The soundtrack album is still at the mastering engineer – these things take a while, particularly since we’re having the same people do the replication. We’re using the same people that SJ Tucker uses for her CDs (thanks for the rec, Sooj) and I know their work, it’s quality. We’ll be getting it back in time for the release show at Conflikt, and there’s still time to pre-order it and help us pay for all these things.

Here’s the disc label graphic, as sent to the printer. It’s Kiri Moth’s art. Pretty, no?

All these pre-orders will be signed, and one of them will get a small special present included. Remember that test CD I was carrying around for a while? I posted about it back in October, and talked about carrying it around to places here.

One pre-orderer will also get that test actual CD. There are differences, too – we made mix changes on three tracks. I’ll sign that, too, and include a little note certifying that yep: it’s the one in the picture. It’s unique, a one-off, and if you find those sorts of things interesting, well, this is how you can get a legit shot at one. It’s not super-fancy or anything – it’s a CD-R with sharpie writing on it, I mean, go look at the picture. But it’s the only copy of that exists, and there won’t be another.

You can pre-order here. The pre-order ends when the CDs get here, and I don’t know exactly when that’ll be. So if you want a shot at the bonus stuff, now is the time. Clickie!

Google is blocking a piece of mail from me as spam. It’s individual mail directly from me to directly one other person. It has no images or links and is plaintext. I’m asking someone I know for recommendations for a fill-in slot at a music festival.

Any ideas? The page linked in the bounce is pretty much useless, and I’m worried they’re trying to force everybody to adopt DKIM, which is a tremendously broken standard I’ve addressed before.

  ----- Transcript of session follows -----
... while talking to gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.:
DATA
<<< 550-5.7.1 [2601:8:9740:1300:da50:e6ff:fe55:2303      12] Our system has detected
<<< 550-5.7.1 that this message is likely unsolicited mail. To reduce the amount of
<<< 550-5.7.1 spam sent to Gmail, this message has been blocked. Please visit
<<< 550-5.7.1 http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=188131 for
<<< 550 5.7.1 more information. g5si6986243pdc.141 - gsmtp
554 5.0.0 Service unavailable
Reporting-MTA: dns; murkworks.net
Received-From-MTA: DNS; murkworks.net
Arrival-Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2014 11:46:08 -0800

I tried a shorter one, and it's bounced as spam too:

From: "Dara Korra'ti (public)" <[deleted]@murkworks.net>
Subject: how about this one?
Date: December 17, 26 Heisei at 11:46:07 AM PST
To: (account withheld}

does it like this short one? If so, check your FB, Google is blocking email from me to you. :(

We have an SPF record, and this is a new trick we've only detected today. Some mail can get through to other people, but none to this recipient. But the original mail which triggered the first bounce can get through to no one. Thoughts?

Wow, this is quite the op-ed in The New York Times yesterday: Elegy for the ‘Suits’ – The Internet, Not the Labels, Hurt the Music Industry.

It’s everything you despise about The New York Times and The New Yorker rolled up into one! Paean to power and old authority? CHECK! Unchecked nostalgia for the prime of the Baby Boom era? CHECK! Slavish worship of corporate culture? CHECK! Fear of agency resting outside the hands of white guys in suits? CHECK! “What an asshole!” working just fine as a punchline? CHECK!

Really, it’s terrible and hilarious. And just wrong, of course – as I’ve written, the labels – via their industry group, the RIAA – destroyed the industry just fine on their own by making music ownership a negative value. Not to mention that they also drove the more aware musicians out through their ruinous strip-mining of artist value. It’s been almost 15 years since Courtney Love did the math, and the sharecropper approach wasn’t new then. If you signed with a label, you were giving them all the value and keeping something below minimum wage – if that. And they owned everything you made.

So no, “the Internet” didn’t “hurt the music industry.” The labels are the ones who set up the teetering edifice. The internet just let musicians break out and tear it down.

ps: talking of, pre-order the new album! We have a mastering engineer to pay. 😀

If the forecast is right, we have about, I dunno, a 60% chance of losing power this afternoon, so this is LAST SURE CALL for creators and makers to post about their things! Do you make a thing or things and want to tell people about it? GO COMMENT HERE Some of the things people make are for sale, some aren’t, that’s okay. Go put it in comments here and it’ll be in the megapost on Monday!

Do it now, too. If we go down they’re saying it could be a couple of days before we’re back up. Of course, now that I’ve posted all this, it’ll breeze right over – BREEZE! HA! – and we’ll be fine.

We’ll be back for sure by Monday, of course, so that post should go up fine.

Do you, yourself, make a thing that you want to show or even sell to other people? THIS IS YOUR POST! It’s kind of like what Scalzi does, but just one post, rather than a whole week of them, because his audience is way bigger than mine. But I know I have creative people following me, too.

So, your crafts, music, books, electronics, sculpture, arts, whatever: talk about it HERE SPECIFICALLY in comments! Not on whatever echo this is, but OVER HERE. I’ll collect and repost them as a separate blog entry next Monday.

And tell friends, so they can do it too. 😀

We’re finally recording the readings this weekend! Yay! Some test recordings and such on Saturday, and hopefully we’ll keep some of those, and the finals on Sunday.

Also, I got the Klopfenpop remix/bonus track in from Josh, and I have to say he’s really outdone himself. This is great work, and not what I expected, but totally fitting. You’ll love it.

Next week I want to do a show-off-your-stuff post, so if you have anything you do or make or write and want to talk about it, look for that on Monday and start commenting. It’ll be like Scalzi’s, except I’ll make a top-layer collation post too.

So watch for that next Monday.

Anyway, got to prep for the final readings. Have a good weekend, everybody!

One of the big tricks you have to do when throwing your album and/or single out there – either or both, honestly – is say “fans of <foo> will like this, too!”

Typically, that’s who you sound kind of like. I flailed around on that pretty hard with Dick Tracy Must Die, and I’m still not happy with choices I made.

So who would you list?

I think it’s clear that the lists would be different for the songs (particularly “Something’s Coming” and “Song for a Free Court/Anarchy Now!”) than for the instrumentals. So both of these would be really helpful.

Obviously, I’ve got a few – mostly the ones left over from Dick Tracy Must Die for the songs, and a bunch of Newfoundland and Quebecois trad bands for the instrumentals. But I’m not happy with either list.

Got any ideas? I really could use the suggestions.

A couple of years ago, I could still walk in to Best Buy and test mixes on an assortment of consumer-grade CD players. And while I’ve been calling CDs “concert souvenirs” for a while now – that’s what they are, people want them, people want you to sign them, they still have value – I haven’t entirely realised how true that is.

Part of that is because CD sales as of 2013 (iirc) were still the largest single sales segment. And they’re by far the largest sales segment in albums, despite vinyl’s resurgence.

But… a couple of years ago… I could still walk in to Best Buy and test a CD full of music tracks on an assortment of consumer-grade players. While it’s partly a ritual, it also serves a real purpose – does your mix survive all these different weird players?

And now I can’t. I couldn’t even test it one one, because there weren’t any. The only CD audio players were in the Magnolia HiFi audiophile ministore.

But that’s fine, right? I’m not stupid, I have exactly the same track mix on my phone, and for this exact reason. But then it got really annoying, because I couldn’t test-listen with my phone, either. Sometime in the last year, Best Buy tied all their display gear down to preset sample tracks, which no doubt hide their flaws and emphasise their strengths. Play your own music to see how that sounds? Nope.

Not cool, Best Buy. Not cool at all.

It’s a little surprising, to be honest, because of those sales numbers. Are all those CDs still being sold – a decent number – going into older, legacy players?

So I went poking around online – Best Buy is the midrange, let’s drop down market segments a little. Target’s page on audio brings up a turntable before a CD player, but they at least have a few – Crosley, the maker of retro-styled audio gear, and Jensen.

It took going to Walmart to find a bit of a selection – or Amazon, of course. But what you seem to have is audiophile and low-end, and not a whole lot in between. Just like the American economy. Aheh.

Which leaves home theatre as the last mass-market stop for physical media. But do people actually do this? Do people play CDs on home theatre systems? I don’t. Never have. Anna doesn’t either. We’ve had it set up for AirPlay for a while, along with all the other audio – we pipe mp3s over the LAN.

But most people aren’t going to do that until it’s a standard feature, or at very least, common. So maybe other people pop CDs into the BluRay player? Is that a thing?

Of course, the CD… it’s a concert souvenir, so it doesn’t really matter. Rip and put in the souvenir box, right? No big.

Until computers stop having optical drives in three years’ time. Then what’re we going to do for souvenirs?

So after all the eye surgery adventures last winter, I fell six months behind on everything, and then summer was filled with surprise extra tasks and work that aren’t related to music… or, really, fun… at all. But I had a lot of catching up to do, and it needed to happen.

And I finally have been. I haven’t been around the last few days in no small part because I have finally beaten down my to-do list to items that were on it before GeekGirlCon 2013 (the weekend my right eye went lol no) and all of those adventures. I diagnosed the roomba’s problem and repair parts are on the way. The minor ceiling repairs (cosmetic, really) upstairs that I started right before all that? Finished. The small mountain of weird credit union rewards points I apparently had? Sorted and spent! And so on.

Not to mention the album, of course. I just dropped Release Candidate 1 for another track. o/

The downside of all that kind of catch-up work is that I’m really kind of out of performance shape, and I need to start working on that now. Studio shape – that, I’m in. But that’s very different to performance shape.

I guess it’s a little like the difference between being trained for sprinting and trained for a marathon. Right now, I’ve been in studio a couple of months, I’m real good at short bursts, because that’s what you need, and you need to be your best at it. But that’s tiring. Live, you also need to be at your best, but in a different way that doesn’t crash your stamina. And I need to switch back to that.

Plus, I need to be booking events. I mean damn. But it’s about time to be thinking about spring anyway, so at least, this time, I’m not late.

But yeah. Catching up, one task at a time, and far enough along that old things are coming off the stack. I’m tired, but it’s the good kind of tired, and now, the decks are almost clear, and we can be moving forward again.

This came up in talking about posters for this Saturday’s joint show with Leannan Sidhe at the Dreaming. (6pm, 5225 Univeristy Way NE, Seattle, hope you’ll be there.) What matters more in a poster graphic: relationship to music or dynamism?

I had came up with this poster design:

YELLING

The background image is from a comic, drawn comic style, which makes sense because hi, comic book and gaming store, and we’re doing some related songs, so it all works. I think it’s quite dynamic and eye-catching, which was my primary consideration.

Shanti, quite correctly really, felt it didn’t relate to her music, and she came up with some other imagery for the background. That’s what made the official poster:

Godking Owl Has No Pity For You

It’s a good image, I like it. It is more evocative of her music. It’s also lower contrast, and less dynamic from a distance. The eyeflow is still good, but… as a designer, I think it’s less attention-grabby.

So, as someone seeing these posters, which matters more to you? A graphic that is more grabbing (but not as evocative of the music style), or one that grabs less attention (and thus makes people less likely to see it) but which is more evocative of the music on some level?

And does it matter if you already know the music or not?

I tried to fit this into a poll, but couldn’t quite get it together in my head. So I’m just asking outright, in text. Do you think relationship of poster graphic to music is more important than eye-catchiness in show posters? Would you even think about the two if you went to a show, or would you forget about it as soon as you walked in?