I've been really pre-occupied lately. I had to move things around a bit to make room for the World Cup. I don't really care that most people here don't understand what the World Cup means. For me it's more than the unity and test of strength between nations of the world. For me it also is the only time were I feel close to my home land. That's why it's taking center stage over everything else at the moment.

This of course doesn't mean that I stopped doing other things like music. I've been busy with a remix for my buddy Dariio as well as a little 30 second clip for a tv spot my friend is working on who is in advertising. I also have shows coming up on 7/11, 7/28, 8/5, 8/15, 8/21, and 9/11 so I'm definitely not neglecting that part of my life... maybe just not stressing over it so much at the moment. Letting things flow sometimes is a nice change of pace.

My sleeping patterns are all jacked up too at the moment. WC games were early in the morning and I work late PM shifts at work. I just can't really sleep until 3am or so.

The whole soccer thing inspired me a bit too. I want to start or at least join an indoor soccer team. I've been unable to play handball (type handball into youtube to find out what it really is) for the last 8 months due to a shoulder condition and I'm urging for a replacement. I bought myself these sick ass Adidas Sambas.
I hope to be able to spend some of my upcoming school financial aid on a Native Instrument Maschine, those units are super nice.

And with that I will end the rambling and go to sleep.

Good Night

www.thomasradman.com

So I decided to change my distributor for my label. Some of you who I talk to on a daily basis already know all about it. What happens now is that everything I've released on my own label will be deleted off of all the online stores (old distributor) and now I'm slowly going to re-release them on the new distributor which is called Rebeat. I also am releasing about 3 or 4 new releases this summer along with the re-released material. There are a few reasons why I decided to go through this lengthy, tedious and quite costly process. Rebeat has professional looking statements that come out monthly, the old one (Feiyr.com) only had an excel sheet that came out quarterly (and sometimes incomplete at first). Rebeat also has exceptional customer service and support, at Feiyr you are lucky to get a complete sentence as a response if any at all. On top of all that Rebeat caters to more online portals (300+) and feiyr only to about 250.

So expect the releases to reappear over the next few months.

So I finally went through the somewhat tedious task of piecing together the old Coachella mixes and have uploaded them with tracklists and everything, for everybody to download.

The link is www.thomasradman.com/archives

Check it out, there should be about 15 cds worth of music!

So I'm finally back in the real world and I should be catching up on some reading for school, but before I can do that I need to get this weekend off my chest:

For those who don't know about the Coachella Mixes, John beaver and I have been doing these Coachella themed mixed CDs for 7 years now, and they are available for download on my website.

www.thomasradman.com/coachella

For some video clips of this year's festival visit Ashley's YouTube page. If you don't know what a landshark really is these clips will tell it all:

Ashley's YouTube Page

This was the 4th Coachella that I personally attended and overall I had the most fun this year although some of the other years had better line-ups as well as less people pushing you around.

On Friday we got stuck in some bad traffic and for some reason once we finally got to the parking lot that we needed to get to (we had a staff parking pass), it was closed and we got turned around to Lot4a, a camping parking lot kinda far from the festival, which is always a bad thing when you have to leave the show to grab a box of 5000 fliers and bring it back to the entrance to promote the mixes.
So because we made it into the gates kind of late I only got to see

Imogen Heap


Benni Benassi

and Fever Ray



I left each one early.
One of my true refuges of the festival was going to be The Heineken Air conditioned Club Tent. They were always playing some kind of a House music, so I headed there if I had no where else to go:

We had a great response Promoting our Mixes after the first day of Coachella. Our bad parking spot got us stuck and we didn't get back to the house til pretty late.


On Saturday we headed out earlier and went a better route so we actually got there on time. We started off with the Temper Traps they rocked it, and you know a band rocks it when the songs you never heard before give you chills. They were also very cool when we met them backstage and gave them one of our mixes that features some of their music. Unfortunately we didn't get any pictures.

Next up was Gossip

I just had to get in there one more time My Club Tent Refuge:

Then we took a break in the VIP Rose Garden away from the crowds located right next to the Sahara Tent while Bassnectar was playing.


After our break we headed to the Outdoor Stage to watch Hot Chip and MGMT. Check out all the dust we were breathing in all weekend.

After being slightly disappointed it was finally time for the MUSE. I was really looking forward to this one and they did not let me down. Every single song is a hit!

Then we went on for some cool Les Claypool, which was very entertaining. I loved the effects on the xylophone and the electric cello. Ashley loved it.
After that we sat outside of Devo and relaxed and waited for John until he was done with Tiesto. Apparently Tiesto was rocking John so hard that we ended up missing the main crowds and therefore didn't promote on Saturday night, which was okay because we knocked it out on Sunday night. It's not hard to get rid of free music ;)

On Sunday we went even earlier. We really wanted to catch Glitch Mob who played around 3:45pm. We almost missed them because when Ashley tried to go through the gates the people the said her wristband had been tampered with because she was able to move the piece of plastic that tightens the band. So they yanked it off her, although that was exactly how we received that wristband. They had no right to take away her wristband. It's not her fault that they gave her a broken one to begin with. This all leads back to the lack of organization this year and the heavy use of volunteers instead of professional workers. Anyways Coachella security fucked up right there and Ashley had every right to be in the festival. So after a little regroup and a bit of brainstorming combined with some MacGuyver/The A-Team innovation, she made it in after all and we went on to catch some of the Glitch Mob's set.

We then tried to watch some of Florence and the Machine but it was way to crowded and hot and the sound was really bad. John and Samantha endured it all because they are big Florence fans but I took the rest of the people and went back to ... you guessed it. My haven, the Heineken Club Tent. And to my surprise it was Donald Glaude on the decks and no trainwrecking!! It was pretty sweet.

Then THE TEXT MESSAGE from John: "Justice surprise set at Sahara boy!" What that actually meant was Club 75 was playing with one of the Justice guys and Busy P of the Ed Banger Label. So I gathered all my crew and we speedwalked all the way to the Sahara Tent. They played some wicked tracks.

Then after we checked out some Infected Mushroom where all the lighting and visuals was controlled by our buddy Sid Z, we headed to Phoenix whose Light and Laser guy couldn't make it because of the Volcano in Iceland. So the singer said: "Tonight it's all about the music" and that it was:

After Phoenix we went to Orbital which was great. I expected their stuff to sound like their famous hit Halcyon but most of it sounded like Industrial Dance music with NIN roots but all instrumental. It was very interesting. They finished off with a remix of 'Dr. Who' I think.

I caught the intro to Plastikman as well but I really wanted to knock out the fliers so John and I left with Nick and Tom Nova and posted up nice and early at the gates and we got rid of pretty much all of them. I think next time we need more than 10000 fliers. After that we headed back to the house and celebrated a fun and successful weekend and the on Monday morning Ashley and I drove back with Tom Nova in the back.
Great Weekend!!!

Some Random Pictures:

All I can say is wow. The last few weeks have been hectic and busy, but John Beaver and I do this every year and we just happen to be in crunch time once again. The mixes themselves are finally ready and are available as a free download on our Coachella Page:

www.thomasradman.com/coachella

We also had a very successful show at Electro Pop Rocks @ Blakes thanks to B33son and crew. I wanna thank them for letting us have our CD Release party there. The flier was sweet too and check out that line outside:

















The crowd was so great and it was personally the most people have played for so far. We had our own video crew following us through out the show, but those videos aren't going to be done for a few weeks, but don't worry, others took video as well:





Next week is the actual festival and it's going to be a great time and conclusion to months of hard work and preparation. And I still manage to get my A's and B's in school through all that :)

Hope to see you at the festival!

-Thomas Radman

Coachella is coming around again this year. This will be the 7th annual Coachella mixes that we'll be making for this festival. John Beaver and I take most of the acts of that weekend and through a mixture of DJing and Production fuse them together into one coherent mix.
Download last years 10 Year anniversary mix for free on my website:
thomasradman.com/freebies
This year's mixes are in the final stages of production and will also be available on my website. I'll probably give them a dedicated page something like thomasradman.com/coachella... but that's not set up yet.
I'll keep the updates coming.

Dariio and I got double booked last night to play in Sacramento at 11pm and in Modesto at 2am. This seemed quite manageable with a little bit of planning. Of course every single thing that could go wrong did. By the end of the night I think our little crew was ready for anything.
So this weekend certainly was the eventful affair that I had expected it to be but in a much different sense than it actually turned out.

We actually had a pretty simple plan.
What was supposed to happen:

5pm - Pick up Mikey V. here in San Jose and head to the Modesto Area to pick up Dariio and his lady.
7pm - Arrive at Dariio's house and hang out for an hour or so.
8pm - Start heading to the first venue in Sacramento called Pinky's
10pm - Arrive at Pinky's and hang out with all the kick ass people that were at the party before we go on.
11pm - Rock the House!
12pm - Do another 15 minutes of mingle and goodbyes before heading to Venue #2 back in Modesto
2am - Rock the Rave!
3am - Head back to Dariio's house for a good night's sleep before returning back to San Jose.

Approximated Travel Distance: 300-400 Miles

What really happened:

6:30pm - Already starting off later than planned Ashley and I picked up Mikey V. who had to stay a little later at work and we took off towards Dariio's house without thinking much of it. For some reason we hit freeway traffic on a Saturday?! This was the start of the spiral.
8:30pm - We finally arrive at Dariio's house and were ready to take off towards Sacramento but first we went over some tracks that we would potentially play at the two shows. We also printed out some directions to both venues.
9pm - This was the first time when I realized that we are not ahead of schedule anymore but that we had to get cracking just to be comfortably on time. So we left for Pinky's in Sacramento.
10:30pm - We are now at the I5 and 99 junction in Sacramento probably 15 minutes away from the venue and feeling comfortable that we'll make it on time. At this point we had to exit the freeway for an emergency bathroom break at taco bell for some people in my crew.
10:45pm - We get back on the freeway right at the point where 99 splits off of I5 and we missed the 99 Split and got stuck on I5... next exit woodland like 20 miles down... FAAAHHHCK
We flip a bitch and try to save some time and exit somewhere by the river and take that road all the way to Pinky's... too bad we ended up on the wrong side of the river.
11:09pm - This was by far one of my most interesting moments of the journey. We had arrived. Pinky's unfortunately it was on the other side of the river. I couldn't help but smile. we kept driving trying to find the next bridge.. which was I80. After lots of phone conversations and missed directions we finally found ourselves back on track and heading the right way.
11:45pm - 45 minutes after our set time we arrive at Pinky's. Everyone was real cool about us getting lost but those kind of things are embarrassing and unprofessional to me so I'm glad that we were still well received. I also want to apologize for all that drama. Thanks to Formless, who held up the fort at Pinky's, we were able to start pretty smoothly. It was like a raid. We ran inside, and I started to set up. We rocked that shit but Dariio and I both were quick mixing to make up for lost time. We still had to leave by like 12:15 to make it in time for the next show in Modesto. Still the tracks went off even though someone kicked out the power of the whole sound system at one point :) Ironically, the last song I dropped was called "Mega Disco Blaster" and true to it's name, it blew one of the fuses to the Subwoofer, which the tech guys fixed quick enough for Formless' Set. Pinky's was actually kinda packed and I wish we could have stayed there until the end. But off to the next venue it was.
12:25pm - Leaving for Modesto. Although we didn't get lost this time, one of our friends started feeling sick and we pulled over several times for throw-up breaks on the way down to Modesto. We were heading for another close call but when it comes to friends being sick I feel that their well-being is more important than being somewhere on time. Friends always come first.
2:05am - Arrived at Venue #2 in Modest.... dead silence. That bitch got busted! I wish we would have known, because then I would have stayed at Pinky's. I guess it all went down when we were already half way to Modesto.
2:30am - Burger King Break. This drive through took like 45 minutes... the lady was lone and they had no meat, with the registers out of commission. Close the goddamn place!
4am - Back at Dariio's we unwound and reflected upon the crazy turn of events.
1pm - Finally back at home in San Jose and exhausted from this Trek.

Actual Mileage of the trip: 471 Miles

I love playing in Sacramento and being late is not something I'm known for. I hope to be able to make it up to everyone next time I'm in town, which is March 5th at Necropolis with Formless and Dariio.

For now I go to sleep.

So I really have to find some time to finish up this song at least enough so I can play it out as a tester this weekend. It just has to be done. I also have to read another 70 pages of the History of Peru by tomorrow but that should leave enough time for the track on Friday morning until I waste my time at work at night. The shows are on Saturday so I'll have a little bit more time in the morning then. That time will be mostly spent on pulling together some of the edits and remixes I've made for our sets. Here are the two fliers again.

There are some shows ahead that Dariio and I are playing. Two of them at the end of February and one at the beginning of march.


The first one is going to be on February 27th in Sacamento at Pinky's around 10 or 11pm. Dariio and I have played there before and it's located at a cozy middle of nowhere part of Sacramento county.




The following show is actually on the same night in Modesto called Ravers Gone Wild. The set time will be around 2am. This might get hectic but if nothing else it will be a memorable night. There is a hotline number to call for the exact location.




The next show after that is going to be on March 5th at Necropolis, a new club also located in Sacramento. This one should definitely be interesting. It's in a basement that historically used to be the street level of Old Sacramento before the flood. We don't have our time slots yet for this show.


Also upcoming:
October 8th 2010, "Dance 4 Life" Orlando, FL

Oh boy. It really seems kinda hard to do my homework on my desk when it's filled with all my equipment. Let's see there are my BX5a Speakers as well as my M-Audio Keyboard. Then I have my Delta sound card for my PC next to the monitor and then I my Laptop together with the Numark Omni Control all laid out and hooked up. My external hard drive and mouse hardly have any room at all. And then on top of that my big cat, who is about 20 pounds, keeps jumping on the desk and tries to find a spot to lay down. Oh well, I'm sure I can find room for him as well. Bring it on Mortis.