Insomniac

Some of you might know about The Sketchbook Project.  I think I mentioned it back in November when I bought one to fill up.  Anyway, I mailed it in today.  Essentially it’s a comic called “Insomniac” & I put it on my Facebook, I was too lazy to put it elsewhere as of yet.  It was supposed to be a couples project for me & my ex-girlfriend to do & somehow it actually ended up she did do a lot of work on it kind of at the last minute & made it a lot better than what it was that I had done.

So I suppose it’s worth mentioning on here that some shit went down between me & Karla since she has made some mentions & appearances in the blog.  Things had been rough on my end since February when we got in our first fight.  We broke up about a month ago with me trying to reconcile things.  & we kinda got back together after a couple of weeks & on Tuesday she told me she wanted to get things back on track for us getting married in the fall.  Then Thursday she told me she had no romantic feelings for me at all (& other things I shouldn’t get into), but she still wanted me to be her friend & I was really important to her.  Friday I told her that all of the reasons she would list why she should kill herself when she was drunk were true & she should just do it.  I’m kind of embarrassed to have said it, but I feel like I have to admit the kind of person I can become when somebody hurts me.  I think she wanted an apology & instead of an apology I offered her an explanation of that she should change the things wrong with herself or kill herself because her spiraling down the drain was in no one’s interest.  I mean, I feel it’s valid for her to say she’s a burden to her family & friends financially, emotionally, & mentally; but that’s a choice she’s making & she should take me telling her that as a challenge to work to be a better person every day.  Which is what I hope she does, even though I will never know what happens either way.  Otherwise the relationship is ending with her in a worse place than she was when she met me & me in a better place than when I met her & I’d greatly prefer it to end with us both in a better place.  In the mean time I lost about 20 pounds of weight over all the stress of the past month putting me at the least I’ve weighed in 15 years & I was debating the idea of going a couple more days of not being able to sleep or eat to see how long it takes for my heart to collapse on itself, but instead I got some pills that people use to help them be able to eat & sleep after surgeries & they seem to be working as I was able to eat full meals today.  So yeah, that’s the sad bastard place I’m coming from.  People keep telling me I should put it into my work, but my reply is I already have written enough sad stories/songs.  I think I’m ready to write something happy & to let it come true.  Thank you all for your interest & concern.  Silber=Family=Love.  We’ll see what happens as far as if not having a “first call” person in my life ends up with me having more time to get work done or less drive to get work done over the next few weeks.

Last Night’s Dream:
I’m going to one of those totally dead malls where half the store fronts have been turned into offices & one has been turned into a church & Clang Quartet has a show there on a Wednesday afternoon.

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Nostalgia Equals Distortion – Skittles

I first had Skittles in the late 1980s.  My mom had bought them as Halloween candy & we never had enough trick-or-treaters to run out of candy, so me & my siblings got the leftovers.  A year or two later Skittles became a major food source for me as I invested the money my folks gave me for lunch on drugs & had a mini-pack of skittles for lunch every day.  Maybe because of that association I haven’t had Skittles in my past relatively sober 15 years.
Recently I’ve been going through some emotional trauma that’s made me have trouble eating & I’ve gone from athletically thin to anorexically thin, so I thought candy might be a good idea to increase my caloric intake & Skittles came to mind.  The sweet fruit tastes are familiar & comforting.  Even the grape tastes better than I remembered.  If it doesn’t taste like a rainbow, it at least tastes like a time when rainbows were still magic & represented hope.

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Small Life Form & Artsy Fartsy Photography

So I guess today was the last practice since I went ahead & struck down all my equipment.  The recording set-up worked fine today (so I still don’t know how to keep it from happening again).  I recorded a couple skeletons for the Remora stuff & then I did the Small Life Form piece below (it’s not a final mix, but I don’t think it’s too far off).  Should I release it as a free EP or just leave it as a secret on the blog or combine it with a couple other things for a special dollar album download?  Looking for opinions on that aspect of things. Linton Studios can update you on latest trends in photography.

 

Here’s a couple of arty animated gifs I’ve done lately taking photos through colored pieces of broken glass.

Posted in art, daily news, engineering, music | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

3 Responses to Small Life Form & Artsy Fartsy Photography

  1. Peter says:

    You should definitely be a part time riverside troubadour.

  2. Nick says:

    Brian, probably those gifs will give epileptic seizure to some lucky one…

Remora stuff

So I’ve been doing some more work towards recording a bit the past couple of days while practicing for show this weekend.  I ran into a problem today with my computer acting weird about recording giving these weird static peaks.  I had the problem a couple days when I was down recording in Savannah & it mysteriously solved itself, but I worked around the issue a bit in what I think is a semi-satisfactory if less than ideal way.  Trying to track down the problem so I can fix it forever.  So here you go… two new ones & a classic revisited….

 

 

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  1. Nick Marino says:

    Great tunes! I really dig Dance Anthem 116.

    • Thanks sir! “Dance Anthem 116″ was done using the Little Drummer Boy software mainly because of my soundcard issues (I wrote it on my keyboard, but it was easier to remake the thing with the software than figure out what is wrong with the electricity). I think you might dig that software. It’s from the 1990s & it changed from shareware to freeware a couple of years ago.

Small Life Form & Dreams

So I have a Small Life Form show this weekend at a noise festival & they put out a compilation about it.  The SLF track is the opener, small laptop speakers can’t recreate the sounds properly.

Last Night’s Dreams:
I’m at a thrift store that has a bunch of old electronics & a bunch of music stuff.  In a dollar bin of cassettes the guy has a shrinkwrapped Robotech Perfect Collection Soundtrack.  I pick it up & take it to the guy & tell him, “I’m not going to buy this because I don’t need this, but you could probably get at least $30 for this on Ebay.”  He thanks me for the tip & puts the cassette in his pocket & gives me a free Crass 12-inch single as thanks for the tip.

I’ve been on a two month alcohol binge living under a bridge so no when can watch my decay.  A girl from my past stumbles across me walking on the hiking trail that goes by the creek under the bridge.  We have a conversation.  In the middle of it my body starts shaking.  She yells out, “Oh my God!  You’re having DTs!” & I tell her, “It’s fine, it’s just that it’s cold & I’m not wearing enough clothes.”  I’m not sure which one of us is right.

I get a package at the post office that I’m not expecting.  When I open the box it’s a VCR.  I throw the packing material away & am walking out carrying it & people are whispering about it thinking it’s some kind of bomb.

It’s after the apocalypse & I live in a four story Brownstone with 20 people on a block where the half of the buildings surviving have similar tribes of 20 people in them with everyone scared to walk outside or they’ll be killed by a rival tribe.  There’s a truce everyday for a ceasefire from 5pm-6pm where people go out trying to scavenge for supplies.  Some of the survivors are big tough dudes with AKs slung over their shoulders & others are children with fancy running shoes.  Everyone is getting ready for five o’clock to strike so they can start the race to find a lost can of beans.  When the time hits I run four blocks & go up to the top of a parking deck where there’s a single rotting corpse of a car.  There’s a girl there waiting for me.  This is our only time together.  I’d rather spend time with her than spend time trying to stay alive one more day.  She tells me she was born in the country, 47 miles away from here.  I wish I could take her back there, it seems to me it couldn’t be worse than here; but I guess it’s just romantic to hope for something better anywhere.  Somebody reaches in trying to grab her through the broken passenger window & I spin around kicking at their arms & they let go & back off saying they thought she was alone.  I get out of the car.  The attacker is a fourteen year old girl wearing an wearing an old army jacket with an AK strapped on her back.  I grab the rifle off of her & threaten to hit her with it & when she runs I just throw it over the edge of the parking deck.  I go back to the car & say to the girl, “Maybe we can just try to stay together in the car tonight & see what happens.”

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QRD, Buttons, Dream

I spent most of the last couple days filling some custom button orders.  It’s funny because I realize to really make doing the buttons worthwhile I cannot keep doing projects for friends where I’m doing all the design work for free.  We’ll see what happens.  I mean, so far I’m not so busy that it’s really inhibiting on other work.  & if I start selling my own designs decently on Ebay & Etsy, then I can just do the buttons as a service to friends & kinda stop pushing that front.  Which I think is what a lot of the famous button makers do as they all charge $20 extra for making custom buttons, I assume because they just don’t think it’s worth the bother otherwise.  Just got to wait & see what happens there.

QRD #61 is up.  Still waiting to here back with the proofreading from the guitarists I interviewed & there’s an ad that just shows up as words right now, but it should be fine for the average reader.

Last Night’s Dream:
I’m being beaten & questioned in a cell.  They keep calling me Bill Caynor.  A boot kicking my left side breaks a rib & I’m a completely broken man.  I’d tell them anything they want to hear.  I wish I was Bill Caynor so I could just make this all end.

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  1. Richard Maslow says:

    wake up! you’re still here, baby.

    • Richard! Is it really you? You still dealing in those crazy photographs? I got a button maker, if those photos are in the public domain, we should start a button empire based on them….

Comics, QRD, & Dreams

I got a bunch of comics assembled to ship out to subscribers.  It fills up the majority of subscribers, hopefully I’ll get some renewals.

I did the proofreading of the next guitarist series for QRD.  Waiting a couple days for some interview stragglers to come in before throwing the issue together.

I’ve been starting to compile all the dream entries for the blog into an ebook.  About a third done.  I still need to figure out if I’m really going to release the thing.  I have no idea if it would be of interest to anyone or not or if I should add illustrations or not.  Sometimes I feel like I’m on the cusp of there being an interest & demand for my art & other times I feel like it’s just quaint.

Last Night’s Dream:
I’m walking in the woods & I get to a point where the easiest path is on the bank of a creek bed.  When my foot touches the water I see something coming towards me skimming on the surface that looks like a lamprey that is part plant.  I’m not sure if I’m even on the right planet.  I’m also not sure if I should just let the thing kill me.

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3 Responses to Comics, QRD, & Dreams

  1. Nick says:

    Adding illustrations and making it like a very personal dreamlike diary with a succession of events, a chronicle of your life during/through the dreams, it could be interesting in my opinion. I’m thinking about some kind of graphic novel, indeed.

Remora & Stuff

So yesterday was a fairly incredibly productive day.  I finished the majority of the promos for the new releases (gotta update some email addresses & do the web email contacts still) & I proofed a couple interviews for the next QRD & I recorded a few more guitar drone pieces potentially for the next Remora release.  Then I botched my momentum by not sleeping well during the night & taking a nap today from 8am to noon.  So I’m going to try to get back on track & finish off today with a bunch of work done.

Here’s a video that Peter Aldrich reminded me exists:

& here’s a weird video about existential dread & Jesus Christ:

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Waves & Demos

So I got out the first wave of promo emails for the new releases done, I might get it all done by Friday.  It’s kinda depressing right now as the response ratio is so low.  I totally understand it as I’m sure they are inundated with material, but I don’t know what the secret is to get things to have more attention without spending more time or money than I’m currently ready to.  I mean, I know I can hire a publicist or I can spend my time reading & commenting on a hundred blogs a day (that’s actually what good publicists do), but I think I would rather spend that time & money making music.

Recorded two songs/drones for the B-side of the Remora cassette I’m working on.  Here are the first rough mixes.

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  1. Nick says:

    The secret: putting hot redhead pics on the artwork.

News & Dreams

I’ve spent most of the past couple of days doing updates to my press list to get things ready for mailing about the recent releases.  I miss how ten years ago people thought Silber was a lot bigger because of the volume of press & radio play we got & maybe these few hundred updated contacts will make a difference in making some magic happen again.  I guess we’ll know in a couple weeks.

I also did get out the Silber newsletter, which you can read on the news page if you didn’t get emailed a copy.

I have been talking about doing some ebooks on & off lately collecting some of the QRD interview series (guitarists, label owners, cartoonists)  as well as the dream diary stuff.  If you have any idea for titles for those books, let me know.

Also semi-worth noting, I’ve decided to move Nostalgia Equals Distortion & Finally Checking it Out to over here on the main blog.  So those will just be appearing as separate entries in the next few days.

Last Night’s Dreams:
In an attempt to re-invent myself, I cut off my beard.  Maybe I’ll finally be someone worth a damn.

I’m at a comic convention & it’s slow as molasses.  One of the other cartoonists invites me up to her room to have a couple shots (I guess she’s scared of getting thrown out for drinking on the floor).  The elevator gets stuck on the way up to her room & we have to pry the service door side of the elevator open & climb eight flights of super sketchy stairs.  This better be some decent liquor for all this effort.

Posted in daily news, dreams | Tagged , | 2 Comments

2 Responses to News & Dreams

  1. GoddakkAttack says:

    i’ve actually had to do that in spain once.