So anyone who still reads this blog-which is probably limited to people who work at Synthesis, people used to work at Synthesis, and their immediate family-already knows that the rock band known as Surrogate is the best fucking band in the whole world. OBVS. However, what they, or more precisely you, might not know is that they (FULL DISCLOSURE: I’m in the fucking band so I guess I should say “we” to avoid feeling too dissociated ) have a new record coming out on July 14th titled Popular Mechanics.

SPOILER ALERT: It rules. Hard. Long. And Full of Seamen, like a crab boat, or a submarine, or possibly a bus transporting seamen to a submarine base. Anyways, the album is already up for Pre-Order at a few badass places like Amazon, Best Buy, and InterPunk. So you should go spend money there so Chris Keene can afford to shower his wife with jewels, wealth and Gold. Also you can add us on Myspace and/or Facebook so we can SPAM you with self-aggrandizing garbage until you’re fully convinced that we really are the best band fucking ever in history of all time. RECOGNIZE.

So Spencer recently put together a ton of contest stuff so we can give yall a bunch of free shit.  Do yourself a favor and walk (possibly click, idunnow)  on over to our contest Myspace profile to get yourself a piece of the action.

Caught a few songs from Diane Birch at some hole in the wall in Austin, TX during South by Southwest 2009.

More photos after the jump.

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I was looking around on the file server just now and I just happened to have FOUND this interview with Found Footage co-creator Nick Prueher done written and enacted by Synthesis correspondent Landon Moblad. The Festival plays Chico this weekend and then moves East. For dates check out their Myspace here.

In a funny way, the Found Footage Festival is somewhat of an inspiring shaggy dog success story. In this YouTube era, when you can get together and swap clip recommendations with friends until one of you calls “uncle,” here we have two average dudes making a living touring videos of maniacal RV salesmen, fast food training tutorials and nonsensical cable access shows. And not even these desolate times can slow them down.
“We weren’t quite sure if people would come out to watch stupid videos in this economy,” co-creator Nick Prueher joked from his home base in New York City, where he works as an assistant for the Colbert Report. “But so far so good.”
For Prueher and his partner in crime, Joe Pickett, it’s all about the commitment to the project and love for what they’re doing that has enabled them to tour all over the country, providing audiences with an hour and a half’s worth of laughs that tops anything Hollywood is spitting out these days.
Over the past five years, Prueher and Pickett have spent countless hours of their time combing thrift stores and garage sales, sifting through trash and following audience leads to find weird, awkward, funny or plain idiotic videos. More often than not, the clips wind up being all of these at once. The show’s recent success has led to an increasing number of fan-submitted contributions, which is something Prueher and Pickett have welcomed with open arms.
“The new show is probably 40-50 percent videos other people have given us,” Prueher said. “So much of our job is not only digging through the dumpsters and finding all these videos but also watching all of them. So when someone kind of does all that for us, it’s like Christmas morning.”
One such video, called “Something’s Happening,” was sent anonymously from Denver and depicts a wretched man in a shoddy, homemade infomercial informing viewers how to get rid of mucus in their mouth. The big secret? Grape juice. What follows is too outrageous to ruin for those planning to attend the show.
“That one is my personal favorite because your jaw just kind of drops,” Prueher said. “We always like to include one of those ‘what the fuck’ clips and that is this year’s.”
Now that the show has stabilized itself as a draw all over the country, Prueher and Pickett have moved on to other endeavors, such as promoting Dirty Country, a film they debuted at South by Southwest back in 2007. The documentary follows Larry Pierce, an unknown truck stop troubadour and all around sleazy old man who has penned hundreds of songs including “Good Hard Screwing,” “We Screwed In the Rain” and “Screw Your Brains Out (One Night Stand).”
“12 years ago, we were looking for something to entertain us on the road,” Prueher said. “If you see something called Songs for Studs, you buy it.”
The film follows Pierce as he begins to gain a bit more notoriety for his filthy repertoire, eventually winding up on the Howard Stern Show.
“It’s a great all-American story,” Prueher said. “Going from total obscurity to relative obscurity.”
One of the great things about the Found Footage Festival is the amount of work put into getting back stories and somehow tracking down many of the actors and real people from the tapes themselves. One of the videos in this year’s edition is an ad for a so-called “Laughing Yogi,” which with a clip of a hysterically laughing monk, is pretty much exactly what you might expect. Prueher and Pickett found him in Los Angeles and got him out to one of their shows, only to see him sit in the front row without letting out a single laugh.
“Pretty much the worst audience member ever,” Prueher said.
One of the Internet’s most infamous clips, helped made popular by the Found Footage Festival, is of Jack Rebney, a Winnebago salesman on the brink with the patience of a gnat and tongue of a Slavic pirate. If you haven’t seen it, you should probably put this paper down and find it online immediately. But after years of searching and with the help of a private investigator and a documentary filmmaker (whose film, Winnebago Man, debuted this year at South by Southwest), Prueher and Pickett found Rebney living in seclusion in Northern California. Eventually, they talked him into making an appearance at a show in San Francisco. True to form, Rebney was prickly at first. By the end of the show, however, Prueher saw a smile come across his face at the amount of laughter his previous follies had brought to people.
“We compared it to the Grinch, when his heart grew to 10 times the size,” he said.
At their shows, watching Prueher and Pickett quip back and forth with each other and excitedly describe the upcoming clips, you can tell they’re getting just as much of a kick out of all of it as their audience.
“Part of the fun of all this is kind of being the tour guides through this world we’ve uncovered.”
I’ll take that over watching videos on my laptop any day.

Not to rag of Facebook patrons, but a new survey indicates that people that frequent said social networking site have lower grades than those who actually have a life other than e-stalking their ex-girlfriends and Twittering. Whodda thunk it?

Facebook users have lower overall grades than non-users, according to a survey of college students who also ironically said the social networking site does not interfere with studying.

That disconnect between perception and reality does not necessarily mean that Facebook leads to less studying and worse grades — the grades association could be caused by something else.

However, it does raise more questions about how students spend their time outside class on activities such as Facebook, part-time jobs and extracurricular activities.

“I’m just saying that there’s some kind of relationship there, and there’s many third variables that need to be studied,” said Aryn Karpinski, an education researcher at Ohio State University.

Her study found that Facebook user GPAs were in the 3.0 to 3.5 range on average, compared to 3.5 to 4.0 for non-users. Facebook users also studied anywhere from one to five hours per week, compared to non-users who studied 11 to 15 or more hours per week.

On a different note, be sure to add us on Myspace!

One of my many shitty bands is venturing North this weekend to play some shows in Portland and Seattle with our good friends Ruth, and a band who I had never heard of called Derby, who are from Portland and were kind enough to get us on a bill at the newly refurbished (and apparently super badass) Mississippi Studios. And even better, they don’t suck, not even a little bit. Their songs vasciallate between a Strokes-esque jangle and a dreamy pop sound a la fellow Portlandites The Shins, with decidely memorable melodic hooks throughout. I imagine that they probably have a shitload of fans in their hometown and beyond, which is badass because we definitely don’t. And even if they don’t, I’m still stoked just to kick it with them for a couple of days. Check out their shit on Myspace, or if you’re a Northwesterner, get your ass out to the goddamn shows this weekend and buy me some beers.