I saw today that The Beatles are using Soundcloud now. Looks like Soundcloud is making a strong play to be the next big home for music. They also have music creation apps now. Man, if I was computer savvy I’d probably love it.
I talked a bit with Melissa Spence Gardner about upcoming issues of XO (yes, they’ll happen eventually) & putting out a physical mini-comic of her web-comic about her cancer diagnosis. Not sure how long it will be until these ideas come to fruition.
The local university paper wrote an article on the local noise scene in general & Clang Quartet in particular. You can read it here.
It’s been announced that Ultimate Lost Kisses #11 is getting an award at SPACE for third best mini-comic of 2010. So I guess that’s pretty good? I would’ve liked to get first, but I do think it’ll help me increase my sales this year.
I wrote another draft of the Robert E Howard script & sent it off to Andrew White to possibly draw. I also wrote another draft for the new Lost Kisses (strange that it’s the first one in two years).
As for Soundcloud, I’ve been sluggish to put my songs up there. Not cause there’s anything wrong with it… but because I don’t see an obvious advantage to it. I think they must have a lot of corporate backing, etc, because they’re integrated with a lot of other sites. But I don’t know anyone personally that uses it or hangs out there. Granted, I don’t have many musician friends, so that might be why.
The Sarah June Beneath Black Robes EP got listed as a free download on Largehearted Boy today. Presumably it will create a spike in interest. But the site hasn’t crashed & there’s no sales spike. I sent out the last of the promo for the Sarah June & Clang Quartet EPs with the exception of radio (I’ll wait a week or two on that to see if I can get a review blurb worth adding).
My Kickstarter keychain/bottle-opener campaign got rejected. I know it probably would’ve failed anyway, but it still kinda irks me.
There was what I thought was a new review of Mike VanPortfleet‘s Beyond the Horizon Line (which came out seven years ago now) on some new site Microsoft (at least it says copyright Microsoft on every page) has that links to places to buy MP3s. But careful inspection shows it is an exact quote of my press release & I just didn’t recognize it right away.
I emailed Andrew White (Just A Man) & it looks like he might draw the Robert E Howard comic. Also I am theoretically getting out of the writer’s block I’ve had with Just A Man for a while.
Also the work on Ultimate Lost Kisses #12 (drawn by Jeremy Johnson) is past the penciling stage & in the inking stage.
Last Night’s Dreams
Everyone is trying to get in the car for going somewhere as a family & despite the fact that I’ve been waiting to go, I’m to blame as the last one physically out the front door & it takes me a second to get the lock to work. The car is already moving & I climb half-way in the passenger window & my dad keeps driving & I figure I’ll be able to get in the car properly at the stop sign a block away & I’ll just hold on. When we get to the stop sign my dad not only doesn’t stop, he only shifts down to 3rd gear & takes the left turn way to fast. We hop the curb & I’m thrown out of the car & then the car hits a telephone pole. I get off the ground & go to the car & there’s my dad looking pretty clearly dead in the driver’s seat. There’s already too much going on in my life to deal with this shit.
I got a draft done of my Robert E Howard story about him & his mother. Still need to do another couple drafts for it, but I do already have an artist in mind.
I finally ordered my color laser printer today. Should be here around the end of the week. So my color comics will come eventually.
I did some more research about promo stuff today & sent out a bunch of emails about promoting the free releases. We’ll see what happens. I should finish sending them out in about two days.
I talked to Nic Slaton (slicnaton) today & along with his upcoming album (he’s getting his studio set back up after a move) we’re probably going to release a free Panthan EP culled from the recordings we did a couple years ago on spec for soundtracks. We’ll see how long it takes for me to have the free time to get that ready.
I’ve been working more on proofing some of the interviews for QRD. Trying to keep on track so I can get a new issue out soon enough rather than drifting farther behind. But the label series which I find incredibly interesting also gets a bit frustrating. Some folks talk about sales being down 75% & others seem to talk about things going great. Is it optimist versus pessimist or 1990s businessmen versus 2011 businessmen? It’s interesting. We’ll see what happens.
Here’s a new video for the upcoming release from Goddakk:
What do I do in a day some times? Beats me! Just kidding, starting to get in the responses for the comic book issue of QRD, which means I need to go ahead & knock out this next label owner issue.
I’m debating sending messages to all of my MySpace friends about how to stay in touch these days. I’m not sure if it’s worth the time it will take to do it (probably 30 minutes a day over 80 days, so that’s 40 hours!), but I suppose what else am I doing with my time? The one program that I have normally used to help me figure out who to send messages to doesn’t seem to work anymore with the new version of MySpace (update it seems the program can work during low traffic times on MySpace (meaning the middle of the night)) so it kinda makes me not want to bother with things. If I could get that too work, I could probably eliminate half of the messages I have to send (e.g. none of the profiles with over 20,000 friends, no one that hasn’t logged in for three years, no rappers, no “models”).
While I’m speaking of MySpace, I hear that Bandcamp (which seems one of the possible next waves of popular music sites) is starting to charge for free downloads if the band gets over 200 free downloads of a release in a month. Does anyone know anything about that? Seems kinda shitty on one hand & understandable on the other.
Darren Hayman (Hefner, etc) has this recent video post about money & music & fan-funding. In general I agree with him, but meanwhile I’m looking into starting to do Kickstarter campaigns not associated directly with music. My first attempt will be for bottle openers mainly to test the demand (if people donate $300, there are bottle openers, other wise there are not). I don’t know that I would care to try to use fan funding to attempt to finance anything I wasn’t willing to blow the same money on myself. I mean, I would love to do the Chinese or Pacific rim tours I occasionally get asked to do but would need $10,000 to properly make happen & even then I doubt the money would recoup. While I know the experience of a month touring in China is not currently worth $10,000 to me, I think it would be equally bogus to try to get that money from the fans/friends/family that might give it to me because it isn’t worth $10,000 to me. I’ve invested more money & time than anyone in my career & I think that’s how it should be for the most part. If I got a cultural grant to go on an asiatic tour (or even a proper american one for that matter!) I would do it, but the idea of asking fans for their money that they work hard for sometimes seems a bit silly. I’ve got enough savings from when I was working my day job 60 hours a week that even if Silber & all my other artistic outlets absolutely fail, that I can maintain my below poverty level life style for about five more years. My hope is that by then things will have cleared up as far as both, “Do people want their to be professional musicians & artists?” & “Do I have what it takes to make money doing what I want to do?” It’s a funny spot I’m in, but I am so much better off than most people I know, that I really hate how much the blog probably comes off as me complaining.
The Armored Troopers VOTOMS show that I’ve been raving about so much got most of its episodes pulled off of YouTube today (the link in the blog from a few weeks ago says it’s taken down as copyright infringing (which of course it is, but out of print 25 year old cartoons somehow feel sharable)). I’d finished watching the main series & have a couple episodes to go in the sequels & then I’ll probably give it a big spoiler filled write-up on Finally Checking It Out.
Last Night’s Dreams:
I’m helping a woman (who might be Uma Thurman disguised as Tina Fey) to escape from someone/something (conspiracy story style) & we’re driving a white car that says on the back that it’s a Ford Crown Victoria but looks more like a Toyota Camry. We’re at a gas station & we can’t use a credit card to get gas or we’ll be tracked & we’re pretty much out of cash. I’m relatively sure from the surroundings that we’re just off the interstate south of Charleston, West Virginia. Which doesn’t do a lot for giving me ideas on how to scrounge up some quick cash, but I think if we just sleep in the car overnight an idea might come.
I’m talking to Jayson Elliot (Permission Magazine (my favorite mag in 1995)) & we’re talking about Clive Barker & he hands the phone over to his mom as a Clive Barker expert & I’m arguing that Clive Barker has been managing his time resources poorly because he should’ve focused on short stories like the Books of Blood instead of going into his thousand page novels, that for the most part those novels could’ve been compressed into five 20-page short stories containing the major scenes that he is so good at writing rather than needing so much connective tissue explaining how you get from one scene to the next.
if fans wanted to support you, they’d buy the CDs to begin with and thus you wouldn’t need something like kickstart. not you specifically. which is why things like kickstart works great for people with 1000s of fans to begin with but not so great for people with only 100′s and 20 of them families and friends.
I bet you’d get more responses from people if you were trying to raise money for grad school though.
Well, I think the thing with how Kickstarter really works is somehow people’s relatives feel better giving $100 through that than just handing it over. Public Enemy’s Kickstarter campaign failed & I would think they are in the 1000s of fans category even today. But Kickstarter rejected my pre-selling keychains campaign. Which is funny to me.
I think I could learn more in grade school than grad school at this point.
that’s where you learn to make friends and connections so you’re probably right. although you’d probably also stop being one of dem dere creative types as a result
So I’m starting to get a little more excited about the upcoming Silber 15 Anniversary show. I’m thinking about buying a home brewing beer kit so I can afford to give the bands their drinks easier. I also looked into the bottle opener keychains again, but they end up costing about $0.85 with the setup fee to get the logo on the kind I like & the minimum order is 300! $250 sounds like a lot these days.
I ended up ordering a power cable for my keyboard (from yesterday’s post) from Music 123. I got an email two hours later saying it had already shipped! I’ve only ordered from the place once or twice before, but I feel like I should check them out more often. Maybe you should too?
How do I know the Sarah June free release is a hit? I don’t care how many downloads it gets, somebody donated money after downloading it!
I talked to Nick Marino today a bit about downloadable comics & web-comics & such. Still a bit of a mystery who reads them & what format & how to “monetize” of course. But we’ll see what happens. He was talking about download cards & my theory with download cards (for both music & comics) is that people either want a physical collectible object or just a download & so the download cards really don’t work that well. What I do think could work well for comics as a digital sale is CDs of comics that are now in the public domain. I’ve bought a few of these because they are cool & cheap. 50 golden age comics on disc for $4 (currently the price of most single issue mainstream comics).
In a similar vein Nathan Amundson (Rivulets) is doing a special tour only disc that collects demos of songs that aren’t going to be on the next album. I think it’s a good way to go. I think another good way to go is people doing more documentary stuff in the studio (I know I feel like I should’ve done that & maybe I would’ve if I was a little more tech savvy) & having that available as a tour only thing because it seems impossible to distribute video stuff.
I sent out my questions for the comic book issue of QRD. We’ll see how many responses I get. I think it went out to about 120 people.
I also started sending out the Silber newsletter today. Went out to the first 1000 (email limits) & I’ll get the rest out in the next few days along with the ones to the press folks about the Clang Quartet & Sarah June EPs.
Last Night’s Dream:
I’m working at the mall (or maybe living there, it seems to vary by portion of the dream) & I’m with Brian McKenzie (Electric Bird Noise) trying to find some girl’s lost dog. I think I’ve found it when I find a greyhound & Brian tells me that looks nothing like the dog we’re looking for, that we’re looking for a white Bolognese & I say, “They all look the same to me.”
I did a bunch of research for bloggers to add to the promo list today after reading an article about the future of blogs doing faster but crappier reviews (which sounds awesome, right?).
I’ve been having some conversations with people a lot lately about Silber in particular seeming to have stalled out a bit in orders & traffic over the past six months. I really do think it has to do with how much I relied on MySpace & that at least for me there has yet to be any viable alternative for a replacement. It really was my way to stay in touch with fans & while I know that the hardcore fans still view this blog, I’m nowhere near the 300 blog views a day from a year & a half ago. So I like to think that *if* I can find a way to connect to the 25,000 casual Silber fans on a regular basis things will boost back up to normal. I guess it’s just a wait & see game.
I was going to work on my 4.5 hour drone again tonight as I had some ideas for it that would use my old Roland sampler that I haven’t used since 2001. I didn’t have the power cord for it & it takes a more or less proprietary one. I guess I need to order a replacement. I have to wonder what happened to the power cord. I looked for it for about 30 minutes. I guess I’ll do one last look around before ordering another. Hard to imagine throwing it away with all the crazy musical crap I keep.
Last Night’s Dream:
I’m at a party hanging out with a girl who tells me her favorite thing to do in her spare time is play the original Resident Evil for Playstation. I remember vaguely from trying to play it for fifteen minutes that the controls were incredibly clumsy & tedious & I think to myself, “This girl must be high maintenance.”
I got a bunch of work done on the SPACE Anthology today. Laid out all the pages & took a first pass at the cover. Just waiting for Bob Corby to write a little intro for it & then I’ll have that obligation taken care of.
For whatever reason I ended up having the State of the Union speech on while I was working on some stuff. Has Obama’s catch phrase always been “It doesn’t make sense”?
Since I don’t have a lot to tell you, I figured I’d give you the treat of one of the better episodes of The Outer Limits:
So I realized how far behind I am on the idea of doing a double QRD for January & I’m postponing the next label owner interview series until February. I still need to get to work on the three issues planned after that. Then after those are done, well, who knows what’s going to happen. On the one hand the last eight months have been an awesome run for creating a lot of new content via interviews on QRD, but it didn’t seem to generate significant revenue ($1 per hour of work isn’t significant to me) nor increase traffic to the rest of Silber (in fact strangely traffic is slightly down over the past six months despite the presumable boost from the hundred interviews). I think the thing is that QRD isn’t what people other than me want. I want indepth interviews & other people want 100 words or less on what is the hip thing for that day.
Today I wrote up the first draft of questions for the QRD mini-comic special & sent it off to a couple folks to look over.
I got in the artwork for working on this year’s SPACE comic anthology. I’m better at over-extending myself than I should be.
Rivulets are going on tour next month in Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands, & Italy with Aidan Bake & Library Tapes. Here’s the dates & locations for those interested.
I don’t think I’ve posted a link to it here, so here’s the link to the Facebook event for the Silber 15 Year Anniversary Show. I don’t know if we’ll try to do any video stream thing or not as I for sure don’t know how that stuff works!
I had a video from the Small Life Form show a week or so ago. I only played for a few minutes because I was last on the bill for a show with about 7 people (including members of the 4 other bands) remaining. Anyway, I hope you dig it. The camera for the video is the one I was using to make some optical feedback projections, so you don’t have to watch me twiddle knobs. Can you tell that half my rig was dead? I don’t think so.
The Other Night’s Superhero Dream:
I’m at some kind of hero academy, so the world must be running pretty low on heroes. One of the tasks is running through a maze & rather than try to run through it I climb up on top of a wall & walk the edges of the wall to get out, which is seen as problem solving rather than cheating. Some woman with legitimate super powers shows up to attack me saying that I’m the one responsible for the end of the Earth & I just say, “No, I’m not.” & I realize that my superpower is that my para-suicidal behavior in the face of danger confuses & threatens my opponents (which I suppose is a big part of the appeal of 1960s’ Captain America). At any rate she’s whisked off with a first wave of hero candidates to fight aliens/elder gods & I’m in the next & final wave to go after them in about an hour. There is some crazy seemingly omnipotent dude granting us all last wished & I ask him to cut off his left ring finger & give it to me. He refuses the request, but does cut off & give me his right ring finger (he must be a guitarist). After a few minutes my cell phone rings & it’s my dad & I answer it. He asks me if I’ve seen the battle feed on TV & I say no & he says the only thing that has any effect is energy weapons & I need to get the hell out of there & I tell him, “When there’s no one else there’s always me.” I tell the most charismatic leaderific guy amongst us about the energy weapons tip to try to organize some plan & the guy gathers everyone together, but instead of forming a battle plan he tells some story about his childhood. & then the elder god/aliens are right in front of us & luckily they kill the charismatic dude before we have to hear the end of his story. There’s a black guy with energy emitting hands that rushes to the frontline while everybody else just runs away & is slaughtered & I rush to join him. He looks at me & says, “What are you doing alive?” “I know, right? I was trying to die first!” I pull the omnipotent dude’s finger out of my pants pocket with my right hand & clench it tight in a fist & I feel like I’m being struck by lightning & I put my left hand on the black dude’s right shoulder & the energy emission from his hands turns into a full nuclear blast & somehow we’re safe at the eye of the storm. We’re in the middle of a crater. Huh? I guess I am a hero….
” I pull the omnipotent dude’s finger out of my pants ”
this reminds me did you ever see the Tick episode when he’s giving a class to new superheroes? it also reminds me of that Hefner song with the line that something to the effect of “when people have got nobody else they can always sleep with me” or soemthing like that.
So this weekend is the 14th anniversary of Clang Quartet, so how do we commemorate it? A new free EP called Ava. Listen or download from CQ’s page here on Silber.
The Clang Quartet/Remora/etcetera show went pretty well. I did record the sets & maybe I’ll listen to them & post them or maybe they’ll be lost in my live music recording collection.
Here’s a video for Azalia Snail‘s song “Space Heater” that will be on Celestial Respect when it comes out in a couple months.
GoddakkAttack 
Congrats on the SPACE Prize.
As for Soundcloud, I’ve been sluggish to put my songs up there. Not cause there’s anything wrong with it… but because I don’t see an obvious advantage to it. I think they must have a lot of corporate backing, etc, because they’re integrated with a lot of other sites. But I don’t know anyone personally that uses it or hangs out there. Granted, I don’t have many musician friends, so that might be why.