Slowness, QRD, Comics, Dreams

Posted on December 30, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

Trying to get a lot of work done before the end of the year.  Slowing me down on getting some thing done I wanted done as far as the five in five series.  Kinda frustrated about that, I’ll have to spend a week writing press releases to get things caught up & easy to do.

Almost done with the digital versions of the comics from Pittsburgh.  So I’ll get on the promo train for that soon.

Sent out a couple hundred solicitations for interviews for the next three issues of QRD.  If you know any label owners, guitarists, or cartoonists I should interview, let me know.  Also if you want to advertise, let me know.

Last Night’s Dreams:
I’m in a fight & I’m trying to do some kind of roundhouse kick, which is total bullshit because the two times I’ve been in fights where people tried that move I caught their foot & twisted it & they fell to the ground with fucked up knees. I connect to the guy’s head & he falls to the ground, but I feel the little bones in my instep break. I’m not sure if I won this fight.

Wandering in the house I notice a lot of things missing. Not like a robbery, but like items have been slowly & selectively removed to be pawned.

My girlfriend is driving on a highway that ends in a cit on the coast.  We’re getting to the point where the highway should be ending, but it suddenly veers up at a 45 degree angle.  It levels off at 200 feet high & just ends with a 50 feet flat level & she slams on the breaks before we fly off the edge.  She gets out of the car looking at the view & I stay in the car feeling the wind blow it side to side & making the bridge sway slightly.

I’m in a Thai restaurant that is on the second floor of an apartment building with my girlfriend, mother, & two women I don’t know.  All of the women leave while I’m waiting to pay the bill.  A robbery starts while I’m waiting & I check my wallet to see if I have enough cash to pay the bill instead of using my credit card so I can go ahead & leave, but I only have $50 & the bill is $70.  I’m not sure what to do.

My girlfriend is getting a literary award from Stacy Palmer.  It’s a ceramic life size female torso & called a Juneau.  I don’t think there’s room for it in the apartment.

I’m watching a documentary about why President Obama is trying to undermine NASA.  The great debate is if he is just following his clandestine orders or if he really thinks limiting space travel will save our planet from destruction.

I pull out a handkerchief to blow my nose & my wallet is missing.

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SPACE, Star, Goths Up Trees, Royalties, Ebook, Music Marketing, Dreams

Posted on December 28, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

I just realized I forgot to mention it on the blog, but Star #2 (a comic I did with Kurt Dinse) is nominated for a SPACE Prize.

I got my picture up on my favorite website, Goths Up Trees.  Ends up I’m only goth as shit instead of goth as fuck.  But I take what I can get.

I got the royalties mailed out to artists on label.  Ends up I overpaid a couple people because of glitched links in my spreadsheet software.  I’d rather overpay the artists than underpay them.

I’m getting close to done on finishing up the ebook from my Pittsburgh residency.  At least close to the point of having some folks proof read it for me.  So once that’s done I’ll start thinking about my next serious Kickstarter projects.  We’ll see what happens.

I talked to Ted Johnson a bit & he gave me some tips on getting my little Kaos Pad I bought a couple weeks ago to actually do some of the things I want it to do.  The high in pitch sounds on it sound a little too cartoony/sci-fi for me, but some of the low in pitch stuff is pretty great sounding.

Here’s a conversation between two of my favorite music marketing gurus (Chris Rockett & Ariel Hyatt) that I think at least some of you might find interesting.  It is an interesting thing that it seems a lot of us spend 50% of our internet marketing time on Facebook while it only generates around 2% of the average musician’s income.

Last Night’s Dreams:
There’s a man with three arms.  Both of his right arms are fully formed & fully functional & under control.  I wonder how using the second arm effects his brain functionality.

She’s pregnant & the baby inside her can communicate with her telepathically.  She’s trying to avoid doctors so that people won’t know her child is special.  Somehow the powers that be have discovered the child & want to kill it in the womb.  She’s running in the forest & the sun is about to set with the wind starting to pick up pulling the heat off of her body.  She hides in some exposed roots in the bank of a dry stream bed.  Maybe she can stay warm enough to live through the night.

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Wrapping Up & Gearing Up

Posted on December 25, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

Merry Christmas!

Hey, sorry I haven’t posted up in a week.  Been pretty busy doing stuff for Christmas & trying to get paperwork done before the end of the year.  Which might keep me from blogging too much the next few days.

As you know, every few months I try to do something new to magically generate interest &/or revenue in Silber.  This past year I did some experiments with Kickstarter, free releases, & most recently the 5 in 5 EP series.  Next year I’m planning on continuing to work with Kickstarter & maybe finally try out Etsy & look into starting to use Ebay as a discovery engine & bring QRD back in the front.  Of course all of that is while continuing the running the label & comic side of Silber as they have been.  Maybe looking more into doing some work with the portable recording set up for helping other musicians & acting as producer (I like doing it & I work cheap if you are interested).  Maybe launching more ebook stuff & making the digital comics available for sale a bunch of places.  Maybe doing a podcast.  We’ll all see what happens.

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2 Responses to Wrapping Up & Gearing Up

  1. Nic says:
    December 26, 2012 at 4:33 am

    Trying out Etsy seems a good idea to me.

  2. GoddakkAttack says:
    December 27, 2012 at 9:08 am

    if you do a podcast you should make sure Pete is involved as well as your home brews

Slogging Through

Posted on December 18, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

So I kinda got some stuff done yesterday.  I got a couple remixes done & sent to Philip Palmer for review.  I got a confirmation that the engineering job on my friend’s record I was talking about yesterday was “good enough.”  I got some work done for the ebook about my residency in Pittsburgh.  I sent out a couple thousand emails to bloggers about the new releases.  So you’d think I’d be happy with the day, but I also found out my favorite distro will most likely no longer be stocking Silber stuff.  Which is understandable as I don’t have any big selling hit releases & never have, but still kind of a bummer.  For the record, the main reason they were my favorite distro had nothing to do with the number of units they sold (lately my sales through them hadn’t been too good at all, I had a couple releases they sold zero units of),  but that they sent me checks & statements on a regular basis.  One of the big headaches of running a label is that you send discs to distros so you can get the music into stores & so many of them are notorious for not paying, but what else can you do?  Right now on the books at Silber we’re owed a little over $10,000 (which doesn’t include the $5000 in stock I’ve written off as stolen over the years from companies who went out of business without having paid me) of which I’ll be happy/lucky if I see a third of that money.  It feels like the scheme by a lot of places is to either keep the stock without paying for it until either (a) the record label goes out of business so they don’t have to pay for the discs or (b) the distro goes out of business so they don’t have to pay for the discs.  It is worth noting that meanwhile distros are getting screwed in a similar way by some of the record stores.  Recently a guy who shut down his distro owing me $500 friended me on LinkedIn & I thought about endorsing him in the skills of “screwing people over” & “ripping people off,” but I decided to just leave it be.

So I’ve been working on drawing one of my comic scripts recently & I’ve been pretty significantly altering the script as far as letting the pictures tell more story & taking out words.  Which I find kind of interesting.  Then, today I got a message from Jeremy Johnson about wanting to alter Marked #4 to change it from 52 panels to 40.  Normally I’d be a little, “Hell no!  The pacing works this way!” But since I’ve been working on drawing my own script I felt comfortable saying, “Do what works best as long as the number of pages is still divisible by four in the end so I can lay it out to print.”  I’m getting a little better about how collaboration works in my old age & embracing my spot as an idea factory instead of a great writer.

Last Night’s Dreams:
There’s this big pig that looks nothing like an actual pig, but like Wilbur from the cartoon version of Charlotte’s Web.  She has five piglets & my girlfriend is trying to pick all of them up in her arms at the same time.  I say to her, “I thought you didn’t like pigs?” She replies, “I don’t, but piglets are cut & quintuplets are adorable!”

My girlfriend says to me she has an idea about trying to sleep in a different position.  I ask her what position is she thinking about & she says one where I don’t snore.

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2 Responses to Slogging Through

  1. the girl says:
    December 18, 2012 at 11:40 am

    just so you know, i have been looking up pot bellied pigs as pets for most of the morning.

    http://www.royaldandie.com/galleries.php

    OMG.

  2. Peter says:
    December 19, 2012 at 5:50 pm

    The LinkedIn thing is funny!

Drekka, 5 in 5, Shows, Fails, Futures

Posted on December 17, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

Okay, so I decided recently that the 5 in 5 series I can only do bi-weekly.  Writing a new press release & getting it tooled every week is just a bit beyond my scope with all the things I’m trying to get done lately.  Anyway, the new installment is Drekka Soundsystem’s Spartan Dub, I hope you can take five minutes to check it out & spread the word if you dig it.

So I’ve been going to more shows lately that I’m not playing at, which usually makes me feel pretty uncomfortable with a feeling of anxiety about where my equipment is & what my definition of self is as just an audience member.  But I do realize more all the time that the music that I make & the music that I like to go to with their sparse attendance is appropriate.  People want to dance & drink & have a good time & for most people that’s about music with a beat, not an uncompromising wall of drone & noise.  I don’t need to try to convince rockers that I’m doing something good.   I don’t need to be an ambassador for the weird music, I’ll save that job for someone else & I’ll just stick in my own circle for a while.

I’ve been working on mastering a friend of mine’s record.  It has some major technical issues that I think I’m supposed to clean up in the mastering side that maybe go beyond my ability.  I recognize the problem in it, which is caused by crappy electricity powering a pedal causing weird sound issues (like a constant high end sine wave that feels like it’s trying to pierce your brain).   Trying to get it out with EQ-ing didn’t work nor did doing the phase shifting noise reduction bit because there weren’t any points just isolating the sine tone.  So I kinda feel like I’ll just deliver this one as a freebie since I’m not particularly happy with it.  I guess I can’t always win.

So my Kickstarter for Remora shirts ends today.  It was a pretty major fail, only two orders.  So I’m not making the shirts.  At least I’m not stuck with 50 shirts for a couple of years as I would have been if I hadn’t gone through Kickstarter to find out there was no interest.

The end of the year is coming & I’m trying to get a bunch of paperwork done & get things figured out for my plans through the next few months.  The price of shipping goes up next month, so I’m going to have to go through & do some price increases on the site.  So you’ve been warned….

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Free Releases, Dreams, Drekka, mwvm, Jon DeRosa, 5 in 5, Just A Man, Small Life Form, Clang Quartet

Posted on December 11, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

I haven’t been paying attention for a while, too busy working on stuff.  I found this next paragraph as a saved blog entry that I didn’t finish typing up last week.

So there was this discussion about copyright infringement on Facebook that went into donation releases for a second.  I crunched the numbers & we’re at over 380,000 downloads from our free/donation only releases.  It’s pretty incredible.  At the same time it kinda sucks because we’ve only gotten a couple hundred dollars in donations.

Anyway, the Small Life Form show for Experimental Xmas in Greensboro went pretty well.  Though the Clang Quartet set that evening was absolutely stellar.  I got some photos (I’ll probably just put them on Facebook), but my video camera batteries had gone bad (those rechargeable batteries seem to drain completely left in the camera for a couple weeks, even unused) & I didn’t bring my recorder, so no audio.

Been working trying to get some more things done for finishing up the comics I did last month & this month is slipping away too fast.  Guess that’s how things tend to go.

Working things up for the Drekka Soundsystem release for the 5 in 5 series & doing some audio engineering work today.  We’ll see how it goes.

Trying to get the new issue of Just A Man laid out today & start printing out the comics to send out to subscribers.  A lot of work to do these days….

Here’s a Christmas song from Jon DeRosa (Aarktica):

Here’s a random track from mwvm:

Last Night’s Dreams:
I wake up next to my girlfriend in an emergency shelter & we decide to go outside in the woods to make out.  I’m walking a few feet behind her & my body starts to feel lighter & lighter.  The moment I notice my feet are off the ground I feel hands grab my ankles & turn me upside down & upwards.  I’m trying to scream for help, but I can’t get the words out. I start flailing my arms trying to get breath into me & eventually I get a scream out from 25 feet above the ground & there’s nothing she can do anyway.

I’m on a train with a group of revolutionaries planning to blow up a bridge because they think a train is most free when it’s off the tracks.  I’m not sure that they are right.

It’s so hot in the church that I take my shirt off.  I forget that I have it off until I’m getting in line for communion.  When I get to the priest I recognize him.  He’s a dead man.  I fall to my knees to receive the body of Christ.

I’m hungry & I put in a piece of gum to hold me over & I keep putting more pieces in as I get hungrier & hungrier until I have a ball of gum so big I can’t chew it or even spit it out.  I’m going to choke & die.

At a comic shop I find a copy of Avengers #200 for a quarter & I buy it for Nick Marino.

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One Response to Free Releases, Dreams, Drekka, mwvm, Jon DeRosa, 5 in 5, Just A Man, Small Life Form, Clang Quartet

  1. the girl says:
    December 11, 2012 at 12:22 pm

    you forgot the part about how your dreams woke me up and i woke you by throwing my entire body across you to hold you down!

Silber Monthly Charts for November

Posted on December 10, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

Here’s the montly charts for what people have been checking out on the website.  Hopefully we’ll start getting a bunch of  new content up again soon as I’ve been in a making stuff instead of posting stuff mood lately.

Top Five Most Read Silber Digital Comics in November
1. Silber Bottle Comics – Photographic Evidence
2. REH #1
3. Mecha
4. Kid Comics Instruction Booklet
5. XO #2

Top Five Most Read About Silber Releases in November
1. Mister Science – Five Educational Minutes
2. Irata – Vultures
3. Plumerai – Mondegreen
4. Remora – I Came to Party
5. Northern Valentine – Fin de Siecle

Top Ten Silber Album Downloads in November
1. Plumerai – Marco Polo
2. Plumerai – Mondegreen
3. Northern Valentine – Fin de Siecle
4. mwvm – Had Yr Pash
5. Clang Quartet – Ava
6. Unspeakable Forces – Butterfly Corpse
7. Panthan – Five Pointed Swords
8. Small Life Form – Voice in the Sky
9. Various Artists – Six Feet Below the Snow
10 . Various Artists – 30 Seconds of Time

Top Five Most Read QRD Interviews in November
1. Erin O’Brien (issue 29 (2005))
3. Alan Sparhawk (issue 43 – Guitarist Interviews IV (2010))
3. Alex Boniwell (issue 54 – Musician Dad Series III (2012))
4. Calvin Johnson (issue 42 – Guitarist Interviews II (2010))
5. Agata of Melt-Banana (issue 43 – Guitarist Interviews III (2010))

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Remora, Just A Man, Dream

Posted on December 4, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

So I just launched a Kickstarter for some Remora t-shirts.  I’ve been kind of wanting to do new shirts for a while, but I have no desire to have them sitting in my closet for ten years so if they pre-sell fine & if they don’t pre-sell then I know there’s no demand for it & I didn’t waste a couple hundred bucks.

I got in the artwork from Andrew White today for Just A Man #5.  I hope to have time to lay it out soon.

Last Night’s Dream:
I’m at a comic shop & they have a deal where all of their back issues are for sale for ten dollars a pound & I’m not sure how good of a deal that actually is.  They have couple of vintage Joker t-shirts, one is from the Tim Burton Batman movie, but is printed on natural cotton instead of black; the other looks like a Bruce Timm interpretation of Arkham Asylum & is printed on heather gray.

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Pittsburgh, Contest, Electric Bird Noise, mwvm, Dream Lyrics

Posted on December 3, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

Been getting a bit done today.  I designed the buttons that are associated with the Pittsburgh residency (because none of the images were circular & required some editing & such).  I had trouble narrowing it down to six.  Maybe one day I’ll get a good button maker & a printer that I like & start making some stuff on my own to have more varieties.  I also started doing some of the work towards the ebook about the residency.

The month is just starting, so we’re having the contest again this month to guess the most popular download of November (music or comic) to get a free download over on Facebook.  Just post a comment over there with your guess before Friday to enter.

Here’s a new ambient piece from mwvm:

The big news though is I got up the new installment for the 5 songs in 5 minutes EPs.  This one is a sci-fi musical narrative from Electric Bird Noise.  Free to stream or a dollar to download.

Lost Dream Lyrics (found this one in my notebook from a couple weeks ago):
True love, true death
True love, true death
When we look into the mirror
What is it we see?
Through each other’s eyes
Just escape or set free?
True love, true death
True love, true death

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A Return

Posted on November 30, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

Hey, back in Raleigh.  Trying to get caught up from being gone for a month, so probably not going to be blogging too much the next week as I’ll be pretty busy.  Especially given it’s the end of the year & I’m behind on paperwork.

The final show of my work in Pittsburgh went pretty awesome.  There’s supposed to be video of it up in a few weeks & I’ll let you know when it happens.  Showing of the work on Sunday here in Raleigh & then mailing all the stuff out to the Kickstarter folks.

I am hoping to get a new five minute EP up this week & run a wave of promo for those & a second wave of promo for the other recent releases (Plumerai & Irata).

Anyway, lots of love for all your interest & support of everything we do at Silber, it means a lot to me.

Last Night’s Dream:
I’m digging through the attic looking for an artificial Christmas tree.  I don’t even know why I’d bother to decorate as I’ve never done it before.

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