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Archive Sunday #42

Added 2024-03-31 16:00:13 +0000 UTC

After a couple weeks off to recover from the European leg, we made our way down to California. We were super excited to get the chance to play Coachella and experience firsthand what the hype was about. We stayed maybe an hour away at a small-town motel the night before. I remember being a bit bummed we couldn't catch Radiohead and other sets Friday night, but fortunately there was a live-stream of most of the performances that we watched together in the motel room. I remember the coverage was a bit intermittent, but I guess it could have been our wi-fi.

The next day we woke up fairly early to check-in at the festival grounds while some bigger acts like Bon Iver had their soundcheck to the empty fields. We grabbed a golf cart to the Mojave stage and built the drum riser and double-checked the back-line guitar and bass amps. Bigger festivals like this are always kind of nerve-racking especially when you're doing an afternoon set that typically doesn't come with a soundcheck. There's always so many moving parts and basically no time to figure out solutions to any issues. But everything in our control looked good, so we went back to the RV trailer in the artist area to relax a bit.

A little before 4pm, we got back to the stage while Floating Points was playing. Backstage we made the final preparations to make changeover as smooth as possible. Once their set was over and the stage mostly cleared, we quickly moved all our gear onstage and patched everything on our end. We had a few minutes left to run through a quick line check and get our monitor levels set with the house monitor engineer. We jumped off-stage to begin the set about a minute later with Andrew starting Vincent with a pitched up "War is Coming" sample. The set went extremely well, and we were stoked how many people checked us out when they were several other stages around with great music happening.

I remember right before the last song which was Beast Monster Thing, Andrew was trying to adjust some levels in his monitor but the engineer had stepped away from the console. Andrew wanted to make sure his SPD was louder so he could stay in time with the sample, but it took a minute to get his attention. He eventually noticed and helped us out, but it was definitely one of the moments when we realized we should look into a rig where we can adjust monitors ourselves or maybe hire our own monitor guy in the future.

We celebrated a successful set by visiting the catering tent and eating as much as we could. We briefly ran into the guys from Local Natives there and told them we were excited to play our upcoming show together in Colorado. Then we went back to the RV to chill out and catch some music at the nearby stages. I remember seeing Bon Iver's set a bit later, but my favorite by far was seeing Moderat perform.

Along with most of the under-card bands, we had the week between Coachella weekends to fan out and play shows around the area to be able to afford the motels and gas. So the next day we drove to LA to meet up with a photographer that Matador hooked us up with so we could do a photo shoot. It's definitely not our forte, but we managed to get some pics for promotional material and the upcoming "War is Coming" release.

The next day we met up with the band Preoccupations to play a show at the Regent Theater downtown. They were great dudes, and it was awesome getting the chance to finally see them live after being a fan of their music. I'm pretty sure they opened the show that night because I distinctly remembering one of the guys running outside after the set to puke on the street. We were all kinda concerned, but his band-mates told us it happens pretty much every night haha. The show ended up being an awesome time and even though John hated the fact the cardioid subs were wired backwards, it was super fun having the whole stage violently shake when I hit low notes on the bass.