Promo/QRD/Pedal/Wilder

Posted on July 20, 2010 by Brian John Mitchell

Got a lot more messages out about the new releases.   All the radio folks are contacted plus a few hundred press folks.  Should get the rest out this week.

Emailed some more folks trying to gather interviews for the next QRD.  Three interviews in so far.  A little scared it won’t make it to twenty.

I had a pedal I ordered that isn’t here & I checked the tracking & it says they’ve tried to deliver it twice (no knocks on the door or little slips of paper left) & I need to try to find it tomorrow.  Aggravating.

Talked to PD Wilder (Hotel Hotel) a bit about his recent busted at the border for trying to tour in Canada fiasco.  Makes me scared of ever touring out of the country again.

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Publicity, Blister, Major Morgan, Etc

Posted on July 19, 2010 by Brian John Mitchell

Finally got things going for starting the publicity campaign for the new releases.  Starting with emailing radio stations & DJs (Silber’s number of contacts greatly exceeds the email limit on my server, so it’ll take a few days to get emails out to everyone).  It’s going to be interesting to see how these folks feel about downloads since there are not physicals of most of these releases available.  I feel like it’s a little bit snobbery to not have physical releases & if I had the extra $10,000 laying around all five of these releases would get the full treatment.  But sometimes reality comes around.

I found my missing Heart Attack Envelope filter in the case with the guitar I have strung with wires.  I also did some recording & was playing without a pick & did it enough to get a blister on my thumb.  Makes me feel like I did some work.

I bought a second Major Morgan (it’s a kid’s electronic toy/instrument) & the little plug to hook the battery up was busted & I actually fixed it.  Makes me want to get into trying to make pedals out of toys again.  Maybe after I record the new album & feel comfortable totally re-working my pedal board without fear of losing unrecorded songs.

Put a bunch of reviews up on the site on the various product pages.  Still need to decide about if I need to populate the entire site with the slightly adjusted banner or just take it as individual pages get updated or wait until there’s more changed with it.  The big change was switching to a different javascript that let the random image in the right of the banner appear without giving an active x warning in Internet Explorer.  But I also added some images from new releases that link to the pages to buy them on for I think the last ten releases or so.  I’m thinking about putting animated gifs from the comics up as well & then putting it up around.

It feels like I might have crossed a barrier where I have an easier time getting things done, but we’ll see what the week brings.

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Mood & Dreams

Posted on July 18, 2010 by Brian John Mitchell

In a really weird mood today where even the things I got done just feel like a waste of my time.  I know it’s a mood because I’m also suffering from the “I am hungry for a type of food that has yet to be invented,” thing I often have.  So instead I’ll focus on my dreams.

Last Night’s Dreams
I’m living with a woman in a condemned lighthouse (I can’t tell if we are in a romantic relationship or not).  She’s telling me that she has children, but she isn’t able to ever see them again because the state declared her an unfit mother.  I start feeling really uncomfortable listening to her story & start to get lost staring at the cracks in the plaster of the wall.

I’m in my car that I had from 1991 to to 1994 (but I feel like the year is closer to 2003) in a gravel parking lot staring at a chainlink fence.  The radio is just a radio, no tape deck or cd player, & I’m listening to hip hop station only playing instrumental mixes.  My cell phone rings & it’s Bill Horist & as we’re talking he asks what the back ground noise is & I explain to him that hip hop is the closest thing to minimalist drone music I can get on the radio.

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Flyers, Ads, MP3s, Distros, To Do

Posted on July 17, 2010 by Brian John Mitchell

So the current profile picture is the new flyer style I’m thinking about using from here on out (not necessarily always with the cubes, but with six related images that seem to tell some sort of a story).  I think it draws the eye in & then you read the info later.  We’ll see if it works I suppose.  I think the font looks good at full size & printed, but wow does it look horrible in this tiny jpg; so that might change.  Let me know what you think of it.  Along with getting the flyers done, I made the Facebook events & ran the MySpace promo for the July 29 show at the Nightlight.

I was looking at QRD & I noticed since I changed the colors around a bit (now gray & black instead of all gray) that some of the ads looked a little funky or were not readable due to font size.  Fixed those.

Did some research for new blogs to contact.

I feel like it’s borderline unprofessional to mention here, but it was brought to my attention that one of the MP3s in the digital shop had a glitch in it.  The solve of course was re-encoding the file & giving the customer a free copy of another release as well.  So that’s the way we’re rolling on that in case you ever have a similar problem.

Emailed back & forth a bit with Johnny at Record Heaven (our swedish distro who are awesome (note definition of awesome as a distributor is “paying”)) about some things to do to help each other out.  Not sure if it’ll come to fruition or not, but here were my ideas for him & essentially any other distributor:
(1) Giving a label contact info for the various press & radio outlets in your region with them tailored to the label’s type of music.  I can’t read the non-english stuff well enough to tell who to promote to.
(2) Giving a label contact info to individual shops to send promos to & to solicit them to order from the distro.
(3) Giving a label opt-ins (meaning the label pays part of the bill) for discounted shared ad spaces since they are bought in bulk.
(4) Opt-in for shared promotional posters to the shops you distribute to.
(5) Opt-in for placement on promotional postcards to be mailed out & placed in your region.
(6) Starting a webzine interviewing bands with new releases each month (or week).

Copied over my “to do list” so that it would make sense to me.  Always a ton to do.  Going back to having it in a small notebook where individual pages can be ripped out with lines copied over.  We’ll see how it works out.

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Promotion, Dream Secret, Demos

Posted on July 16, 2010 by Brian John Mitchell

Today’s big event was talking to Bruce Warila of Music Think Tank about doing a frontpage article about the Vlor Lego video for “Watch Me Bleed.”  So obviously I’m going to follow his lead on the project & see what happens.  It’s interesting because he has ideas that come from a totally different place than me.  Example: the goal of a viral video is not to sell CDs, it’s to gain music placements.  Wow.  Yeah.  I hadn’t thought of that.  He’s right.

I took some photos for making some flyers for the upcoming Remora shows.  Really different looking from any other flyers I’ve done.  I’ll post them up when they’re ready.  Really more weirdo designer than anything else.

While getting ready to run the MySpace promo for the shows, I noticed Remora has significantly less friends than a couple years ago.  Used to be 2500, now it’s at 1900.  Of course who were the friends in the first place?

I can’t remember if I posted it here, but a few days ago I put a bunch of magnets under my pillow because I heard it could intensify your dreams.  The answer is yes, it does that.  The problem is I wake up feeling like I haven’t slept & am jacked up on meth or something.  So I’m not sure I can advocate the practice.  You should try it out & let me know your results.  Incidentally it supposedly works better with the right side of your head against the pillow.

I listened to a really weird demo someone sent me today.  It was one of those things where, “If this is an actual demo it could be great, but if it’s a completed album it’s pretty awful.”  Decent songs, but you could hear people bumping into the mic stand & the vocals being punched in & out.  Really weird figuring out what the intention is sending something like that to a label….

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New QRD & Two New Remora Videos!

Posted on July 15, 2010 by Brian John Mitchell

So you read the subject line, productive day.  I also did some work on the website.  I found a way around the javascript warning that was being issued in Internet Explorer & I’m going to be populating that around the site soon.

QRD #42 is up.  21 interviews with guitar players about playing guitar.  Includes Silber artists Sarah June & Michael Walton (mwvm) & Evgeny Zheyda (Thorn1).

New Remora videos for Mecha:
“049″ (by me)

“Collapse” (by Bob Freville)

Last Night’s Dream:
On tour with Alan Sparhawk & he’s complaining that I waste way too much time in my life bathing.  (Which reminds me of when Michael Wood told me I’d never make it as a touring musician if I wanted to shower everyday.)

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WTF?

Posted on July 14, 2010 by Brian John Mitchell

I don’t know what’s going on, but the Silber site is down.  & my email is down.  & the tech support page for my webhosting company is down.  Ummmm, this is not supposed to happen.  It may put a major kink in the new QRD being ready (At least I’ll have someone else to blame things on.  4 interviews left to proof, so tomorrow seemed reasonably possible for launch.).  It may also put a kink in my future of eating burritos since it’s how I make money.  Is there something crazy going on in Canada to knock my service out?

All day just trying to plow through these interviews.  It feels like the past several days has just been one really big long day.

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Slow Belly Ache Dreams

Posted on July 13, 2010 by Brian John Mitchell

Just working on the interviews mainly.  Going slower than I thought.

& I have a belly ache.

I started reading my HP Lovecraft/Robert E Howard letters book.  About 20 pages into it & I feel like it is destroying the imagery I have of Howard a bit, which I guess I knew would happen.  It also is giving me some insight to the rise of Nazi-isms racial tendencies.  Because these two people who are both clearly intelligent & eloquent men that are simultaneously tied to the time period in which they live are discussing why they believe the people descended from the parts of England their ancestors were from are physically & intellectually superior to the rest of the world.  Wow.  Really?  I knew that this mind set was around with factory workers & immigrant farmers & the like in this era, but the literati?  It makes war & genocide seem so humane when you look at people from other parts of the world as failed experiments in the evolution of man.  Lends some credence to the idea that the Civil War was more about one portion of a nation wanting to economically oppress another part of a nation than about slavery.  In a hundred years if people read these blogs, I wonder if it’ll destroy their ability to like my art.  Of course that brings up are things like letters (or blogs or diaries) part of an artist’s creative output & to be read or just ephemeral words on paper.  My answer is, “I don’t know.”  In my personal case with this blog, it’s about that I generally don’t have anyone to actually communicate with on a regular basis who cares about what I’m doing in the minutia of my business/artistic life.

Last Nights Dreams:
On a tour & my compatriots’ van breaks down in the mountains of south-eastern Kentucky.  I debate continuing on solo, but decide to stay with them because I’m good friends with one of them.  We go to a Chinese restaurant & there’s a hold-up while we’re eating our soup & we’re told we need to stay in the small town indefinitely pending investigation.

I get one of those shirt style priority mail boxes.  Inside is a Korg SQD midi editor & a ton (maybe 30?) of the proprietary discs it takes (that my Roland sampling keyboard also takes).  It makes me ecstatic at the same time that I’m sitting there thinking, “I will never use this & it’s really just trash.”

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QRD, Boondock Saints, Dream

Posted on July 12, 2010 by Brian John Mitchell

Today I’ve just been working on the new QRD.  Arranged all the ads.  Wrote the intro.  & proofed/laid out 4 of the 21 interviews.  Maybe I’ll get one or two more done before I sleep.

Boondock Saints was on today & it seems like so many folks list that as their favorite movie that I should watch it.  I don’t really get why people like it so much.  It felt a little clumsy to me (granted I was working on QRD interviews while it was on).  It felt cut for TV even though it was on IFC so it wasn’t.  Maybe it would’ve been better with commercial interruptions because the cuts would have been forgivable.  It felt like they made a season of a TV show & then tried to cut it up to cram it into a two hours.  I need to do some research into why so many girls like that movie as that’s even more confusing….

Last Night’s Dream:
An Asian girl asks me to move in with her to record my next album & I do.  Her whole apartment is white on white on white (white furniture, white walls, white floors – reminiscent of Cloud City in The Empire Strikes Back).  Its in Buenas Aires & on about the twelfth floor of the building we’re on & I don’t have a key to even get out of the apartment much less back inside.  A corner of the living room is converted into a studio for me & in the bedroom (also all in white) there’s a canopy bed & one of those tiny cots that looks like a stretcher (it also is white).  The girl is also all in white.  It seems like the most colorful thing in the whole apartment is my gray guitar.

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Irata, Thorn1, Work of Art, Dreams

Posted on July 11, 2010 by Brian John Mitchell

Got the Irata stuff up on the site (I still need to add things to the catalog pages).

Got an email from Evgeny that the Thorn1 album is essentially done, so I might hold off running my promo campaigns an extra couple days so that one is ready as well.

I’m kind of into the reality show on Bravo called Work of Art.  I know I’m into it because last night I had a dream about it where I was a contestant & the whole thing was based in Anacortes, WA at The Department of Safety little artist colony.  I think the last time I was interested in a reality show was the one Disney had about a high school orchestra.

Still trying to get things ready for the MySpace promo campaign.

Did a little more research on bloggers to contact for promo.

MySpace changed something around where it says there are comments I need to approve for the blog, but it won’t let me see them to approve them.  So if you’ve written anything on here lately, send me a message.  Hopefully it’ll be fixed soon.

Last Nights Other Dreams
Current TV was getting shut down & banned because NOW deemed it was sexist & had enough pull to do so given its general left end viewers.

I played an afternoon show at a mall in a Mexican restaurant & I lost my shoes there (I play without shoes sometimes so I can twiddle knobs with my feet).  I had a roadie who was helping me take my equipment out & we walked by an Abercrombie & Fitch that had his picture up & it ended up that he had just given up modeling (to be a roadie for a Mexican restaurant?).  I was in a rush to get out because the whole reason I had booked an early show was because I was double booked that day & my evening show was a wedding.

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