So it’s been a good 24 hours. The 919Noise gig last night went pretty well. It was the most pleased I’ve been with a Small Life Form appearance in a couple of years & Peter Aldrich had a triumphant return to guitar playing. Here’s the video shot on my phone (possible better videos in the future – this one includes the ten-minute set-up/tear-down time between sets & a guest appearance from Ted Johnson as “the pedal inspector”):
I launched the Kickstarter about my mini-comic residency in Pittsburgh. I’ve been pretty good about setting goals I think I can meet & I’m getting way better at setting prices & workloads that are fair to me. & I got half of my funding in the first couple of hours! So yeah, my fears of Kickstarter being dead are gone for now. However Kickstarter has placed a limit where you can only have one active campaign at a time. So the Remora t-shirt campaign will launch in about a month & then we’ll see what happens after that as in my brain there are three more projects planned depending on my life schedule. Also I got asked to be interviewed by one of the staff members at Kickstarter, which will hopefully put a big boost on my current project.
I did a t-shirt design for Irata in support of their new EP (available from Silber soon) yesterday. I think it looks pretty sweet.After 4 hours of sleep I had a full day of landscaping work & earned a decent day’s wage for the first time in what seems like an eternity. To top it off when I took a shower afterwards I found $20 in the pocket of the pants I put on. So pretty much the best day ever.
I took the cover art for the Irata disc & cut out the majority of the image. Then I exported it as a gif with only three colors so that it will only need two inks for printing. Then I inverted it into a negative.
So the big news for today is the new Remora EP I Came to Party. It’s the first in the new series of five minute EPs from Silber. It’s up, but the official launch probably will be next week. Anyway, it gives you the idea for what the model will be for 5 in 5 EP series. Free to stream & $1 to download. Once the series launches it’ll be a new EP each week for a while. Which is kind of exciting to me, to go back to having new content on a regular basis instead of the weird jamming shotgun thing I’ve been doing the past few years.
Speaking of QRD I typed up fifty questions for an upcoming interview series for touring musicians.
I typed in a draft for Just A Man #5 & sent it over to Andrew White for drawing. Pretty stoked about that.
I went through a couple old notepads from the past year & found some short stories I’d written & I typed them in & posted for them to randomly go up over the next six months or so.
So I wrote this back on May 16 in my notebook. Now it’s the middle of the anniversary of the week where I laid on her bed without sleeping as she slipped into a coma & died. So heavy stuff or whatever I guess. Still trying to come to terms with all that in certain ways, but I guess maybe it’s a little better now than what it was then.
May 16, 2012
It’s my grandmother’s birthday. She’s been dead for six months. I’m staying with some friends at a high rise ocean front hotel & I keep feeling the urge to jump off the balcony to my death. It’s not that I want to kill myself so much as I want to not exist anymore. I feel weak & useless. As long as my grandmother was alive & I was taking care of her, there was a certain degree of validity to my life. Now keeping myself alive just seems like a waste of resources. I hope God gives me purpose or strikes me down soon.
It feels like it’s been a long couple of days. I’ve been working on assembling puzzle boxes & comics most of the time. Did a practice for Small Life Form that went over pretty well. I still have a few releases to prepare.
Recent Dreams:
I’m living in a basement apartment, the kind where the windows come down about a foot from a ceiling. There’s a butterfly trying to get out of the windows, but even if I open the window it won’t be able to get through the screen.
I’m at a cafeteria with my family & I get separated from them in line. When I’m looking for the rest of my family I find my grandmother & her tray is empty. I give her a lemonade & a chicken leg.
I booked an appearance at The Pittsburgh Comics & Collectibles Show for when I’m in Pittsburgh. It’s a pretty different event than where I normally try to sling my comics. It has R2-D2 & the Batmobile instead of a bunch of people doing photocopied comics. I also tried to confirm with the one art gallery about a date for doing a comics for kids workshop.
Last Night’s Dreams:
I’m working in a warehouse & pulling the chain to roll open the bay door. The door jams only about four feet open. Still holding on to the chain for balance I go out on to the lip outside of the door to try to figure out what’s jamming it. I don’t see anything stopping the door, but I do notice that we seem to be an infinite amount of stories up with another infinite amount of stories of bays above us & three bays to the right & maybe twenty bays to the left. I’d fall off the edge except my right arm is caught up in the chain. I call out for help & a co-worker pulls me back in & when I look out the bay door all I see is a parking lot & a night sky.
It’s after some kind of apocalypse & we live underground. There’s a girl sitting on a metal bench crying so hard that the rags she’s wearing become disheveled & she exposes her right breast. I straighten her clothes to cover her & tell her everything’s going to be okay.
So I crafted two of the Kickstarter campaigns (the Remora shirt one & one for doing comic stuff in Pittsburgh) & submitted them today. So hopefully they’ll get approved & launched. Kickstarter definitely seems to be hitting some growing pains. They do a bunch of new stuff to make people prove their identities. They have a thing where you need to fill out a thing about the challenges with the project. I don’t know if it’s losing it’s luster for everyone or just me, but it seems like there are less weird & interesting projects & more things in the mainstream. A lot more established/famous people asking for a lot of money & I don’t know if that brings in more new people interested in backing other projects or gets people jaded. I kinda felt like Kickstarter was a fad, but I was hoping to irk a couple of years out of it instead of six months. We’ll see what happens.
So I liked yesterday where I just spent the day recording & at the end of the day something exists. Today I was tweeking some mixes on the stuff from yesterday based on comments from a couple friends & trying to get the website ready for launching the EP series.
I did do a bit more brainstorming for getting the new Kickstarters prepared. Does $60 for two t-shirts, two compact discs, & 18 downloads sound fair or too cheap or too much? That’s the high dollar thing for the Remora shirt project. The low dollar thing is a $1 digital download. The goal for the shirts is $250. On the comic side I’ll be doing $5 sketch cards & $20 small paintings going along with a PDF book collecting all my work the month of November in Pittsburgh (the ebook is for $1). The goal for that will be $200.
I got another coat of finish on the puzzle boxes. Probably just two more coats to go.
I posted up on the website about not filling orders while I’m out of town in November, things are crazy with the amount I’m out of town this year. A lot of work to do before I’m ready to leave town & no squeezing extra time out of no where. But there will hopefully be a lot done in the next few days.
So I had a long & productive day today. I recorded a Remora song for a compilation, laid down some vocals for the collaboration with Brian McKenzie (Electric Bird Noise) & Ted Johnson (Tesla Recoils), & recorded & mixed the Remora 5 minute EP “I Came to Party”. So I’m pretty excited that I got some stuff completed today & I’m hoping for another productive day tomorrow. Lots of things to do & a limited time frame to get them done in before going to Pittsburgh. We’ll see what happens.
Got some work done staining boxes today & making some videos for some potential Kickstarter projects. Below are the charts for September here on the Silber site.
Top Ten Most Read Silber Digital Comics in September
1. REH #1
2. Lost Kisses #6
3. Extreme Lost Kisses #1
4. Mecha #1
5. Poit – WTF?
6. XO #3
7. Ultimate Lost Kisses #12
8. Vigilant #1
9. Ultimate Lost Kisses #11
10. Kid Comics Instruction Booklet
Top Ten Most Read About Silber Releases in September
1. Brian John Mitchell & Andrew Weathers – Drone is in the Blood
2. mwvm – Had Yr Pash
3. Promute – Drone of the Norns
4. Northern Valentine – Fin De Siecle
5. Remora – Scars Bring Hope
6. Lotte Kestner – China Mountain
7. Vlor – a fire is meant for burning
8. Lycia – Cold
9. Aarktica – Pure Tone Audiometry
10. Twelve –First Album
Top Ten Silber Album Downloads in September
1. Plumerai – Marco Polo
2. Brian John Mitchell & Andrew Weathers – Drone is in the Blood
3. Promute – Drone of the Norns
4. mwvm – Had Yr Pash
5. Various Artists – 30 Seconds of Time
6. Northern Valentine – Fin De Siecle
7. Clang Quartet – Ava
8. Panthan – Five Pointed Swords
9. Sarah June – Beneath Black Robes
10. Rllrbll – Murwa Mbwa
Top Five Most Read QRD Interviews in September
1. Erin O’Brien (issue 29 (2005))
2. Jeff Schneider (issue 46 – Guitarist Interview Series IV (2010))
3. Nick Reinhart (issue 43 – Guitarist Interview Series III (2010))
4. Calvin Johnson (issue 42 – Guitarist Interview Series II (2010))
5. Alan Sparhawk (issue 46 – Guitarist Interview Series IV (2010))
Last Night’s Dream:
I have a summons for jury duty & the case I’m on is about a theft ring at the airport where I used to work & I know two of the accused folks & while I don’t like them as human beings I really don’t think they are thieves & I’m torn as to whether I should say I know them to get off the jury or stay on the jury to get them free.
I had a dream last night that you and I were hanging out. You were making lasagna, and singing the phrase “Only a woman knows” solemnly over and over. Then I woke up and was late for work.
I think writing record descriptions is a real chore for an artist. “Shoegazing doom” gives an idea of the EP, though.
The first time I listened to it, “Ancestral Star” and Barn Owl in general came to my mind. One of your recent free recordings I listened to more.
Here’s a review of the Silber Bottle Comics on The Comic Vault (review starts at ~7:55).
So over the weekend at Lansing I had a blast. There was some kind of technical snafu going on with half of my effect chain getting little volume out of it (I need to mess with it to fix it in the next day or two), but I powered through for a pretty solid Small Life Form show. I also was reminded of a comp I’m on that I had forgotten about called This Room Is An Illusion, which I didn’t know was out & came out six months ago. I can tell you that the Remora track on their is one of many things done during the period after my grandma died that I just have absolutely no recollection of. I mean, I can recognize the cheap drum machine sounds I like in it, but I can’t even tell you if the guitars are real through my effect pedals or simulated in the drum machine & verbed out. Absolutely no memory of it. Weird.
I met a blacksmith dude at Stompfest who said he either saw a bigfoot or a man dressed as a bigfoot trying to scare people away from a marijuana patch. Thankfully CBD is available in all 50 states. I for one, love CBD gummies and even use Austin Chronicle to get better offer on these products. They are so convenient and get me feeling relaxed! Kind of interesting and they were also easy to get after I find out if Is Delta 8 Legal in North Dakota so I can consume them. I bought a triangle (musical instrument kind) from him. He had some pretty cool stuff; like knives for skinning animals pounded out of old railroad spikes. Probably worth the $65 they cost as far as the amount of work put into them, but I couldn’t really justify getting one.
Also I had Brian McKenzie (Electric Bird Noise) listen to the mixes of the Philip Palmer disc I’m working on to get his insight. He gave me some tips on blogging that will hopefully make things better in the end. We’ll see what goes down exactly. I want to do as much of the work on it as I can, but am willing to admit to needing some expertise I don’t yet have on things. He told me to learn the history before making self attached into a thing, just like on gambling, before you put yourself into that make sure you know how it starts and where this things begin. I’m not used to the idea of needing to compress things as mush as I probably should to get things to sit properly in the mix & I am new at chopping stuff up & moving a note by a tenth of a second because it is slightly out of time. On my own stuff I’m a lot more willing to say “good enough” than I am with someone else’s work.
It’s closing in on a year since my grandma died now & simulating functioning properly is still a daily struggle. Today (for example) I went to the grocery store & was going to buy those Andes thin chocolate mint candies that I hardly ever eat, but I used to get a box a week for my grandmother & they don’t stock them anymore & it was hard to keep from throwing shit off the shelves over it. Luckily the self-checkout was open so I didn’t need to talk to anyone before getting out of the store & when I got in my car I started whelping & crying. What the fuck, right? Sometimes I doubt Asperger’s as a super power….
Last Night’s Dreams:
I’m driving on the highway at night in the right hand lane. A dude in the passenger seat of a van next to me starts waving his arms frantically & I slow down thinking they are needing to cut over into my lane. The passenger opens the door of the van & jumps out & I run right over him.
I need to take my grandmother to the doctor once a month because there’s some government mandate requiring it because of her advanced age. She hates doctors & I hate doctors & it fucking sucks.
I’m out late after a show & a night of drinking, just wandering in a city park. My phone goes off & I look at it & it’s Nick Marino & it’s 5am & he wants me to meet him for some kind of public write-off to see which one of us can complete a graphic novel script faster. I agree to meet him somewhere at 7am. I sit down on a park bench & lean my head down for a thirty minute nap before going to meet him. I go check an app and just wait to mee this person ive been dating over the last year or so. He sat next to me and it was amazing just how fast everything went. I decided to pop over to these guys to check if he matched the profile in his picture and sure enough he did! It was a successful date and im grateful for it.
After 4 hours of sleep I had a full day of landscaping work & earned a decent day’s wage for the first time in what seems like an eternity. To top it off when I took a shower afterwards I found $20 in the pocket of the pants I put on. So pretty much the best day ever.
GoddakkAttack 
Peter 
Nic
That Shirt is awesome, Brian!!! How did you design it?
I took the cover art for the Irata disc & cut out the majority of the image. Then I exported it as a gif with only three colors so that it will only need two inks for printing. Then I inverted it into a negative.
I’m glad you had a good day. Thanks for getting me out there!
Just trying to do my part to get mankind back on top. Back above the surface.