Just Another Snake Cult

Last year Rachel and I got together during one hectic weekend between her Sleepy Sun obligations with the intention of shooting a Birds Fled From Me music video and recording an EP to go along with it of material she’d been working on since her last album and some older tracks that didn’t yet have proper recordings.

For the music video she chose River Song, which we decided to do a new recording of for the project. We gathered all the materials we needed at thrift stores – costumes, green bedsheet for the greenscreen – and shot it on my digital camera’s video mode. Those files sat on my hard-drive untouched for half a year until I had enough free time to try to learn how to paint and composite it all together. Here’s how it came out:

The video was to give me a chance to improve on techniques I’d started developing during the last Monsters From Mars music video. I wanted further to explore the possibilities of putting real people in fantastical settings – in this case, a children’s book world. If nothing else, it was a great learning experience. I’m looking forward to working on the next one and exploring some new, more ambitious territory.

I won’t go into too much detail about the EP, as I put a lot of time and work into this ultimately stillborn endeavor. You can stream as far as we got with it – an 11-song collection of alternate takes, outtakes, or otherwise unreleased material recorded 2006-2009 – in low quality here for a brief period:

Tracklist:

1. Owl Song (originally a William:Kaiser song?)
2. Release Me (recorded for Spaceman)
3. Staring at the Sea (original demo)
4. River Song (alternate version)
5. Unloved Unhappy
6. Have They Found
7. What You Said When I Was Dreaming
8. Sat There Unknowing
9. Show Me Love
10. Apple Sauce
11. Phantom Hearts

Tracks 1-4,6,10,11 produced by myself; rest by Rachel. Erin Copp plays cello on 2,4. I play any synthesizers, xylophones, melodicas, and harpsichords found on tracks 1,2,4,6.

This is a goofy little short I made with Dylan last year.

About a month ago I spent a weekend holed up in my bedroom and walked out with this: Bandwidth^Beta

Here’s the premise.  Lets say this is you — you’ve got a band.  Lets say you’re doing it DIY.  Sure, you’ve got a MySpace or whatever, so people can discover you and hear your music.   People have heard your music and they like it, but you’re still bumping in the dark.  At the end of the day they might or might not remember you, and if they do, you don’t have any good way to keep connected to them.  It’s hard to convert online “fans” into real fans.  This is where Bandwidth^Beta comes in.  You offer your fans a FREE album download — single, EP, or whatever.  Make it a unique one-off that’s only available through Bandwidth.  If they liked your music, they’ll download it.  Now they’ll remember who you are, you’re on their iTunes (or whatever) rotation.  On top of that, when downloading the album from Bandwidth, they enter their location and agree to automatic show notifications.  That’s the trade: the fans get a free album in trade for their contact info and location.  Show info is pulled from Last.fm (and at some point other sites such as Facebook and MySpace), so the band needs to put no effort into it after the first upload.

The site is far from complete at this point.  Still lots to figure out.  Any ideas/comments are greatly appreciated.