Hi all, Hope this thursday finds you well. We are a little tired, but a good tired. We got in last night at about 1:30-2:00 am… and in the office bright and early this morning. We had a great show last night in Cornelius, NC and want to thank everyone who came out and bought merch etc… it was very refreshing to have a great show. For those of you who weren’t there - there was about 1,000 kids all appreciating what we were doing, we werent expecting this kind of turnout, but it was very nice. Also got to hang out with some friends afterwords at dinner, had a great time. I want to thank Christine for putting everything together for last night.

As for today, Ledbetter and I have a big conference call for Airtype today - gotta love the corporate world, I never imagined I would have to have conference calls, “deliverables” and “end of days” - yet we won’t complain. Right now im sipping coffee, chatting it up with my friend dave in NY (btw check out his band: myspace.com/runawaydorothy) and rocking out to some remy zero.

We do have a free show this sunday in Winston-Salem, NC. Hope to see some faces there. Thanks again to all who came out last night. Also, if anyone does read these - let me know what you want to hear about… ask questions etc. Hope all is well, and until next time take care,

-p

Well, we have had this blog for quite sometime now - and tend to writing in it every 6 months or so - boring I know. I am going to change that and commit to updating you guys with whats going on in the evoka world at least once a week, maybe twice a week. Please hold me accountable.

Well, our CMJ campaign is over - we did chart in the top 200 hundred a few times, which was our goal, however for some reason we still feel let down? I guess we were hoping in a big surge in record sales, or labels to come calling etc… but no worries, we will keep it rocking.

We had a show a couple weeks ago in morganton, thanks to all of you who came out, it was good to play again. Also have a couple coming up, we are stoked.

Bryan and I are slammed at Airtype - currently working on some t-shirts for the passion world tour coming up this summer, coming out really cool thus far. We just hired a web developer, James - man talk about a genius… this guy is a freak when it comes to knowing about computers. I looked on his desk the other day and saw a huge text book titled “Algorithms in C++” - I mean for real, who reads that stuff? But seriously james is a very cool guy, a blessing to Airtype, and we are glad to have him join the family.

I haven’t talked to Taylor much recently, I know he and Katie getting ready to move and staying busy with that. He is also working alot building houses with his dad.

Pete is on another vintage guitar kick… for those of you who know him know he is crazy about some guitars, he and I both really. He just picked up a 1966 sunburst P-bass and added it to the collection and now he already looking at some thinlines, its wild - but super cool. He is also about to go back on tour with OURS and helping then tune and set up their guitar rigs.

Speaking of OURS, I finally picked up their new record “mercy”. Its a great record, I think its gonna do OURS well. I have had a copy of it for over a year now, so I knew what to expect from it. I was kinda let down by the design & packaging… in my opinion this band deserves nothing but the best - and it seems they came up short in this dept - but the music is great.

A couple other records I picked up was the new one from ELBOW - “The Seldom Seen Kid” - wow wow wow… Elbow just keeps getting better and better - this record is sick… thats all I really have to say… my favorite track thus far… “Grounds for Divorce”.

The 3rd record was Flight of the Concords, haha this stuff is great. If you ever need a good laugh… just youtube some of their videos or listen to some songs… its great. Its very well done and its hard not to get a kick from it.

Well, I guess im off to go carry furniture - my brother is moving and has suckered me in to help. Hope you guys are having a great weekend and are geared up for monday. I promise Ill be back soon to write more!-P

Well, for the past 3-4 years now right after new years, we always seem to have big plans. “2005 is big for evoka, 2006 is the year for evoka, 2007 is the year evoka breaks etc etc…” So now its 2008, and of course we hope good things will happen, and we are for surely working hard towards that - however we aren’t relying on it. We do have many plans in the works for ‘08 to help us get to where we want to go. Our biggest goal of year is take “Cries from the Castlegate Empire” to a larger audience. We are very thankful for all the feedback that our few and mighty fans have shown on the record, and as we said before - that record is for you. We do believe however that the record can do well on a broader audience, therefor we are going to try to make that happen.

Although we probably already have enough new songs to write a second record, we want make sure CFTCE gets the exposure it deserves. We are about to embark on a national college radio (cmj) campaign, that includes over 300 CMJ stations, hoping the band will catch the ears of the cmj DJ’s out there, and in turn gain some friends all over the country. We will then do a national publicity campaign in hopes of gaining press and reviews from various magazines around the country, and finally we will do some small run tours, maybe 2 weeks at a time, playing live is the upmost passion of evoka, and we certainly want to do that.

You may wonder why we don’t have any shows currently scheduled. Apart from the reasons stated above, Pete, our bass player is currently out on the road with bands Marylin Manson and OURS helping out fixing guitars, tuning them, etc… He will return in early March, and we will then look to book some shows. Pete is having a blast out on the road visiting some killer cities and clubs. If you happen to catch one of those shows, be sure to keep an eye out for him and say hi.

Again, we want to send thanks for all you who continue to stay current with evoka and enjoy the music, without you guys - we would still make music - it just wouldn’t be as fun

Make it a great 2008,
-evoka