A lot going down this week

Posted on July 20, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

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.

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QRD, Bottle Comics, Plumerai, Small Life Form

Posted on July 18, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

I got a plug in for Notepad++ that allowed me to edit files way quicker & I fixed a bunch of messed up links on the QRD site in a couple hours instead of over a couple of days.  Pretty stoked about that.

Here’s a newly released track from Plumerai.

I got a bunch of work done prepping the artwork for printing up the Bottle Comics.  Good to be ahead of schedule.

So I mastered this 42 minute Small Life Form piece I recorded last week.  I sent it out to a couple friends to see if they think I should release it or not.  Usually I sit on an album a year, so I’m not sure about this looking at it on my own.  If they dig it, I’ll release it to the masses next week.

I think I finally figured out the right export settings to get a video the way I want it on Adobe Premiere.  So here is the Small Life Form practice from last week after I switched out the broken pedal.

Posted in comics, daily news, music, video | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

One Response to QRD, Bottle Comics, Plumerai, Small Life Form

  1. GoddakkAttack says:
    July 19, 2012 at 7:53 am

    unreleased track yo not new.

Bottle Comics, Vacation, Crap, QRD, Dream

Posted on July 18, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

I got in the art from Kimberlee Traub for the Bottle Comics & Jason Young wrote me saying he’s finishing up the inking & will have a video for it up in a day or two.  I also went for a walk today looking for bottles in the woods where some of the homeless folks hang out & found a few that fit my requirements.  Because I realized that some of the people who are getting display bottles might prefer one with a little character to it.  So then I walked over to the woods I used to drink in while I was in middle school, but there were only beer cans & no bottles.  It’s funny how I can’t really seem to remember people drinking beers out of bottles instead of cans until I was about 25.  I think that’s about the time that I realized I should drink beer instead of liquor if I was going to survive & started drinking more or less exclusively heavy beers.

I don’t think I announced it before, but I’m taking a two week trip with my sister at the end of August to Colorado, New Mexico, & Utah.  I’m kinda scared about it as the last time I spent significant time with my sister was when she was sick in 2000 & I had to physically pick her up & carry her to the hospital.  Prior to that we didn’t spend much time together since I started going to elementary school.  I might play an acoustic show in Denver or Taos while I’m out.  We’ll see what happens.

I was talking to a friend of mine that runs a significantly more successful label than mine about how it seems tough to get any press interest these days & he said he doesn’t bother to send out more than ten promos of a record these days because there’s no point.  Holy crap.  It’s nice to have somebody being willing to be honest about the state of the industry, I just wish they had something better to say.

So I spent a few hours yesterday re-working the about page for QRD.  It’s crazy to think how QRD is well on the verge of going on half of my life & my entire adult life.  I think I might add some more content that never got up on the internet from the first 20 issues at some point.  We’ll see.  I’m also running into some minor problems with running a semi-major edit to every content page on the QRD site.  We’ll see what happens about that.

Last Night’s Dream:
I’m staying at a high rise hotel at the beach & the wind is gusting hard enough that I need to hold on to the railing of the balcony to not be blown off.  One of the planes that pulls the advertiser banners behind it is flying against the wind & essentially only staying steady.  The banner snaps off the plane & flies up against the side of the building.  I let go of the railing & grab on to a piece of the banner & then I’m pulled off the balcony with it when the wind shifts.  I wrap my arms tightly in it to hold on & the wind blows me against another building & I try to get loose to stay on this strangers balcony, but my right arm is stuck in the banner & I’m yanked away from land & towards the sea.

Posted in comics, daily news, dreams | Tagged , | 1 Comment

One Response to Bottle Comics, Vacation, Crap, QRD, Dream

  1. GoddakkAttack says:
    July 18, 2012 at 7:55 am

    Funny how everybody wants to shut down the major labels and the corporations etc . . . but when put in the position they act just like them. Most music blogs still cover the same artists as pitchfork or Spin or whatever. Because you know, when i go to indie music blogs what i really want to read about is Kanye or about the re-reissue of My bloody valentine records for the 1000th time.

Tedious

Posted on July 16, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

So my spreadsheet/database for song placements is almost done.  I hope to finish it off in a day or two.

There was a problem with the mailing list sign-up form throughout the Silber website.  I’ll be trying to track where it is in the site & fix it everywhere.  Big thanks to Bill Pernell on that.  I’m planning to soon add the standard thing where if someone signs up for the mailing list they get some free music.

I posted in a half dozen comic book forums about the Bottle Comic project on Kickstarter & it generated what looks to be ten clicks & one donation.  So that shows how effective forums can be these days.  In other Kickstarter news they asked me a couple weeks ago to do a little video about having run a successful campaign & I made one & sent that in with the hope it will help somehow with the new campaigns.  I’m debating doing the campaign to raise money to make it to Malta for their comic convention, but I feel that if I can’t raise $1000 for a really cool project (the bottles), then how can I raise $2500 for a selfish useless project like appearing at a convention in Malta?

I’m hoping to have three new musical things & a new QRD up for the monthly newsletter to go out next week.  We’ll see if it actually happens.

Posted in comics, daily news, music | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

2 Responses to Tedious

  1. GoddakkAttack says:
    July 17, 2012 at 7:41 am

    also technically aren’t you not supposed to use it for trips and such and only projects? that didn’t stop Amanda Palmer but she may have some weight to throw (no pun intended).

    Also you may have to think about dipping in too much. That’s already 3 no? perhaps you should kickstart each individual bottle as opposed to a six pack.

    • Brian John Mitchell says:
      July 17, 2012 at 10:48 am

      The Bottle Comic Project is indeed the third project (though I’m not doing anything to promote the Puzzle Box one). But with only 86 backers of the first one & only 10 of those backers coming from Silber fandom (meaning they had emails already on Silber mailing list), I’m mainly shooting for the Kickstarter community rather than the Silber community.

      The Bottle Project is individual bottle backing at the $5 – $15 level. It’s not until $50 where you are backing six bottles.

      Kickstarter says it’s not for vacations, not excluding travel. There are a ton of people with projects like “let me take a bunch of photos at the Grand Canyon” or whatever where people just go on vacation & take a hundred photos & put them in a PDF. Hopefully the people doing that stuff aren’t just taking pictures with their phones of their friends, but I can’t say for certain as I think those projects are fairly bogus & have never backed one.

      We’ll see what happens. I think it would be a good idea to get a failure or two under my belt to go with the successes to make me a more rounded human being.

Another Interview & Licensing Paperwork & Reviews of Sci Fi Television

Posted on July 15, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

So I spent the majority of the day working on some paperwork for music licensing.  It’s a big project that is going to take me a long time to do, but the way I’m doing it will help me in the future.  Because I’m organizing everything to have easy access to songwriter credit & publishing names instead of needing to look it up each time.  I should have done it back in 2008 when I made my first attempt to break into music licensing, but at least it will be done now & if I get one $1000 placement it’s well worth a week’s work.  Lately $1000 might be worth two or three months work!

So the interview I did about my puzzle boxes a couple weeks ago went up.  They didn’t tell me it went up & Google Alerts didn’t catch it because they listed me as “Brian Mitchell” instead of “Brian John Mitchell,” but I found it by actually going to their site.  Anyway, here it is if you are interested.

After reading the Troypoint reviews, I got inspired and I wrote up reviews for Otherworld on N=D & The Tribe on FCIO.  If you go over there, please click on the Google Ads for going to some online university as they are paying me a dollar a click right now for some reason.  So if I can get all you regular readers to click an ad on one or both blogs Google will pay me $100!

Breaking Bad premieres Sunday night.  I am kinda excited about it because it’s the only show I care about, but kinda dreading the possibility of it sucking….

Posted in daily news, music, puzzle boxes | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

2 Responses to Another Interview & Licensing Paperwork & Reviews of Sci Fi Television

  1. GoddakkAttack says:
    July 15, 2012 at 11:10 am

    i keep thinking Breaking Bad is that 80s movie about breakdancing, always disappointed when i realize its not

  2. Peter says:
    July 15, 2012 at 6:21 pm

    Maybe this will be Walt Jr’s big season.

Interview, Kickstarter, White on White

Posted on July 13, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

So I think I mentioned that I did a little interview about my comics a week or so ago.  Here’s the link to it.

I’m getting pretty frustrated with my Bottle Comic Kickstarter.  I logged on today & three backers had left the project along with about $100.  Pretty disconcerting.  I thought this was going to be a $2000 money maker like my last Kickstarter, but I guess it isn’t.  Oh, I also think it’s worth noting the project has 78 “likes” but only 28 backers.  It makes me ready to give up on the hope of success with Kickstarter as a way to really make my art break through.  I thought I was going to get maybe 80 of the 85 backers of the last project returning & then  new folks as well.  My personal goal was 100 backers.  At 28 & less than three weeks to go, I just don’t think it is going to happen.  Much less my goals to get enough money to finance custom bottle openers & t-shirts.  I mean, I’m still happy that I got enough funding to make the project happen & hopefully there won’t be enough people backing out to prevent that, but it sucks that I might not be able to give the artists $100 each for drawing the things.  We’ll see what happens over the next couple of weeks I guess.

I stumbled across this interesting random generation movie.  They give a computer a collection of audio & video clips to randomly generate a film.  Kind of cool. It’s called “White on White”.

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Small Life Form & Dreams

Posted on July 13, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

Here’s me as Small Life Form doing my version of Godflesh’s “Slavestate” which has very little to do with the original.

Last Night’s Dreams:
I’m visiting a friend I haven’t seen in a couple of years. He has a two year old son & on the way home from the hospital with his son he was in a car accident that killed his wife & his daughter & has been living alone with his son living off the settlement from the accident. He tells me about his two year old reading adult books. Big thick hardback books that he’ll find him reading that he doesn’t even know how he gets off the shelves. I see the baby reading a book & turning the pages with telekinesis. I ask my buddy if he still reads in the Bible every day & he says he gave up on religion after the accident. I pull my Bible out of my backpack & start reading aloud & the baby starts shaking & screaming & his eyes go black & I stop. We go into the kitchen leaving the baby in the living room. I tell him that his baby killed his wife & daughter & we need to get a priest. I call the local parish & tell the woman that answers that my friend has a baby showing symptoms of possession with telekinesis & she hangs up on me as a prank call. I go down to the church & bring the priest up & when we get back my friend is dangling hanging from an electric cable around his neck & the baby is gone.

My brother’s a cop in a small city. I’m driving behind him, following him to meet our sister. He flashes his light & has me pull over. I get out & walk up to him & here over the radio about someone taking out the SWAT team & stealing their weapons. I ask him if he’s listening to LA’s police band & he says, “No, it’s real & it’s six blocks away. I’m not going to make it to lunch.” His partner is freaking out saying, “I’ve only been working here two weeks! I’m just supposed to give out parking tickets!” I can here gunfire in the distance. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. My brother’s putting on a flak jacket he’s getting out of the trunk & I ask him, “What’s the address of the place we’re going for lunch so I can put it in my GPS?”

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Small Life Form

Posted on July 12, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

So today was all about Small Life Form.  I practiced for the live show tomorrow & I did some little video things & I recorded a potential album.  Also I finally got the problem I’ve been having with live shows where half my pedal board stops working (the left side) to happen at my house where I had time to find the problem.  It was the Digitech Jamman & I cleaned the pots & that still didn’t seem to fix it (the problem is with the quarter inch input, the XLR input seems to work fine & so I ordered a quarter inch to XLR cable so the pedal should work for me again after that).  So I yanked that pedal out of the board & replaced it with my 1990s delay/looper – the Digitech PDS 1002.  Man, I used to love that pedal & it was pretty key to Remora from 1995-2001.  So I’m kinda looking forward to having it back in my rig.  I actually had a problem figuring the pedal out because it is so beat-up (it’s from before I had a pedal board & I bought it used, so it’s lived a rough life) that you can’t read the writing & I was plugging into the bypass jack instead of the input jack.  I’ve been thinking about re-working my pedal board for a while anyhow.  Next up may be replacing the volume pedal with a wah & adding another envelope filter….


Posted in daily news, music, video | Tagged | 2 Comments

2 Responses to Small Life Form

  1. GoddakkAttack says:
    July 12, 2012 at 7:42 am

    True story: my wah pedal is used mostly as a volume pedal. Also last night james knocked my JC-120 off a ledge and it fell approximately 5 ft. to the concrete floor and still works just as well as it did pre-drop. (i dunno what it is with bassists and knocking that amp over)

    naught for nowt, i used to have a similar power issue but it was because when i stomped on a pedal, a certain part of the powersupply would touch a medal piece of something else and short out the board.

    • Brian John Mitchell says:
      July 12, 2012 at 12:02 pm

      You know, the JC-120 is a tank that I can’t over recommend to anyone.

      Yeah, the thing with this pedal is it’s not acting consistently & since it’s not true bypass it cuts the signal out even when it’s not in use. I’ll post up some stuff with the replacement pedal tonight. It kinda significantly alters the sound when you have a two-second loop instead of a two minute loop. Not necessarily in a bad way, but it makes things feel a little more trancey than droney.

Bottle Ring, Found Art, Dreams

Posted on July 10, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

Spent most of the day trying to get work done for other people for money, so not a lot to talk about.  But I do have some photos to make up for that.

So I got the glass ring cutting technology to semi-work.  Here’s an example.
I also found this weird art thing thrown out at an office building in my neighborhood.  Kinda cool, but I don’t have a space for it.

Last Night’s Dreams:
I’m hanging out with Ice T & we’re about to go into a convenience store.  He gives me $2.86 & tells me to get back in the car.

I’m out for a walk & see a purse lying on the side of the road.  I check it out & it’s completely empty.  Over the course of the next block I see six purses & only the last one isn’t empty & in it I find a wallet with the Florida driver’s license of an old woman & the family photographs are all pictures of a water tower.  Why did I get my fingerprints all over all these purses?  Crap.

I’m chasing something in the woods at night.  The night is bright with moonlight.  The thing I’m chasing is making a ten foot wide path in the woods in its wake, the trees predominantly just silently disappearing.  I see the end of the path fifty feet ahead of me.  Maybe I shouldn’t have been chasing this thing.

Posted in art, daily news, dreams | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

4 Responses to Bottle Ring, Found Art, Dreams

  1. GoddakkAttack says:
    July 11, 2012 at 7:47 am

    dream #3 reminds me…. Have you seen Troll Hunter?

  2. GODDAKKattack says:
    July 11, 2012 at 11:30 am

    no, it’s the one that’s kind of a mockumentary about a guy that hunts trolls for the norwegian govt.

  3. Peter says:
    July 11, 2012 at 11:12 pm

    I’ve seen it. Pretty good huntin’. Never go into a convenience store with Ice T or any other rapper for that matter, it’s embarrasing.

Mead, Bottle, Placements

Posted on July 10, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

So I ordered twelve pounds of honey to use for making mead today.  So we’ll see what happens with that as far as making some new recipes.

I spent a couple of hours trying to do some stuff with cutting bottles & it didn’t work out for me.  I watched a better instructional video on it & I’ll try it again tomorrow.

I started filling out some paperwork for some song placement stuff.  I’m trying to do it in such a way that it actually helps me do the forms for more than just the particular music placement I’m doing it for.

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