So check out our interview, and if you live in Houston get excited about the show this Friday!

Thanks for your support!

The Gorilla Run was a huge success. Over 1000 people dressed up in gorilla suits and raised over $50,000 for the second year in a row last Saturday. I’m so proud of everyone who helped make this happen. I love all the participants, fans, and the spirit of Austin. I’m so happy to call this city home.

Our show was super fun. Playing to a crowd of a thousand people dressed in gorilla suits is an unforgettable experience. Hopefully we’ll get some pictures posted soon. In the meantime you can check out photos of the gorilla run at the official site. I never would have predicted this, but what with the Gorilla Run and Voodoo Fest, some of our biggest and most energetic shows recently have started in the early morning – at 10AM!

Big props to Hooch, as we got many compliments on the sound. He’s run festival sized sound before (Applejam’s Sunday jam last year, for example), but this year was a whole different beast.

It will happen again in 2013. We’ll see you there!

To kick it off, our buddy Ty from Gunnison drove up to party with us. Sweet. Then right before the show started three friends from Austin surprised us at the bar! My buddies Harrison, Andrew, and Bryant, whom I’ve known since elementary school, just happened to be in town that weekend for a ski trip. They wandered into the Motherloaded Tavern earlier that day and were told an Austin TX band was playing that night, so they came back to check it out. At the time they didn’t have a clue it would be us.

This weekend happened to be the “Dew Tour” weekend, which means that Mountain Dew and a bunch of other companies build a halfpipe in the middle of town and bring in a bunch of snowboarders to do crazy cool stuff in front of audiences in town and on the mountain. It also means that Motherloaded was packed. People danced on the tables from the first song, and didn’t stop until the end of the night.

Apparently Breckenridge can be a fickle town, so the bar encouraged us to only take one small break during our three hour set. Forget that, we said, we’re playing straight through. So we did. No breaks, three hours. People going crazy dancing on the tables the whole time. Ty and his friend flipping each other around like crazy swing dancers.

We stopped playing and people cheered and cheered. “Keep going!” People, we just played for three hours straight. “Ok, if you’re still yelling for us by the time we get back from the bathroom, we’ll do one more song.” I tell them. In the toilet two rooms over, I can still hear them yelling. They kept at it. So we decided to keep playing.

One more song. “Keep going!” A guy hands some money. “At least one more!” OK, we’ll keep going. The crowd had started to thin out at the end, but now people are filling up the place again. The place packed out, so we kept playing. 45 more minutes, until the bar had to legally kick people out!

What a crazy fun night. We had lots of offers for places to stay, but at that point it was two days til Christmas and we did what we always do at the end of a tour, no matter how far we are from Austin, no matter how late in the night it is. We hopped in the van and drove all the way home.

Breckenridge – come out and party with us on February 18th! It gets better every time.

Check out our video which contains footage from the race and us playing at the race:

As you can see, the race is incredibly fun. People dress up in costumes over the gorilla suits and get really creative. Achachay! plays at the end, and this year we’ve blocked off an entire street. Registration costs $100 for first timers (includes the suit), and $50 if you’ve already got your suit from last year (you get to keep it!).

We’re very excited about it. Our friends in the band SPEAK will join us on stage this year. See you there!

My college-roommate rockin' out! Can you believe we shared a dorm room?!

The town of Alma is residence for about 200 people. It is located approximately 90 miles southwest of Denver, tucked in the mountains, and it is also the highest (at 10,578 feet) incorporated municipality in the US. Alma is one of those town you have to pass through to get to other destinations in CO, but last Friday we found out there is much more to Alma than that. Alma has 2 bars (and 2 dispensaries  awarding the town with the distinction of most dispensaries per capita in CO (and possibly the US?)) and we played Alma’s Only Bar (the OG of bars for Alma). Whoa that’s a lot of parentheses! Anyways, because of a booking snafu we opened up the night at AOB for the local group Spider Murphy and the Pushovers. It was early, too, like 9:00 pm start time and we had low expectations of a crowd, but sure enough the place had a good crowd about 5 minutes into our set. We played for just over an hour and totally won the place over, old and young, rocker and hippie alike. It was nice that even though this show was starting on a weird note because of the booking debacle, it turned out to be great.

The rest of the night was great as well. Spider Murphy and the Pushovers were great: think low-key, laid-back, groovy music with bass, guitar/banjo/4-string guitar, harmonica, and drums. They were great and we hung out with the locals and got to know the town for the rest of the night.

We also had a very gracious host that everyone called Hector. Hector has a great house in town where he hosts bands that come through to play, as well as travelers and others who need a place for a while. All in all, our night in Alma was great and I think we will have a great time next time we roll through to play the entire night.

Old friends from Stillwater

Quixotes is what you would call a ‘Dead’ bar. Not ‘dead’ in the sense that it’s no longer an establishment in the community. ‘Dead’ in that every decoration on the wall (and there are hundreds of decorations) is in some way tied to The Grateful Dead or the Jam Band Culture that revolves around it. Everything from old concert posters to paintings of Jerry Garcia are represented. As you can imagine this makes the venue feel like a flashback to a different psychadelic time. This is our second time at Quixotes and this time around we played with local Denver funk band ‘In Due Time’. It was such a fun night of music. With fiery vocals and a funkin’ awesome horn section ‘In Due Time’ kept the crowd shaking their booties. To add to the musical excitement of the evening the ‘In Due Time’ horn section sat in with us on ‘Rock People’ and ‘Get Funky’. Man horns really make our songs more dynamic. So sweet…
I also got on stage with ‘In Due Time’ to help sing ‘Superstitious’ by Stevie Wonder. It was so much fun. The whole night was just great. I had several old friends from different times in my life show up to the show and that was really just icing on the cake. So as you can tell I love Denver and I think it’s safe to say the other guys do too. Thanks to my friends, our fans, and ‘In Due Time’ for making it an awesome night. Until next time Hooch over and out!

Hanging out at Kate's after the show

Wednesday we played Boulder, one of my favorite towns. We hit up a new venue called Shug’s and it is a sweet place – nice stage, good sound, probably the only place in Colorado you can get Abita and Dixie Beer (its got a Cajun theme). The crowd definitely grooved and played along nicely with all of our participatory moments. The stage was also big enough to allow me to exercise my jumping muscles to the fullest extent.

The show was awesome, with our new friends Smack Thompson laying down sweet Colorado jams in the style of Phish, String Cheese, Grateful Dead, etc. Unfortunately I missed the first half of the show because I was… looking for the van.

Hooch and Ryan parked the van, and they didn’t get me the most precise directions. It was also really cold. I wandered around for about fifteen minutes until finally Hooch met me to ostensibly guide me to the parking spot. Yet, we still wandered about fifteen more minutes until we found it!

Ryan being silly

RyOther highlights of the day / night included:
- Friends from the deep histories of our lives coming out to rock with us, including Camp Olympia, Elementary School, college, New Orleans, and more.
- New fans we met in Winter Park came to see us play again!
- Getting to attend a pre-game mediation session with Julie & friends

We can’t wait to be back on February 11th at the Dark Horse!

Summit Daily News

Who: Achachay!

When: Saturday (also opens for Spider Murphy at AOB tonight)

Where: MotherLoaded Tavern, Breckenridge

Where’d the name come from? While traveling in Ecuador, lead singer Jordan Myska Allen began booking shows in Austin, Texas, and corresponding with drummer Ryan Greenblatt. Jordan came up with a huge list of names referencing sci-fi and fantasy novels, obscure poets, and esoteric religious principles. He showed the list to his sister, who declared, “These are the worst f***ing band names I’ve ever seen.” What about “Achachay?” Jordan asked. The word is slang in Ecuador, borrowed from the native language Quechua. It is an onomatopoeia that means, “Burrrr, it’s cold!” and being a native Texan, he felt a little cold in the mountainous altitudes of Quito. “Yeah, that works,” she said, and the name stuck.

Home base: Austin, Texas

Type of music: Our own brand of funk/rock. We play unique and thoroughly booty shaking music.

Who are you? We are three passionate dudes who want to participate in the world waking up to a new way of seeing and living, by transcending and including everything that’s come before us while expanding upon it.

If your music were a tangible item, what would it be, and why? We would be your favorite beer: classic in taste, nice to share with friends or to enjoy alone, and always the life of the party.

Why do people love ya? People love us because we love what we do. Come to a show and you’ll feel the passion. There’s a palpable, contagious energy and up-beat attitude. People also love us because we play a kind of music that no one else does. It’s deep, spiritual, yet simultaneously practical and fun. We’ll sing about the psychological underpinnings of the quintessential “player,” a guy who’s just out for one-night stands, while playing a drinking game with the crowd.

How do you keep it fresh? By continually writing new music and working to improve ourselves as musicians and as people in general.

What’s the craziest thing you’ve done/weirdest experience? The band took a guided tour in Arches National Park while two-thirds of us were on hallucinogens. I don’t know if you can print that, but it was pretty crazy and really, really funny. If you can imagine 20 elderly people, a 22-year-old park ranger, and two long-hairs with beards plus their wily side-kick who was continually taking panoramic pictures, you can imagine why it was so funny.

Snow!!!!!

“It’s a college town..without a college. That’s all you need to know,” – Scottie, bouncer/doorman at the Bubble Lounge and local Telluridian (?). This was our 4th time playing in Telluride and our 3rd time at the Bubble Lounge. Some of our old friends, namely Gregg and a different Scott, were not around for our show this time, but we made some great new friends and fans. For a Monday, our show was pretty good: a decent crowd and a good time.

Telluride is just sort of a magical place in general with its absurd beauty and very chill vibes. It also snowed for the first time this tour almost the entire time we were in town. I enjoy the snow until we need to get out of town and we can’t because conditions are too bad. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case this time and we were able to just enjoy the 2-3 inches and still get out of town. I’m excited for our next show in Telluride because it seemed like everyone there is going to promote the show a ton now that they know we rock. I also want to give a shout out to our gracious hosts and friends Kate and Wiley! They’re the best!

Outy 5000
Blattttttttttttttttttttttttt