The Drastics feat. MC ZULU
Live at Martyrs' Chicago
Friday / January 13 / 2012

TELL THE FACEBOOK
OVERLORDS YOUR
COMING

Yo!

So some of you might not know (but now ya know) that Mad Anthony from The Drastics has been doing live dub off a cassette deck (as inspired by the man Dub Robot) at shows and parties over the later part of this year. We've been taking the plethora of riddims recorded over the years at Drastics HQ (aka Dirty North), dumping it onto that sweet 1/8" of tape and bringing the dub-of-many to the masses. It does sound surprisingly fat.

Well here's a snippet of a brand new Drastics track we recorded this fall given the ol' live dub treatment. Dumb Hole (A Sonic Black Hole) features Chris (bass), Anthony (drums, keys) & Luke (guitar) on a hard mixdown mixed with sweet 80s reggae fashion. Literally though, fashion.

SO PEEP IT ALREADY

Everyone's dubbing on film these days!


Dubbing the Pinstripes in The Drastic's Lab aka Dirty North


Brian Wallace aka Dub Robot dropping Science

The Drastics with Fada Dougou, live on KDHX

That's a booya! The Drastics will be heading north into the great Northern Open this next weekend and hitting Traverse City (at The Loading Dock) and Billy's in Grand Rapids! This will be our first time in both these cities so we'd love to see you and love for you to spread the word! We'll have Fada Dougou 'pon the mic spitting hotta flame so make sure you wear yer lil asbestos drawers so ya don't get burnt like Kurt Russell!!!!

OH HEY! Ya know what else is cool? You remixing, re-dubbing, re-working and generally mussing up some Drastic riddims. But ... how? By downloading the newest in yet another new Drastics series ... this time of DIY mix-packs (sort of a series within a series .. this month it's sitting in for our belated First Tuesday release) . Up first we have Fidelity which originally appeared on our "Chicago Massive" album. The free-for-download DIY album contains stereo drums, bass, rhythm, and stereo auxiliary sounds ... Just don't go muxin' or melfin' or mylin' around with these tracks now ... jussamussin ... hit up the lil application below or get to our BandCamp page (thedrastics.bandcamp.com) and git'a'downloadin ...

This is by no means a competition, but we'd love to hear what you do with our tunes, so send any of your re-workings to contact@thedrastics.com.

Our new album is also still in production ... we are back on track after a near-studio-meltdown and are getting all our ducks in a row before pulling the trigger on this one. Best be ready those cause this is gonna be 10 solid shots to the dome kid .. with some very extra-special guests!!

And in super advance warnings, we are going to be traveling EAST the first week of November .. expect to find us in PA, NY, VT and some more of America's classiest states November 2-7.

Oh yeah, AND we're now on the Reverb Nation and can find us at www.reverbnation.com/thedrastics.
 

Yo! Just a quick reminder that we'll be headlining the Milwaukee Street Arts Festival on Friday Night (July 23) with MC Zulu on the mic! The stage is right at the monument at Logan & Milwaukee and we hit at 9:30pm ... ruff! Tons of other great bands all weekend! Come out and get down!

You read right. Your friendly neighborhood reggae squadron is heading south to the land of acadème. We'll be at the Canopy on Thursday, doors at 8pm .. a measly 5 bux to get through the door! We'll probably be hitting around 9pm or so ...

Make sure and get there early to participate in our 3rd Biennial "Cluck Out 'Til You Clock Out Cognition Competition". Due to last years unfortunate incidents, this year we begrudgingly are offering seat belts to all competitors. All contestants will be seated in a precarious velocipede and placed on a state-of-the-art rail track (specially built by the Siamese for this year's event!) surrounding the venue. The participant to first succeed in reaching three "Grand Clucks" will receive this years grand prize: a trip to Old Mr. Beederman's Farm and Abattoir where you will be put to work as an indentured servant until the these damn Siamese are paid. Runner ups will receive an assortment of street signs and manhole covers from Orange County.

Michigonians, Michiganers, Michiganese and Michiganites! We want to see you! But really we want you to see us. Actually, just make sure that you're in the club before you get to the show. And you're gonna wanna make sure that you're still there after you've left. So show up 15 minutes before you leave for the venue and we'll be sure to start playing 38 secon...ds after the music starts. But then again if you stick around after you went home, we'll be sure to be on the road before we leave. Ok, so check it out .. if you're not there after you arrived we'll be sure to wait until BEFORE we get to Kalamazoo to play. Cool?

To make up for last month's epic fail of not posting a new tune, we humbly offer you ingrates this ... a free live EP for the downloading.  That's about right ...  5 tracks, 2 new compositions and 3 group improvisations all recorded live at Sketchbook X on June 17, 2010.

I brought a portable recorder and a handful of mics to the gig hoping to capture whatever happened, and the result is some pretty electrifying group playing that teeters between the Sun Ra and Lee Perry schools of music. Drastics' Tenorman Tom couldn't make the gig so we asked our good friends Charles Gorczynski and Nate Lepine to sit in. That left us dub-less and forced the focus onto individual improvisation.

Check it out on BandCamp and preview the songs, download individual ones or the whole album! This music is definitely charting some abstract territories so fare-thee-warned it's not for the faint hearted.

Charles Gorczynski: Alto Sax; Nate Lepine: Tenor Sax; Andrew Zelm: Trombone, Melodica; Brian Citro: Guitar; Chris Merrill: Double Bass; Anthony Abbinanti: Drums.

Time Out Chicago contributor Dave Cantor rolled through the studio the other day and took some footage of us rockin "Ransom The Senator" with our man MC Zulu on the mic. Check out the full story here including the video which is messing up our blog!

MC Zulu - Vox
Tom Riley - Tenor Sax, Live Dub
Andrew Zelm - Melodica
Brian Citro - Guitar
Chris Merrill - Bass
Anthony Abbinanti - Drums, Engineer

We're honored to be included in this year's Sketchbook (the 10th annual) put on by Collaboraction. Your Drastics will be performing ALL NEW MATERIAL on June 17th as part of the festivities .. special instrumental set featuring Charles Gorczynski on Alto Sax and Nate Lepine on Tenor Sax (plus all your favorite Drastic regulars) .. we'll be dropping that mad science on these theater folks so come get some culture already!!! Come early and be part of the Tennessee Williams Mustachathon! Details of this years events will only be revealed 5 minutes prior to the match, so come early and bring plenty of hair!!

Yo, as is apparent on the big board, we got 2 shows this weekend with our good friends from The Natti, The Pinstripes ... big shows, big tunes, pound for pound we like 'em big and round ...

Chris from the Pinstripes even put together a 'lil promo video for the Saturday night show at the Mad Hatter in Convington (across the river from Cincinnati) .. you gotta have ye olde Facebook profile to view ... but peep it here.

Livejournal. Remember that? No? No worries! Unless you were an elitist high school emo girl in the early 2000s you have very little reason to check it out. Slightly better than Friendster and slightly worse than Myspace, Livejournal was (is) a sort of Proto-Blogger/Social Network platform that allows people to blog, create fan communities and generally introduce loads of garbage onto the internet. I've personally never had an account and the few times The Google took me within their domain I was greeted with that image of "girl-with-gun-to-head-and-butterflies-coming-out-the-other-side" faaaaar too many times. So Livejournal ... what is it good for? Awesome weird stuff from Russia, that's what! LJ seems to have done a good job of clearing all the spammy/porno sites outta their kingdom and that's left room for sweet sweet vodka influenced postings, Asian chicks selling homemade clothes, and racists! How do I know? From this image aggregator that pulls all the most recent image posts from LJ users. It's been a secret weapon of sorts while blogging on other sites .. it's definitely a crap shoot but if you refresh that page a couple times a day you're bound to hit on something that just compels you to find out more. Not for the timid however, you'll still run across some cold-nasty porno and racists .. but it wouldn't be the internet without it.

Anyways, I sometimes collect images from the site and so as a sort of non-content blog post: here's a bunch of weird stuff to wrap your mind around ...

We just signed up with SoundCloud where you can stream our tracks at CD quality. Some oldies but goodies up there that got taken down from our Myspace page .. leave us some comments!