We have sessions booked in to start rough recordings with our good friend Phil for the first weekend of October, check his work out via the link bellow: -

http://www.myspace.com/philrecording

We are going to be recording 6 never before heard tracks and in total out of 9 tracks so far written for our album i think 6 of which will be going on our album. We have plans for the others though nothing is set in stone as of yet. Keep yours eyes peeled though. We are planning on having our album fully written by the end of this year and to support that unfortunately we are not going to be doing a couple of the tours we had arranged. One of them was a planned and booked trip back to Belgium, though as that stands it looks like we will be returning in Feb 09. I guess we have gotten to the point where so much shit has gone wrong this year that we would rather concentrate on writing, so we have all of our album fully ready and sorted for 2009.

As for our split with Attack Vipers which we have talked about for a long time, though due to a shit load of delays, hasn't happened yet.......... Well it looks like it could well be happening in the next couple of months. I say this all the time which is why i am not saying a date yet, though it is still coming! At last then we will have our first 7inch and we might even have an excuse to give you a small preview of the other track we record for it 'Linger On'. Although a long time coming it will still be a fucking sweet split and all the parties involved are still very much into this record happening. Joe from Attack Vipers, as i am told is constructing the art work at current and no doubt i will stick it up on here when we have it all sorted. Check Attack Vipers out!

http://www.myspace.com/attackvipers

I would give you a link to Guns not Knives records who is putting the record out though there is nothing to link to at the minute. Guns not Knives is a brand new label just about to start in the North East that will be also in October be releasing the 'Pure Graft/Beasts' split 7inch. Another good split that shouldn't be over looked, so when some stuff gets up on the internet i will link the fucker up.

I hope my Shinfo hasn't bored the fuck out of you.

Till next time.