QRD & Hospitals

Posted on October 13, 2011 by Brian John Mitchell

So the new QRD with 15 interviews with label owners is up.  Got it done earlier than I anticipated, which is nice.

The other news is my grandmother fell down yesterday & I had to take her to the emergency room because there were some cuts that didn’t stop bleeding after a couple hours so they needed stitches.  So about six hours for twenty minutes of doctor service.  Kinda sucks.  & I lost my sleep period & generally feel shitty/useless today.  So I’m going to be cramped to get everything done for the festival thing on Saturday as far as getting my comics together & practicing at least enough to make sure my equipment is working for a Small Life Form set.

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One Response to QRD & Hospitals

  1. michael says:
    October 19, 2011 at 4:02 pm

    6 hours is a bit heavy isn’t it? feel for you. nice interviews btw.

QRD, Flash Music, Dream

Posted on October 11, 2011 by Brian John Mitchell

Been working on the new QRD the past couple of days.  It should be up tomorrow night with how things are going.

I just found this cool little weird music software interactive flash thing.  Waste time at work.

Last Night’s Dream:
I find a pile of 100 cicada skins while walking around the neighborhood.

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AGIFF, Mead, Breaking Bad, Dreams

Posted on October 10, 2011 by Brian John Mitchell

So the past few days I’ve been down in Smithfield a bit for the Ava Gardner Independent Film Festival.  I feel like I got a lot more out of it this year than previous years as far as having an ability to look at people’s work & trying to figure out what did they do right & wrong & what can I learn from it.  One of the things that I noticed a lot of people doing wrong that I also see in a lot of commercially successful films is having the music way too loud.  Another thing that has been my theory for a while that I really am trying to concentrate on within everything I do is making things using what’s available instead of trying to make a big grand statement.  Better to alter a script to fit the personalities of the actors available than to hope actors can pull off a good performance.  Also I’ve been noticing lately (& not just at AGIFF) that it’s getting to the point where a straight ending is almost a bigger twist than a twist ending to a story, which is kind of bizarre.

Kirk Adam did this little doc thing of me making mead that was part of the film festival.  Here you go:

So the season finale of Breaking Bad was tonight.  Good episode, good season.  I kinda didn’t like the last fifteen seconds where they showed the lily & I almost felt like it would’ve been a good series ending place if it hadn’t done that (of course I don’t mind some loose ends in a plot as I feel it’s a bit realistic).  But of course one season to go.  I wonder if Walt will survive the series.

Last Night’s Dreams:
I’m in heaven sitting on a curb.  Surprisingly heaven seems a lot more like a refurbished downtown Detroit than I ever would have anticipated.  A group of five guys who look like 50 year old mobsters come out of the processing building meaning they’ve made it here.  One of them has a cold.  The one with a cold goes up to a pretzel vendor & gets pretzels of all of them & licks the pretzels of the others’ while his back is turned before presenting them.  Heaven doesn’t seem quite like I expected.

BMI audits Spotify & ends up bleeding the company & its backers for millions in artist revenues.  The principal backers of Spotify of course are the four major labels, so in the financial shake-up they collapse.  I’m not sure if it’s all good news or if it’s the end of the idea of people making money off of recording music.

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3 Responses to AGIFF, Mead, Breaking Bad, Dreams

  1. GoddakkAttack says:
    October 10, 2011 at 7:48 am

    1.) i agree with your assessment of movie flaws. Although i noticed this more with hollywoody movies and things from the 80′s where the music even if it’s not loud it’s non-stop. I like how a lot of recent films don’t clutter it up with music.

    2.) All this time you talk about Breakin Bad, i thought you were watching that breakdance movie.

    3.) Yesterday i was counting change out of a cup so i can take it to the coinstar & it made me think of tracking sales of Spotify etc. . . . and then that made me realize that the internet based musician is basically a busker going home with a handful of coins and a few bills.

  2. Brian John Mitchell says:
    October 10, 2011 at 9:46 am

    Yeah, the non-stop music or the loud music, hard to say which is worse. But when the drums are unintentionally louder than the nuclear explosion, that’s not too good. I know that when I tried screening my cartoons without sound they didn’t work properly because people don’t notice they start without a sound cue & I do dislike it when credits are ran on silent at the end of the movie because it seems to give them a false sense of importance. But the really loud music seems like such an easy & obvious fix. For a while I thought it was because of me watching movies on inferior devices, but I think it’s just from lazy people in the sound department ripping audio straight off an ultra-hot CD without adjusting it.

    You should check out Breaking Bad. It really only functions I think if you start from the beginning as it’s kind of about likable characters becoming total assholes.

    • GoddakkAttack says:
      October 10, 2011 at 9:55 am

      i don’t think it’s from the incompetence you speak of. I think it’s more to do with “IN YOUR FACE” production values that’s really popular since the 2000′s started.

Star, Rivulets, Ron Paul, mwvm, The Outer Limits, Dreams

Posted on October 7, 2011 by Brian John Mitchell

Last night the video version of Star was on the big screen at the Ava Gardner Independent Film Festival.  People laughed at the right times & everything, so well received.  Here’s the video if you haven’t seen it before:

From Rivulets, here’s a recent live video from the streets of Europe.

A friend emailed me this Ron Paul video that totally reminds me of Red Dawn.

& here’s a couple videos of mwvm checking out some new equipment:

& here’s an episode of The Outer Limits starring William Shatner:

Last Night’s Dreams:
I have a copy of the Necronomicon & the government is trying to take it away from me to keep it safe.  I know it’s safer with me than in the hands of the government & that ultimately the world is safer still with it destroyed.  In the end I give them a fake copy & keep the real one for myself.

My sixth grade science teacher who was a 22 year old first year teacher has a jam band with a Sun Ra type of jazz edge & all the songs are inspired by The Wizard of Oz.  I’m trying to sit in & jam & I’m using the skull of some dinosaur bird as a didgeridoo blowing into its beak with the sound coming out of the bass of its skull.

There’s a new album by some uber popular hipster band called “At Last Unicorns Speak.”  I like the album title & the cover art, but the music is crap & I can’t even remember the name of the band.

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2 Responses to Star, Rivulets, Ron Paul, mwvm, The Outer Limits, Dreams

  1. goddakkATTACK says:
    October 8, 2011 at 5:55 pm

    that man’s voice on the RPaul video was killing me. Also i think the red dawn remake is with the chineses.

XO, Deadpool, Stop Motion, Dreams

Posted on October 5, 2011 by Brian John Mitchell

I got a third draft of XO #10 done.  I figure I should go ahead & write them when I can & hope Melissa can catch up with drawing after she wins the lottery.

Talking to Nick Marino about changing our stickman Deadpool fan comic into something with our own characters instead as he says Deadpool’s popularity is waning.  So I’m not sure exactly what is going to happen with that.

I got out this month’s email newsletter.  I think I’m losing subscribers faster than I’m gaining them these days as people change email addresses without updating things.

Working on stop motion animation stuff & it’s going a lot slower than I anticipated.  A minute of footage took me about 3 hours to make & I kinda ran out of things I want to do in the video with over 2 minutes of song to go.  It’ll probably still be a couple of weeks before I get it finished.  Here’s the first few seconds.

Last Night’s Dreams:
I’m at some store & the person I’m with is trying to get me to ask out the checkout clerk & I say “That girl’s a child, she’s probably 17 years old.”

When things were bad I’d wander through the city at night.  Waiting for my body to get exhausted enough to collapse.  I’d sleep wherever was convenient.  A park bench, under a bridge, wherever.  I’d wake up either from the sun or the cold.  The dew having settled on me in my sleep.  It made the world real.  Let me know how good my life was.  How luxuriously I lived; sleeping indoors, some place warm.  All of my problems are reserved for the privileged.  My problems were all ones I had personally sought out.  & now here I am a dozen years later.  & it’s starting to get cold outside.  & I’m losing weight.  I just want to sleep outside & let nature take its course.  Let my body go cold.

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2 Responses to XO, Deadpool, Stop Motion, Dreams

  1. GoddakkAttack says:
    October 6, 2011 at 8:51 am

    good job on the video. the look of it is cool. maybe make the guy move too in the next two minutes you have to fill. ps out of an hour of video i usually wind up with something around 5-8 minutes. so good luck on the rest of that.

  2. Brian John Mitchell says:
    October 6, 2011 at 2:38 pm

    There’s another 30 seconds from last night of the paper doll moving around & fighting giant bugs. There’s five versions of the doll in different positions.

    Guess what, I had some trouble getting the lighting to be how I liked. & what I did to accentuate the feel of stop motion when there was essentially no motion was using some slowburn christmas tree lights as off camera accent lights to cause some lighting variation. Oh, & the background is a Silvertone guitar case.

Jon DeRosa, The Alcohol EPs, Google, Twitter, Snoop Dog

Posted on October 4, 2011 by Brian John Mitchell

There’s a pretty good interview with Jon DeRosa on Vol. 1 Brooklyn.

I just put up the feature release for free streaming for this month.  The Alcohol EPs from Remora, Rivulets, & Pale Horse and Rider from 2002.  I’ll be honest, I hadn’t listened to it in a long time & the Remora stuff on it is really rough in a bad way & unfortunately indicative of that period of my life.  The songwriting is fine, but the recorded performances are pretty awful.  But the Rivulets & Pale Horse and Rider stuff is hopefully worth your time.

Looking over my web stats for this past month.  I’m still confused how “Wet Teens” ends up the Google search with the most clicks to the Silber site.  Because how far down would you need to go on that search to find it?  I just checked & didn’t have it come up in my top 100 results.

I went through on my Twitter & followed all my followers as I am told that is the polite thing to do.  I suppose I should at some point organize my list so that the message stream had some sort of sense to it, but I kinda like it not making sense & juxtaposing unrelated things.

I saw the episode of Monk with Snoop Dog in it the other day, here he is singing the theme song.

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4 Responses to Jon DeRosa, The Alcohol EPs, Google, Twitter, Snoop Dog

  1. goddakkATTACK says:
    October 4, 2011 at 10:57 pm

    are you really shocked that “wet teens” is the term that sends most people to this site?

  2. Brian John Mitchell says:
    October 5, 2011 at 10:13 am

    I’m surprised that Silber’s Wet Teens shows up high enough in search results for it to drive traffic. I actually cancelled the Google Adwords for them because it was getting a lot of traffic that didn’t generate sales (despite the keywords all being things about the music). Like 2000 clicks (at a penny per click) not generating one $5 purchase.

Promo, Christmas, Irata, Norm MacDonald, The Outer Limits

Posted on October 3, 2011 by Brian John Mitchell

I got out the latest batch of promo follow-up emails over the weekend. There does seem to be a little bit less coverage of the newer releases despite things seeming to be done in the exact same way I’ve done them for a few years now. Which is kind of part of why I’ve been talking about trying to do the short run stuff lately. Maybe I’m just in a funky mood because of the sudden change of whether here.

We’re going to be doing another Christmas compilation this year.  I sent out emails to the usual suspects, so if you’re reading this & didn’t get an invitation & think you should have, let me know your current email address.

Talked to Jason Ward & Irata is taking time off their day jobs to go into a studio with a producer next week.  We’ll see what happens.  I think there’s a good chance they’ll be graduating to somewhere bigger than Silber, which I guess in a certain way is what I wish for all the bands in the roster.  Just as long as they don’t get screwed over & jaded by the bigger label (which is unfortunately common), I’m happy with things.

Here’s another really ridiculously long Joke from Norm MacDonald:

I just saw what is perhaps the weirdest episode of The Outer Limits that I’ve seen.  It kind of reminds me of Carnival of Souls.

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Facebook, Web Updates, Dreamland Compilation

Posted on September 30, 2011 by Brian John Mitchell

So I was trying to make it so the Silber Facebook Page (as opposed to just my personal page) has posts feed in from my Twitter.  It seems like for the non-personal pages it can only go one way (Facebook posting to Twitter), anyone know if I can get it to auto-update?  I’ve been thinking about trying to invest $10 in advertising the page, but not unless I can make it have regular content flowing in so it eventually drives traffic back to the Silber site so people can buy stuff.  You know, if I can get 1000 new followers at a penny a piece & generate one physical order or two digital ones from it over the course of a year, it pays for itself.  Though I think that those numbers are slightly optimistic. Got a semi-final draft done for Lost Kisses #23.  Still have to lay it out for drawing. Spent some time updating a bunch of pages on the website.  Still getting used to the new WYSIWYG editor I’m using (Kompozer).  I wish I could find one that doesn’t screw with my code & doesn’t crash, but I guess that’s too much to ask for. There’s a new MP3 compilation from Dreamland called “Around” that includes tracks by Silber folks Remora & Northern Valentine plus a ton of our allies like Shiny Around the Edges, More States, Landing, & Yellow6.  The Remora track is in the mecha style. Here it is, I haven’t listened to it all yet, I think it’s three hours or so long.

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One Response to Facebook, Web Updates, Dreamland Compilation

  1. GoddakkATTACK says:
    October 2, 2011 at 9:44 am

    for the plumerai page, i update on reverbnation and it feeds FBpage, twitter, myspace.

CD Case, Blogging, Norm MacDonald, Dream

Posted on September 29, 2011 by Brian John Mitchell

So I did some work on the possible disc case thing.  Here’s a video of me trying to assemble one while holding a camera in the other hand.

I talked to Shane Sauers a bit about the assembly thing (the video is mainly so he could see what I’m thinking & improve on the design).  We were talking about running labels (he runs Northpole) & whether or not it’s worth it to advertise.  He had a story about a magazine telling him a review would run & when he said he couldn’t justify an ad for a seven inch limited to 300 copies the review got pulled (of course it’s in a magazine you would respect, this is just how magazines work, which is shitty but understandable from a business standpoint).  In similar news another friend of mine is talking about hiring a real publicist (the kind that only works with a total of ten or so clients) which costs about $10,000 for a year which I have absolutely no idea of whether or not that actually ends up panning out.  It’s funny to hear these stories about friends who are in similar music business situations to me just taking the big leap investing $10,000 in ads or a publicist.  I just can’t justify it personally.  I’d rather put out 5 CDs with the money hoping to break even than put all my eggs in one basket.  But it could very well be that they are right & I am wrong.

I just read this interesting rant about music blogs on The Decibel Tolls about how bands spike & fall.  It’s interesting because I don’t think the reviewer is aware of how money driven a lot of blogs end up being & once the money for promoting a band dies down, the bands that are unnaturally buzzing fall back down to nothing.

I saw a re-run of this bit from Norm MacDonald a while ago.  I think it’s funny, but it is definitely long.

Last Night’s Dream:
My brother has moved back in with me & my grandmother (again) & I’m sleeping on the couch waiting for my grandmother to wake up.  She wakes up during the five minutes my brother is getting his breakfast so he tries to help her into the bathroom rather than waking me up.  I hear a huge commotion in the bathroom & I go in & there is shit & vomit all over the floor.

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5 Responses to CD Case, Blogging, Norm MacDonald, Dream

  1. GoddakkAttack says:
    September 30, 2011 at 7:45 am

    well in order to even break even you’ve got to either price the CD’s high or sell a lot of copies so just relying on word of mouth or the multitude of blogs that nobody really reads unless they’re looking for their own reviews probably doesn’t help.

    I’m doubtful ads even work in this day and age. I mean when was the last time you went to a website and saw an ad and was interested enough to click on it? Then again not everybody is me and i did run a couple of those cheap FBook ads as an experiment and while it was only 25$ the most that came out of it was 2 or 3 more FB likes.
    Publicist, i’m weary of… on one hand they can do more for you than you can due to their established connections and ability to put the time in and the other, what they do is it really going to help you out enough or are you just paying money to see yourself in print etc. . . . . if you’re still only getting into the hands of people that aren’t going to like your music anyways, it’ll never translate to sells or more people at your shows despite more awareness. That’s why i dunno if that route would do Silber niche any justice. If we only played punk or metal this would be way easier to make connects.

    I still think the #1 way to increase exposure is through live performance and meeting people. I don’t know of a single artist that got popular any other way except for novelty acts like DieAntwoord or ones that had members of formerly successful artists.
    That $10,000 might be better served sending people out on the road if the goal is to sell more music/CDs etc. . .

  2. GoddakkAttack says:
    September 30, 2011 at 7:57 am

    i think in the chart on the page you linked Cold War Kids “A&R reps frustrated with blogs creating artificial fan following” is the most important statement on that page. Also that the internet is more or less marketing to people that don’t really like music, who i guess technically are the people you need to reach but being the internet and all these people no longer put worth on music and then how can you expect them to do anythign but download it for free or not at all.

  3. Brian John Mitchell says:
    September 30, 2011 at 9:05 am

    Yeah, I think the $10,000 I would much prefer to set for putting bands on the road. If I had the money & gave bands an extra $100 per show I think that more touring could happen. I mean, it seems like the bands that I’ve known that have made it did it by doing 200-300 shows a year for 5 years. Of course gas was cheaper then & booking agents were easier to come by & show attendance was higher. But I think touring is great also because it brings a band together &/or breaks them apart so you either end up with a better band or a band that shouldn’t exist not existing anymore.

  4. Brian John Mitchell says:
    September 30, 2011 at 12:51 pm

    I think the theory of getting a publicist & becoming a buzz band is possibly scoring an advertisement placement or film placement that will hopefully cover the investment.

Blogging, Short Runs, From Oceans to Autumn, Remora, Cerebus, Conspiracy Theories, The Outer Limits, Dream

Posted on September 28, 2011 by Brian John Mitchell

So I just figured out how to get the blog to show comments on the front page instead of just individual entry pages.  Starting to feel a little bit more comfortable with WordPress I suppose since I am going in & hacking some code.

I spent a couple hours working on a template for the CD case thing for doing short runs.  Called Shane/Starbage Hands about trying to do it, waiting for a call back.  I’m sure he’ll be able to make the design work better than I can as far as getting the envelope so it’s tight enough to hold the disc securely, but not so tight the disc gets scratched pulling it out.  I’m going with a no gluing design with some slits in the front for interchangeable artwork according to the release in it.  Which would make more sense if you were actually looking at it.  So we’ll see what happens.  What the price point will look like & if I actually go through with it.  But I’m imagining getting 1000 made so that they’re cheap & then when the releases come around getting 50 or 100 professionally burned & printed & seeing what the demand is like & if my distros will pick them up.

I talked to Nic Slaton today & he’s still working on the slicnaton release for Silber & hopes to get it done in the next couple of months.

Did some work doing some slight mastering for something new coming soon by From Oceans to Autumn.  Worked up the artwork for that a bit as well.

Got my first pass done at the Mecha style remix of “My Brother’s Guns & Knives” by Remora.  I also tried to do some work modifying the bugs I’m using for the music video, but Super Glue evidently doesn’t bond to bug skin which seems weird.

I’m working on a comic for the Cerebus Newsletter with Jason Young (Veggie Dog Saturn, Gutter Trash) & I got the first page in & it’s looking good.  Should be finished & available soonish.  I think it’s the first time I’m going to have a comic appear in something where I’m not the editor.  I am way too much of a control freak.

I just found out about this conspiracy thing I’ve never heard of before where there are three centuries of time artificially created.  WTF?

Watched this pretty decent (& definitely weird) episode of The Outer Limits.

Last Night’s Dream:
I meet a girl on a train who looks like a petite Rosalind Russell & we hit it off & sleep on chairs facing each other.  She flies home to New York in the morning & gives me her number on a piece of paper.  I’m on the train standby & because of a cancellation I won’t be able to leave for 48 hours.  I find a payphone & call the girl.  The conversation is awkward & unnatural & I realize I can’t remember her name without looking at the paper.  I really didn’t want to go to New York anyway.

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