So I got some notes back on the Small Life Form Voice in the Sky album from the friends I sent it to. Favorable reviews. & then I did some minor tweaking that I’m uploading now for them to check out. But it should be available soonish. My plan is for it to be the first of a hybrid release type at Silber. So it’ll be free to stream on the site forever (which of course means those that want to just take it can) & available as a $1 download with all the art files & such. I might do something where it starts as $1 & goes up to $5 (normal Silber digital price) later on.
I also listened through & did what I think are the last edits & final mix down for my 4.5 hour drone piece that I evidently (based on dates on computer files) have been working on since January of 2008 (it feels like only since September 2008). I’m thinking of releasing it as “Brian John Mitchell” rather than Remora or Small Life Form. I can’t say exactly why I feel that I should have my own name on it, but it’s just a vibe I have. I think it’s about seven keyboard parts & about ten ebowed bass/guitar parts all with no effects & no looping. Just fades in & out & no digital effects added. In the end literally at least 100 hours of recording time (I had some takes that I had to abandon after an hour long take because of screwing it up) & maybe 20 hours towards mixing. Obviously the art isn’t done since I don’t know the band name yet. For the album title I’m thinking of going with “4.5″ which works twice because it took me 4.5 years to record it & it’s 4.5 hours long. What do you think? “Brian John Mitchell – 4.5″ have a good luck to it?
As you may know, I’m doing some things to try to push music placement a bit more (since that’s more or less the only straws to grasp at for making enough money off music to recoup expenses). So I remembered about how four years ago (the last Silber licensing push) I did a project called Panthan with Nic Slaton (slicnaton) to try to do some music exclusively for that. So anyway, we’re going to go ahead & make the stuff that came out good enough & not overly generic (which is oddly a goal for music for placement) together as an EP to be freely available. More news when that actually goes live.
In related news I hear that slicnaton’s album Autoscopy (I think I’m spelling it right) is getting dangerously close to finished. It’ll probably be ready in September.
So since I repaired the issue with my newsletter sign-up thing, I’ve been getting 5 Polish email sign-ups every day. Pretty sure that’s spam. It would be nice to get one newsletter sign-up that was legit.
In other spam news, I got a Facebook message & friend request from a guy saying, “I saw you back a lot of comic projects on Kickstarter & I thought you might want to check mine out.” Now I do back a lot of comics on Kickstarter & I thought he might have seen me posting about some comic Kickstarters in a Facebook newsgroup or something (because I do occasionally promote stuff other than my own). So I just asked him how he found out about me & basically he’s going through comic campaigns on Kickstarter & contacting any backers who backed several comic projects. Which means he’s going through & collecting the names & cities of active Kickstarter folks & then trying to find those same people on Facebook (because Kickstarter seems to actually be kind of good about not giving out the Facebook links to people who are contributors instead of creators). He said 30% of his backers came from him doing that. I’m not sure how I feel about it. On the one hand if it’s targeted enough, it’s called marketing; on the other hand it does skirt the border of being spam. So I’m debating if I should try his idea or not. I think that I’d in the end do something where I would just send friend requests to people that have backed five comic projects in the past year & have either over 200 Facebook friends or at least five friends in common & then if they naturally discover my project in their feed that’s awesome & if not, that’s fine too. What do you folks think?
Speaking of Kickstarter, the bottle comic project has a picture put up now with the covers of the three comics & also some new rewards for backers (including a special PDF for all contributors of $1 or more & pre-aged bottles). While it’s passed it’s official funding goal (the minimum I needed to make it happen), it’s well below my personal goal in the number of backers. My goal is 100 people behind the project & while I’m getting close to that in Facebook likes, I’m a long way to go as far as people actually throwing in a dollar. So if you know anyone that you think would be intrigued by comics put in bottles & thrown into the ocean, please let them know about it.
I stumbled across this Metallica video with Dave Mustaine doing “Phantom Lord.” I kinda thought Metallica was past the ability of not only not being able to do good new material, but not being able to do decent versions of the old stuff. Well, this video I think proves they only suck because they want to.
Okay, I guess that’s about enough for now. I need to get to work on QRD as I want the new issue (indie comic creator interviews) out next week along with the newsletter & at least three of the releases mentioned above. A lot of work to do & I’m the only one working around here….
Last Night’s Dream:
It’s snowed enough that it’s covering the whole yard. I’m sitting with my grandmother eating breakfast. A red fox wanders out of the woods into the yard with his feet sinking a couple inches into the snow.