Back, Northern Valentine, Origami Arktika, Dreams

Posted on January 24, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

Okay, so I made it back from tour & my vacation from the internet.  It was a good break from my life & I’m hoping it will rejuvenate me & inspire me to make more content on a regular basis.  I did get some work on some comic stuff done, though it’s not scanned in as of yet.

So Northern Valentine is trying out Kickstarter for working on their new album.  So if you are interested in their new album happening, why not see about putting some money down.

Here’s an Origami Arktika video that Tore just sent me the link to.

Last Night’s Dream:
I’m recording a guitar riff & the D string breaks & rather than knocking the whole guitar out of tune it gives the effect of the guitar just being tuned up a fifth higher because of the extra tension on the remaining strings.

I’m in Louisville having dinner in a Thai restaurant with Jamie Barnes & by the cash register they have a bin of CDs for sale at $2 a pop & I find the two disc version of Hefner’s Breaking God’s Heart.

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Dream

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

Last Night’s Dream:
A friend/former co-worker/hip hop record producer that I haven’t seen in five years shows up at my house.  He wants me to collaborate with him writing/recording some guitar riffs to go on top of his beats to sell to drug dealers who want to be rappers.

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Dreams

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

Last Night’s Dreams:
My brother died & I’m out of town with my family for the funeral.  The place where we’re staying has a barracks setup with a dozen double beds in the same room.  I’m wrapped up in a blanket & it’s time to go to the service, but I can’t get my mind together enough to have the composure to even get out of bed.

I’m running through a parking lot & jump over a car.  At the rear of the car where I’m landing there’s a woman sitting on the asphalt leaning on the bumper reading a book.  I don’t have the clearance to not land on her legs.  I will a burst of wind & it blows me over & I crash into the pavement on my left side.  The girl glances up, then continues reading.

I’m laying belly down on a car roof with my fingers curled over the tops of the doors holding on.  The car’s being driven by a small turtle & luckily it doesn’t weigh enough to push the gas pedal all the way down & we’re going fairly slow.  The turtle can’t steer & I’m trying to guide the car by shifting my weight on the roof.  We’re going to crash for sure.  The turtle couldn’t have stolen this car if it was a stick shift.

I’m in a 15′ x 10′ recording studio with five other guys to record an experimental praise record.  By the time the seventh guy gets in & sets up some of the other guys are ready to go home without a note being played.

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Dreams

Posted on January 12, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

Last Night’s Dream:
I’m at university orientation with Brian McKenzie (Electric Bird Noise, etc) & Michael Wood (SAVAS, etc) & I introduce them as my brothers.  When people find out we weren’t born of the same mother nor raised in the same household they get pissed off about it.

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Scams, Tour, Remora, Puzzle Boxes, Blogoverse, Mead, Dreams

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

Today I got contacted by a guy who paid to rent a club for an afternoon during SXSW & wanted me to pay $500 to have a band play on the bill.  I’m sure he’ll find people willing to do it & maybe he doesn’t even realize how crappy it is (he’s based out of Chicago & who knows if he even has ever been to SXSW).  This pay to play thing is crazy, especially when a band is probably already losing $1000 by going on tour between gas/food/lodging/lost wages.  I assume the venue is more to blame than the promoter dude or even more so just the current culture of music being beyond free into something you are paid to sit through.

Tomorrow is my big day of taking off to go on tour as a merchandiser.  I haven’t decided yet whether or not I’ll take my computer on the road.  I’m thinking of not having it & being completely unplugged for the first time in a couple years.  I wonder if anyone will notice?  Hopefully it will help me to spend less time on the internet & more time actually creating content on my return.

The new Remora got passed by the label I thought was going to put it out.  Kinda down about it.  I sent it to four other labels to see if there’s any interest elsewhere & if not I guess it will be on Silber.  If you know of a label that you think would be interested in a minimalist christian feedback drone album, let me know.

In other Remora news, I sent out to some video bloggers & some cover song bloggers about the car insurance song thing.  We’ll see if anyone posts about it.

So I mailed out to the people who write the blogs I track to make the comic newsfeed on the blogoverse page letting them know it exists an offering them an adswap & I got back a hate mail from one of the dudes.  Well, glad I didn’t contact him asking if he wanted to review one of my comics or I’m sure it would’ve been even worse.

I went to try to bottle some of my mead today & it was nowhere near ripe enough to bottle unless I wanted to have some explosions again.  I don’t understand exactly what’s up as I would’ve thought it would be ready, but the hydrometer said it had only converted 2% of the sugar over so far.  Maybe it has to do with temperature or something.  At least it’s one less thing to do on a day where I’m short on time.

I designed some little paper boxes to fit my puzzle boxes in.  I feel it will make them come across as a little bit classier or at least less ghetto.  I was also realizing I could do some where I paint the blocks copper & try to sell them as “steampunk” puzzle boxes at a higher price.

Last Night’s Dreams:
I’m in eastern Europe with my friend Jeremy (who has a Lando Calrissian mustache for some reason) & a couple of girls that I don’t know.  We’re in a rowboat on a stream in the woods & Jeremy stears the boat to go in a stream in a cave.  He says it’ll be fun because it’s like a maze in there.  It’s 100% black & I can’t quite figure out if this is part of a horror movie, the 1980s computer RPG Wizardy, a John Carter of Mars book, or my actual fucking life.

I’m on a road trip with Mitt Romney & I’m waiting for him to lighten up.  When the guy gets out of bed he’s already in his suit with his hair sculpted.  We pull off the highway & go to a gas station that has a diner on it that has pretty incredible fresh made donuts & he’s saying he doesn’t want to eat donuts because they’re too sweet, but I finally get him to break down & eat a fucking donut.  While we’re sitting there he comments on a couple of jelly beans that have fallen off of someone’s crazy donut (they have those kind of toppings on some of them) & that someone could fall & get hurt on them.  I reach down & pick them up to go throw them away & he says that it’s not my job.  I tell him it needs to be done & it’s just as well I do it as somebody else.  I walk off looking for the bathroom to throw the jelly beans away in a trashcan, but I can’t find the bathroom

Posted in beer, daily news, dreams, music, puzzle boxes | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

3 Responses to Scams, Tour, Remora, Puzzle Boxes, Blogoverse, Mead, Dreams

  1. N. says:
    January 10, 2012 at 7:04 am

    Uhm… what about Under The Spire Recordings or Denovali Records?

  2. Lullabier says:
    January 10, 2012 at 11:04 am

    My album has been put out by Silentes (http://www.silentes.net/), but the label is focused on ambient and drone music…You should try to contact them IMHO

Good Space, Remora, Progressive, Dream

Posted on January 8, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

I can never figure out exactly why, but this morning I woke up feeling at peace with the world & in a good space.  I wonder if this is what other people feel like normally or not, but in the end I’ll roll with it as I’m happy to have a day where I feel like this every couple of years.

I sent out a potential final mix of the new Remora album to a few select friends.  I also sent a copy to the label that had solicited me to do it.  But I haven’t heard back from the label as yet, so we’ll see what happens.  I might end up needing to trim a few minutes off the disc as I’m not sure how many minutes are on a disc these days.  I think it clocks in around 75 minutes & I can’t remember what the limit is & I think it might actually depend on who they go with for manufacturing.

I like that one song from a Progressive Car Insurance commercial. Insync Insurance can help for any kind of insurance. So tonight I worked up a cover.  I’m not sure if I should record a real version or just have this one on YouTube as the final bit for it.  Let me know what you think.

I finally joined up on Skype with the idea that I may eventually do some podcast segments for the blog.  Any opinion on that?  My thought is I would talk to somebody who knows something I want to know (or conversely somebody talks to me about something they want to know) & then I post up the conversation.

Last Night’s Dream:
I have a teddy bear frame made out of chicken wire & rather than cover it with paper mache I am dipping in scraps of fabric in the glue & covering it with that.

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One Response to Good Space, Remora, Progressive, Dream

  1. goddakkattack says:
    January 8, 2012 at 7:41 pm

    like ice cube says “today was a good day”

Remora

Posted on January 6, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

I feel like I got some stuff done today, but I can’t quite remember what.  I did spend a few hours working on recording.  I got two pieces potentially done (or near done) for the new Remora record & then I recorded better demo versions of fifty tiny songs that I had saved on my crappy phone & there’s still 40 songs I need to do that with on the thing.  I want to get them off in case I lose it.

Here’s a 20 minute video of me singing overdubs for a 45 second song over & over again in my bedroom. Maybe the time to start broadcasting my life hasn’t really come yet or maybe it’s already gone.  I don’t really expect anyone to watch this in its entirety.

I did also put in a couple hours working on the music newsfeed robot.  Probably at least two hours of work to finish that up & it’s tedious so I don’t want to do it….

I talked to Brian McKenzie a bit (going on tour with him next week) & he keeps telling me he wants me to do more long narrative songs (like “My Brother’s Guns & Knives,” “Nevada Smith,” & “We Come from the Sea”) instead of these super short & repetitive lyrics I’ve been working on lately.  I guess I need someone to push me into doing something harder than what just naturally falls out or I won’t get better at my craft.  We’ll see what happens.

I was talking to Austin Glover today & he might end up recording parts to complete the unfinished My Glass Beside Yours record from back in 2000.  Don’t worry if you’ve never heard me talk about MGBY before, that project was 1993-1995 & 1998-2001 & I’ll probably end up using a different title for the project this time out.  I need to find the old recordings, they were on my zip disc recorder & hopefully the zip drive still works…..

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One Response to Remora

  1. N. says:
    January 6, 2012 at 7:15 am

    You should definitely do more long narrative songs IMHO.

2011 by the numbers, Toner, Butterfly Corpse

Posted on January 4, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

So I finished up the paperwork for general taxes (just gotta do the ones for income taxes in April) & yikes were the numbers for the year worse than expected.  A loss for the year of $2,595.11.  Crap.  Going to have to do some restructuring of the business model for sure.  The big loss leaders were car mileage ($926.86) & the new Remora disc ($1431.35) & the new printer & toner for the mini-comics ($460.16) & musical equipment ($368.40 (remember that I caught my amp on fire)).  So I guess I need to drive less miles & not make physical releases there isn’t a known demand for & abandon color comics & not blow up any amps.

So speaking of toner, I use a laser printer & I always just refill the toner cartridge to save money & I noticed the prints are starting to loose quality.  I noticed on the toner bottle instructions while refilling the thing that it says not to refill a cartridge more than three times.  Ooops.  I guess it makes sense that I would need a new cartridge, so yeah, next time out maybe….

I just found out the name Butterfly Corpse is already taken.  So I’m going to have come up with a different name I guess.  Maybe Butterfly Corpse IV or Darin had some name that was something of the ilk of Butterfly Corpse & the Forces of Evil.  So anyway, here’s a video from Butterfly Corpse.  Probably as good (or bad) as what I was doing at their age.  I love the intro speech & then at the very end where the girl says “Like us on Facebook, but only if you actually like us.”

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Twitter, Updates, Dreams

Posted on January 4, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

So I finally started working on the music news feed Twitter account.  Pretty soon it will be ridiculous with 1000 posts a day.  Taking longer than I anticipated getting all the feeds into it, but once it’s done it’s done.

I also made the Silber Blogoverse page that lists the news about the hundreds of music & comic review sites I follow.  Hopefully some of you folks will find it useful as well.

I put the newsletters from the last two years on the Silber News page & changed the layout a bit.  I’m not sure if I should change the Twitter feed to the right side instead of the left.  Let me know your opinion.

When I was at my brother’s he was talking to me about my website & he wanted to know how much money I made from the volume of web traffic I got & who paid me for it.  The website of course is something I pay for rather than get paid for & I wonder if plenty of people assume since they shell out their money to have the internet that eventually that money goes to content creators.  Of course if they instituted a tax for that, would I get any money at all or would all the money simply go to Facebook & Google?  Maybe if the tax was structured so it had a cap of only paying out $50,000 per website or something with everyone paying in $1 a month to their ISP & I’d end up making back the $12 in taxes I’d pay.

Last Night’s Dreams:
I’m on tour & a girl I’ve been friends with for half my life comes to the hotel with me after the show.  I go into use the bathroom & when I come back out she’s lying naked on the bed.  I say to her, “What the fuck?  You’re married & I think of you like a sister!”

I come back “home” from tour realizing I don’t have a place to sleep at night besides my car nor even a place to park my car.  A friend of mine tells me he has a spare apartment I can use for a while.  WTF?  A spare apartment?  I wonder if he’s breaking up with his wife or is having an affair.

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Brian Eno, Henry Rollins, Shimmer Comic, Dream

Posted on January 3, 2012 by Brian John Mitchell

So I consider myself a Brian Eno fan, but here’s my review of Brian Eno’s Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) on Nostalgia Equals Distortion.

I saw this thing with Henry Rollins about traveling the world helping legitimately poor people on Book TV.  I’ve never been sure if I like that guy or not because I’m not a fan of his music & I suppose that’s a big part of how most people define him.

So for the SPACE anthology this year, Bob Corby is looking for some color comics.  I’ve been looking for the original of my first comic Shimmer (from back in 1995) for a couple weeks & I finally found it & scanned it in & did some watercolor work on some prints of it.  I’m actually pretty excited about it.  I decided to do the watercolor stuff after helping my niece do some watercolor stuff of just shapes.  I don’t think I’ve worked with watercolor paints since I was about 7 (always tempura or acrylics, though there’s no real reason why), so it was interesting & fun & I really like how the colors are splotchy & inconsistent to make it look a little rough/raw (probably because I’m using the cake water colors you can buy at the dollar store).

Last Night’s Dream:
She’s leaning against her car in the driveway of my childhood home while giving herself a tattoo on her right shoulder (the needle in her left hand) & the tattoo is bleeding pretty profusely so that all I can see is a patch of blood running down her arm & it seems like no ink is staying in at all & maybe the needle doesn’t even have ink in it.  I don’t have anything to say, so I just go inside the house.

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