as next week we will be in kansas city to play a show at the record bar. we are pretty excited and it's going to cost us a lot of money to be there, so we are really itching for it to be good. next week is going to be a bit of a harried time. jenee's last day is on monday, which will be sad because she's probably my favourite work person. she's having a goodbye party type of thing on sunday night and i have to be at work bright and early at 8am the next day. very nice. i must say that riding my bike to work every day has made a difference- i can sleep later and i've noticed i'm a little more with-it lately when i'm there. in addition to that since ty had a shift that he needed covered up on the board for the 14th i took it since i'm going to miss a day of work as well and that way it'll still be a full paycheck. he called me yesterday to inform me that he had the wrong week and that it will actually be this coming thursday that he needs covered. so in one way it sucks because that makes this week a six-day week and we have a show that night, then we leave early the next morning, but on the plus side now i'll have a three day weekend and a four day week next week after we get back and it will go by very fast and probably be fairly mellow. we're also playing on wzrd next saturday night. fortunately (for a change) it's a venue that's really nearby and won't be much of a time commitment. thus it will be cheap for us to do from an igo point of view- which will be nice after this whole kc debacle. and then our next show is at the empty bottle and we don't need to reserve an igo car for that at all because we'll be housesitting for jay and diana during that time, so we'll be able to just use diana's car. yay.
after some careful consideration i have come up with a plan for next year. it's always been something we've kind of been wondering about. i have a lot of equipment to buy, so i was beginning to think that i should just start buying it. i'm not going to be able to get a studio together without working up some debt. end of story. since i already have some considerable credit card debt it might just be a good idea to get started after the tour once things have calmed down and i might just go ahead and buy those api preamps and the mics i went on about in the last entry. i'm still going to plan on getting the 'dandelions' ep released once it's finished. disk factory just sent us a nice brochure and they are wayyyyy cheaper than cdman is now and they're in the city. i know where they are. cheaper cds and i can go pick them up on my own rather than pay for shipping. so that means we should be able to get about 500 plain discs pressed for fairly cheap and then we will do what we did with the 'learning how to crawl' ep- i only ordered 100 of the arigato paks from them since i knew that that would last us a while and i've only printed up about 50 of them. we only keep a handful of them around at a time. i think it's about time to reorder more of them, actually. i should take stock before we leave for tour. anyway, we'd do pretty much the same thing with the 'dandelions' ep- the entire cover will be silk-screened. stefanie's going to do the artwork and it's going to be silver ink on red cardstock. very simple. she showed me the cover-design she had finished and it looks very nice- i like it a lot. naturally she's going to get a tattoo of it as well. so hopefully that won't be too much of a production. hopefully. haw haw. i'm going to mix it down to tape and send it away to magneto that way. they have nice tape machines and seem very analog/digital hybrid oriented. i always felt that that was why the stuff they mastered always sounds so great. i think the ep is going to sound very nice- it sounds very natural. it's almost finished too. i need to finish the lyrics for two songs, but those two songs have been started and have a decent chunk of their music recorded. one has a nearly finished string score- i'm missing a good part for the chorus. it also needs a sort of swirling feedback symphony type of thing.
the next project i'm going to start is going to be going through those old instrumentals. i might just mix them all down, redo the ones i think need to be redone and then just make cds of them and give them to stefanie and try and have us write lyrics for them independently. i think that they would make a good double ep or something like that- like if we were able to write lyrics for some of them then they could work well. that stuff would work in that 'low level owl' kind of context. just beautiful. deeee!
our internet has been out for two days at home. i am very tempted not to get it fixed as i am kind of enjoying not having internet. although i worked for about four or five hours on that proposed animated 'angels floating on the head of a pin' video to absolutely no avail. evidently scanning images and then importing them into imovie via iphoto doesn't work as well as it should. they end up looking like total dogshit, especially if they're small. the pen and ink drawings might make good t-shirt designs or what have you. i should probably order some t-shirts as well for the tour. i think it might be entirely possible that t-shirts might be something that could make us some much-needed extra cash on the road. what's more there is something to making people into walking billboards.
so my new plan is just to buy the equipment i want to get my little setup that much closer to being a proper studio and then all i'd need would be a tape machine and a mixing desk, which would be easier to save up for by itself.
my plan for next year- we are going to be very quiet on the local front. i feel like we shouldn't bother with getting shows booked around chicago. if we are offered shows we will probably take them, but we will not actively seek out shows. if i get a jones to play live i should play open-mic nights on my own or something. no local shows. we will still apply to play at south by southwest in march- then just split the cost of a rental minivan with nick and nadine if they're going to go (and by some weird miracle we get to go). then work towards getting the next full-length out in time for another promotional trip in september. this one will be of the east coast and be shorter- ideally around a week long. i'm beginning to think that we should do these week-long or two-week long tours every year, just alternating between the east coast and the west coast. i really don't see the point any more of just going going going constantly and jamming yourself down people's throats. i'd rather do it more gradually. it feels to me that we could do this and it would work out well for us. our music takes time for people to get used to. there's no point or help in just making ourselves incredibly visible- it's just not going to work. i feel like if we find subtler ways of getting ourselves out there then it will grow more gradually and people will react more positively. so that's my plan as it stands at the moment. next year- less local shows (not to say there won't be any) all working towards the goal at the end of the year.
next week my little project is to go on the consignment rounds. i'm going to take a day after i get off of work and go around and take 'down to sleep' cds to permanent records, two or all of the reckless records shops, laurie's planet of sound. voila. i definitely want to do this before we go play live on the radio. it would be nice to be able to say that it is readily available to buy in the city. i don't really think that many people will hear us on the radio, but you never know. do people still listen to the radio anymore?
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