From Aural Innovations #37 (September 2007)
Brian John Mitchell first came to my attention eight years ago when he sent me a cassette of his now long lived solo guitar project Remora, and over the years I've reviewed many releases on his Silber Records label. In addition to the many fine artists on his label, Brian has also released music as Small Life Form, and been a member of a number of other bands. Brian also publishes the long running zine - QRD. This summer I had the good fortune of meeting Brian here in Columbus, Ohio when he played near back-to-back shows. With all the various projects Brian has his fingers in I took the opportunity one day in July to sit down with him for the following interview.
Aural Innovations (AI:) When did you first start playing music and what were you playing in the beginning?
Brian John Mitchell (BJM): When I was 14 I was given a guitar, and I had one lesson…. maybe as many as 2 or 3 lessons. And I didn't really like my guitar teacher and didn't play again until I was about 20. But the guitar is pretty much my main instrument. At the time I was getting more and more into music but I was more interested in doing a magazine, being a DJ, running a label… somebody more behind the scenes rather than actually doing music myself. And a lot of friends were saying as much of a music fan as I was I should be doing music myself. So eventually I fell into it. That was about 12 years ago.
AI: So did the zine and the label precede you actually playing?
BJM: The zine yes, the label no.
AI: When did you start the zine?
BJM: I started the zine in 1994 because where I lived I didn't realize there were other people doing zines covering this kind of thing. I wanted to read interviews with these bands and the only way for me to get to read them was by doing them myself. The only music magazines I was aware of was Spin, Alternative Press and Rolling Stone. So you're not going to find bands that only sell a thousand units in those. Anyway, if I'd seen these other zines I probably never would have bothered to start mine. But of course once you start doing it you start to be like…. these people aren't doing this interview right, and if I were doing it… you know? So you can't stop doing it once you get started. That was in fall '94 when I did the first interviews. And it wasn't until 1995 that I got everything together to print the first issue.
AI: You put it together yourself?
BJM: Yeah. It was done with a glue stick. I typed the interviews with a… what do you call those things… it's not quite an electric typewriter, but it has a disc to save the files. Anyway, I would print out the text, and I cut out the text and pasted down on top of an image that would be behind the text. It was truly homemade. But back then zines still looked like that. A few years later everyone had computers. In '94 when I started it the internet was still text only. There weren't images yet. It was just email and newsgroups.
AI: Is that how you communicated with the people you interviewed?
BJM: Exactly. But some still through the mail. Super 31 was one of the first interviews. They did it via email. With Lycia I sent them the questions and they sent me an audio tape with the answers on it.
AI: You sent them questions through regular mail?
BJM: Right. I mailed them questions and a blank tape.
AI: How did you contact them if it wasn't on the internet? How did you get contact information?
BJM: I guess it doesn't happen so much now, but if you look at records from the 70s or so, bands would have contact us for our fan club and such addresses.
AI: How many copies of your first issue did you do?
BJM: Probably 150. But I was on a college campus so you could get rid of them just by virtue of being a student at the college campus. I sold them for .50, which was basically what they cost to print. But it wasn't about making money off of it anyway.
AI: How regularly did you publish QRD?
BJM: The first year I think I did maybe five issues, which is a lot. It started out that it would be two interviews plus a ton of reviews each issue. And as it went on I wanted to interview other people that were doing zines. Partially to expose their zine and partially so I could learn their tricks. Eventually I stopped printing it because it was costing too much money and shipping kept going up. I don't think I stopped printing it until 2001.
AI: Did you then transition to the web right away?
BJM: I already had the web and was double publishing, where everything was also online. But it was the economics of it, the labor, and the fact that I'm printing a 100 of them and mailing them, versus my web site is getting a couple thousand hits.
AI: Tell me about the comics you've done. You sent me these cool little comics.
BJM: A couple years ago when I'd stopped doing my physical paper zine, the San Jose Museum of Art asked me to do a zine for an exhibit they were having. I've never found out how they found out about me. So I decided what I wanted to do was something that came across as a small, personal, physical object. What came out was a matchbook sized comic called Lost Kisses, and to my surprise it was mentioned in a few reviews of the exhibit. So I decided I should do more issues. And now I have four issues of Lost Kisses which is about a stick figure with similar life issues as me, though he has a harder time than me. Recently I started doing collaborations where other people do the artwork for stories that require better art than I can do. I think in the end the comics are more likely to pay my bills than my music and I'm not sure how I feel about that. I guess one day I should merge the music and comics into one thing. I'm sure I will eventually when I have a story that I want to tell in both mediums.
AI: You never learned how the museum found out about you? So you were clearly doing comic art or some art and making it public before that, weren't you?
BJM: Well, QRD was pretty well distributed as far as photocopied zines go. It was reviewed a lot of places and in a lot of zine libraries around the country. So I think it's safe to think that was why they contacted me. They didn't know I had stopped making a physical zine a couple years earlier. I had done a couple little comics in letters to people, but I hadn't done any serious graphic artwork that had been displayed since high school.
AI: When you got your web site going was it for the zine? That is, pre-Silber Records?
BJM: When I started the zine I had always planned on starting a label. Actually, before I started the zine I was in touch with Mike from Lycia, just as a fan. And I always wanted him to be on my label, and then 12 years down the line he is. But after about six months of doing the zine I dropped out of school so that I'd be able to finance doing a compilation CD. So I got in touch with all these bands, some of which were relatively known, like Lycia and Attrition, but also some more obscure people. It was a national and international thing, rather than just local to my area. And I didn't have any idea what I was doing. I thought I'd put it out and people would buy it. I didn't have any thought about how people would find out about it. It was called Alleviation and it was such a financial disaster to me. I though maybe I'm just not meant to do a label. And the only things I released with the Silber release numbers were cassettes of my own stuff. Alleviation was Silber01. The first Remora release was Silber02. And it's crap in general. I don't see any reason to reissue it.
There was a band that I was in a little before I started playing guitar. It was me and a girl that's my current girlfriend. We had a thing where we did Bauhaus covers and stuff. She played viola and I sang. And when we've done stuff together lately she plays viola and I play guitar. And I don't sing. Actually prior to that when I was in high school I was in a band just as a singer-frontman. It was called Vlor. Vlor was really the first band I was in. It was me and this guy Russell that was my best friend in high school. There were a couple other members on and off. But we never did any shows. We would only play in the basement or wherever and sometimes a few friends would come by, but we never did any shows. Years later we started playing together again. We played acoustic guitars and used the same name.
AI: Is that the Vlor I would have heard on the Demain compilation?
BJM: Yes, Demain would have been when we got back together playing acoustic guitars. We played acoustic guitars on a raquetball court. And it wasn't a 4-track or anything. It was just a tape recorder in the far end of a raquetball court and us playing acoustic guitars. It sounds like huge amounts of effects on it but it's just because of the nature of the room.
AI: I'm hearing about other bands from the samplers but didn't know you were part of them.
BJM: Silber releases, I guess it's 02-08, were all cassettes and it was really just me. There was Remora Annaron, Remora Acroyer, Remora Amerse, Vlor Lavished, Vlor Luxate, My Glass Beside Yours Pressedflattedpulledpeakedreadied, then there was Remora Ambient Drones For One Guitar, and immediately after that was the Demain label sampler.
AI: Demain was the second CD you released, right?
BJM: Right. It had Clang Quartet, who I was friends with [Scotty Irving]. A local act. I've been friends with Jon DeRosa. At the time his main band was called Dead Leaves Rising, which was kind of a dark folk thing. He had a side project called Aarktica, which of course is now his main thing that he's famous for. But at the time it was him running a lot of pedals which…. he was a classically trained acoustic guitar player, so the idea of him doing this electric ambient guitar thing was considered kind of weird by the people that were fans of his first couple records under his previous band name. So the lineup for the label roster was going to be burMonter, Remora, My Glass Beside Yours, Vlor… so that's four bands that I'm in. And then Clang Quarter, Aarktica, and Origami Arktika, who are from Norway and I've been friends with for years. And Small Life Form, which I had started and didn't really come to fruition to have a CD until ten years later.
AI: That was from just the past couple years.
BJM: Yeah, I didn't know how to record it as an album. I would get these pieces that I liked, but they would be 2 minutes long, and when I lined a bunch of them up it didn't work for me to be a full length CD. I had to totally refigure out how to do it.
AI: So did things pick up a bit with the release of Demain?
BJM: One of the main things was when I put out Alleviation I had no idea what I was doing. I didn't know how to secure distribution. I didn't know how to get reviews. But with Demain, the internet existed in a way that it didn't when Alleviation was put out. So I was able to do a lot of research. Find out what radio stations to service. Find out which magazines to service. Find distributors to take on my releases. I was able to do it properly. I did the release. I was able to get some reviews. I was able to get some radio play. I was able to get some distribution. So right away I did the label sampler, an album by Clang Quartet, an album by Aarktica, and another compilation which was called Zann. It had to be in the year 2000 when all this was going on. Then I had the Christmas sampler. So I did like four releases back-to-back. It was a totally intense time, re-launching the label. I knew I was going to be doing this about a year ahead of time. And I just started working 70 hours a week and just put the extra money away. And I had a $10,000 seed fund that I'd saved over the course of a year and a half that I planned to start the label with. Of course now the label's more in debt than $10,000.
AI: Was there something about the away things turned out with Demain that gave you the confidence to do a bunch of albums back-to-back?
BJM: I was saying that I was just going to go for it with these first four releases. I was convinced John's Aarktica stuff was good and something would happen with it. With Clang Quartet I was convinced it needed more exposure and something would happen with it. In whatever ways I feel like most of the artists that are on the label think that I've helped their careers rather than hindered it. From that standpoint it's a success even if it's not a financial success. It's an artistic success.
AI: So did you start getting some more experience with the distribution and such at the time all these releases came out?
BJM: Yeah. The whole time I was doing my music I was getting networked with other people that are running small labels and trying to pry out a little bit of information. Like somebody asks me to be on a compilation and I'd ask who are the distributors they're working with. I'd ask if there would be any radio stations they're servicing. So I got a little bit of distribution here and there. Radio play. Over the years you learn that some of the distributors work. Some of the distributors don't pay you properly. That's the nature of the business.
AI: It seems that I've always received promos from you in batches of 3 or 4.
BJM: When I put out multiple releases I'm able to…. like when I have promo postcards made it costs me a couple hundred dollars to do that. So I pay a couple hundred dollars to promote three releases instead of paying a couple hundred dollars to promote each of those one releases. And I save on shipping by mailing out three CDs at the same time. And I save on my personal time writing the notes to people. Because I'm in personal contact with pretty much everybody on my promo list. I write them a hand written letter by name.
AI: You know, you're unusual in that regard. I get a huge volume of submissions. But not many people follow up. Which in one sense is good because it's a struggle to keep up with it all anyway. But not many people contact me to ask if I've received their submission.
BJM: Yeah, that's a problem I realized pretty early on. That if you want somebody to do something you need to ask them to do it. From running my zine and doing the reviews, one thing that I hate, and I'm sure you get it too, people will mail me a CD with nothing. No press release, no letter. If you give me a press release and a letter telling how you found out about me, I'm probably going to listen to your CD.
AI: My web site is very clear on the submissions page. Give me information about yourself.
BJM: It's funny the things people don't do that it seems like no nonsense.
AI: I always thought that Remora was your main thing throughout the years but I'm hearing about these other projects.
BJM: Well Remora has been my main outlet but the other things have… what happened with Vlor was Russell moved to Florida to go to flight school. So that was the end of it. And the reason I brought it back was I remastered the cassettes to give them away as free mp3 downloads. So I was mixing the cassettes and had forgotten how much I liked it and found myself starting to write these guitar parts that didn't really fit that well into the Remora model. They were Vlor guitar parts but there just wasn't any Vlor band. The other thing that I did like with Vlor that I don't get with Remora, since Remora is just me there's no collaborative process, and so with Vlor I took all these pieces that I'd written that fit the model for the band, and I sent them to - I can't remember exactly how many people - maybe six or seven people that I sent it to. There was Mike from Lycia. John from Aarktica. Jessica Bailiff, Nathan Amundson and Jessie Edwards… the three of them all recorded their parts together. And then this guy Paolo Messere from 6pm and Blessed Child Opera out of Italy on Seahorse Records. And they all sent parts back and I would mix them together. [see Vlor - A Fire is Meant for Burning review in AI #34.] And I'm working on the second volume of that right now. I've got about ten parts written. I try to have it where I'm going to have at least twice as much material for people to choose to work with and will actually end up on the record.
AI: I guess I've just heard a few Remora albums. There was the first cassette you sent, Ambient Drones For One Guitar. And then I think the second one I heard would have been the Best Kept Secret label cassette, Some Future's Past. But that tape was when I first heard the Remora that had both the droning ambient music, but also actual songs. Then there was the more recent CD, which I think was similar.
BJM: Yeah, but people get confused because the one on Best Kept Secret is Some Future's Past, and then there was an album associated with it called Some Past's Future. It's not as good as Enamored…. to me.
AI: Enamored is the more recent CD you put out on Silber, right?
BJM: Right. Some Past's Future I also put out on Silber. And it's funny because the Best Kept Secret cassette came out first, because I was actually shopping it to other labels, because I just didn't feel comfortable releasing my own stuff on the label. It feels weird contacting reviewers and asking did you get MY cd and review it. And actually I did get some nibbles from labels that I respect, but they said it might be 18 months before they could work it into their release schedule. And I thought to myself, screw that, I'm putting it out myself. Whether that was a right or wrong decision now, who knows.
AI: Well you must have felt good about it because you then released Small Life Form on Silber.
BJM: Yeah, I got more able to separate me as the artist and me that's running the label.
AI: It's not at all uncommon for people to have a label, or call it a label, for the purpose of releasing their own music.
BJM: Well that was part of it too. If you release your own thing it kind of makes it seem like you're a vanity label.
AI: But you've got enough of a catalog where your individual projects are pretty much dwarfed by the number of other releases.
BJM: Right. At this point my outpoint is probably 10% of the catalog.
AI: Which brings us to your new album, which is on another label. It really took me by surprise. How did that come about?
BJM: It's an EP called Songs I Sing [see review this issue]. In 2005 I went on a Pacific Northwest tour with Rollerball. And I'd started doing this thing during my live shows, because I have a real heavy right hand and I break strings all the time. And I flew out there so I couldn't have the spare guitar with me. So I would have to restring my guitar and retune it. So while I'm restringing my guitar I would sing these little songs that were semi-comedic or whatever while I'm redoing the guitar. And Shayne from Rollball loved them. He was like… man, you've got to release something with those songs. And I just thought nobody wants to hear that. They're cute and funny in the live aspect, but there's no reason to release this stuff. And he said he would put it out. So eventually when I was on tour I played a show in Toledo and stayed at Jessica Bailiff's house and we recorded it that afternoon, before the show. We recorded the whole EP.
AI: Oh, I thought Shayne had been recording your songs sung while retuning your guitar and released those.
BJM: No, it was the songs I was performing during those sessions, but performed within a studio setting.
AI: There's several that are like seconds long.
BJM: Yeah, there's several that are only a minute long. Because when you break a string and put a new one on, after that you need to keep retuning that string, because it's still getting used to the tension of the neck and everything.
AI: Have you had any feedback from people who know your music?
BJM: I got a good review from Ptolemaic Terrascope. I can't remember exactly but it was really a favorable review. I was really timid about the release because I feel like my guitar is the strength of my music. And the voice is kind of the weakness of my music.
AI: I think I like the Remora with both the guitar and songs the best. I was accustomed to the voice so it was fun hearing these little songs.
BJM: I'm happy with it but it was a big decision whether or not to actually do it because I was afraid I'd get flak about it.
AI: We had been talking about Small Life Form and you said it took you a while to get to the point where you would do an album. What made you finally decide to do it?
BJM: I did a tour with Kobi in Europe. Electro-acoustic is the term a lot of people use where… he'll have a hinge with a contact mic on it and he runs that through a lot of effects, and processes it, and that's what he uses to make his music. Which is similar to what I was doing with Small Life Form, but when I would do it couldn't make it work beyond two minutes. But he would do it and it would last his whole set. And I realized… at first there's the spectacle aspect of seeing somebody playing a lightbulb with a piece of styrofoam or whatever. But then as it goes on, at the same time you start to think to yourself you're getting bored after two minutes… right around four or five minutes you start to hear more of the subtleties to it. So I decided I needed to do an album of it. And when I started to record it I decided to use certain instrumentation, but what ended up happening was I was recording it on to the 8-track, to make it real dense, and fill up all 8 tracks. But when I started to mix it to EQ it, I would EQ each channel separately, and was noticing how each channel when you do it separately sounds good enough by itself. Just the trumpet sounds good enough. Just the trombone sounds good enough. Just the organ sounds good enough. All these things sounded almost better individually and everything got kind of muddy in the mix. So what I did was I released it with all the tracks as separate tracks, and with the instruction that if you wanted to you have the ability to load it into your computer and play all 8 tracks simultaneously and you control how loud each track is. And I made it so each of the pieces was a different amount of time. So one would be five minutes and one is two minutes and ten seconds. And so if you do put them on your computer and do the mix, with them playing looped through, it would never repeat itself because of them being different lengths.
AI: So anybody with the CD can do this?
BJM: Anybody with a CD on their computer. They rip it off into mp3's. And because I'm always behind the times with technology, I didn't know this, but if you go to my web site it tells you which version of Media Player you download to be able to do this. But with the old version of Media Player you could only open one file at a time. It didn't have playlists. But you could open multiple windows at the same time and play multiple things at the same time. And I just thought that was what everybody did. I didn't know they had totally changed the way it worked because I'm using Windows 98 and everyone else is using Windows XP. So people would say to me they didn't know how to do what I was talking about and it wasn't until somebody showed me their version of Media Player that I understood, and added the note on the web site about what version you need.
AI: I also seem to remember that there's a lot of different instrumentation on that album.
BJM: Yeah, there's trombone, there's trumpet, there's drums, organ, vocals…. there's a friend of mine that's convinced me that the way I play guitar, I don't play it as a guitar player would in general. Because I don't really approach it that much as a chordal instrument. And because I approach it more using single notes, that corresponds with the way horn players play. And of course all the jazz greats are horn players. So there's that whole attraction to the horn too. So I got a couple used horns off of Ebay for like $30. And those were the dominant instruments on there.
AI: You picked them up without having played them before?
BJM: I had probably played both of them about two hours worth of practice time before using them to record the album. Because all I was wanting was to get one note and be able to hold it, and then just do a little bit of wavering of the pitch to match the loop. And to me it worked.
AI: Did you play shows as Small Life Form?
BJM: My first Small Life Form show was I guess about two months ago now. I'd never done it live, and what happened was this guy that was booking I was friends with on Myspace. And he was friends with me through the Small Life Form account rather than the Remora account. And he was booking a show locally to me and the club owner was saying he should try to find some locals to play and I agreed. And he booked it as Small Life Form so….. all of sudden I guess I'm doing a show. And it's two months generally from when a show's booked to when you actually play it. And during that intermittent time there was another show that another friend of mine was having, and he asked me to do a Small Life Form show for that too. So all of a sudden I had two shows within two weeks of each other.
AI: It was a solo show, right?
BJM: It was just me. And I actually used the same effects that I use for Remora. But instead of plugging in my guitar I plug in a microphone. And it's just me and the voice. Or me and the trombone or trumpet. And I used a melodica also. They were fun sets, at the very least. I did some stuff with feedback manipulation to the speaker. If you move your microphone right in front of the speaker it's going to feedback. But there's control points where you can get certain pitches to come out…. if you go too close in it's uncontrollable, you go too far out there's nothing. But there's this little space which is only a couple of inches where you can make some cool noises. Kind of Theremin like. And it's functionality in that way depends on… there's little things you can do, like if you have the microphone you cup your hand a little bit over the microphone and that changes the pitch slightly. Like turning the microphone towards the floor instead of towards the ceiling. It takes some practice to be able to do it.
AI: How many times have you toured in Europe?
BJM: As Remora just the one time. And then I went with burMonter one time. The Remora tour was in 2002. I played Oslo, Norway. I did a recording that got released as Remora live in Oslo. It was a cassette release. So there were a couple shows in Norway. Some shows in Germany, Denmark.
AI: Who did you tour with?
BJM: Kai Mikalsen, which is Kobi. And we did a couple shows with Reynols, who just happened to be on tour at the same time.
AI: And you've had two recent tours in the US, on the east coast. You came through here last month, and played in the Cleveland area. Did you go back to some of the same places on this tour that you did last month?
BJM: City-wise, yes. But not the same venues. I play wherever they let me.
AI: Getting back to the Silber label, one of the things that got you started was making contact with Lycia. And you've reissued most, or all, of their back catalog haven't you?
BJM: They were on a label… no disrespect toward Projekt… they are what they are. Projekt had the way they wanted to work and the image they wanted to project with how they did things. And it didn't always jibe with what the artists wanted. Mike was never happy with the artwork. The artwork was always done by the guy that ran the label. And he saw it as the artwork represents the label more than it represents the artist. Which, valid or invalid, his idea has points. So there was that. And the way things are mastered now versus ten years ago is totally different. The original versions of the releases were taken to some guy that just masters random records for a living. He doesn't really care about it being this kind of music or that kind of music. And he does it in one afternoon. And now Mike from Lycia is remastering all the stuff himself, and he's spending like 20 hours per song.
AI: When were the original Lycia albums released?
BJM: I think he started Lycia in '89. And I think the first release came out in '91 or '92.
AI: Did you approach Mike about reissuing the albums?
BJM: No. He came to me about it. What happened was he had gotten into a fight with the previous label while doing a release. And it was at the point where he was already fed up with a lot of things about music. The guy at the label was questioning the direction he was headed on the new record, and Mike was like… screw it… I'm not going to do another record with you. I'm going to sit on this record until my contract runs out. And he had like 4 more years left on his contract. So Empty Space wasn't a reissue. It was a new release when it came out on Silber.
AI: Was that the first album you did?
BJM: That was the first Lycia thing.
AI: So I imagine a new Lycia album helped bring some attention to Silber.
BJM: Yeah, that sold a lot better than the reissues.
AI: Have the reissues done well?
BJM: They make more money than most other artists on the label. They're breaking even and the digital downloads on them are where the money comes from.
AI: How long have you been doing the digital downloads through iTunes?
BJM: Two years now. Maybe three. It started with the first Lycia disc… Empty Space. Because one of the problems Mike had with Projekt was they weren't really interested in embracing the digital downloads. In 1998 Mike was telling Projekt that digital downloads are where it's going to be. But in 1998 there wasn't really any pay service for digital downloads. So from a business model perspective I don't know how they would have embraced it anyway.
AI: And it's still finding its place and getting sorted out even today.
BJM: Exactly. But anyway, he wanted me to get digital distribution for it. So I got digital distribution for that, and most of the releases since then.
AI: You told me that the digital sales do better than the CDs. Does iTunes do some kind of promotion on their end?
BJM: No, there's no promotion. People are finding it there and that's the way they're buying it.
AI: Do you see yourself at any point giving up CDs and going purely digital?
BJM: I think everybody will eventually go that way. But I think physical CDs are really good for getting reviews.
AI: I've received a couple submissions lately that the promo sheet stated the CD was for review purposes only and that the actual album would be a digital download only. So they only had the CD done for review purposes.
BJM: Yeah, for review and radio play. And I think eventually radio station libraries will all be on a hard drive somewhere. There was an article in the New York Times a couple weeks ago saying supposedly next year Wal Mart, Target, Circuit City, Best Buy, are all going to stop selling CDs because they don't make enough money to be worth their shelf space.
AI: If Wal Mart does it that could influence everyone.
BJM: For labels of my size and specialty it wouldn't have that much of an affect. But companies like Warner Brother would have to fundamentally change their business models. Which I've heard they're already doing. I've heard that a lot of new major label contracts they have it that the label gets portions of money from live shows and merchandising, like t-shirts and stuff, which previously was separate. That was the artists money. But if they can't sell CDs anymore they've got to find some way to do it.
AI: Any new releases upcoming you want to mention?
BJM: There's actually a lot. There's the Lycia Cold reissue. I just got the CDs at my house. I haven't sent out the promos yet. Street date will probably be September. There's a new full length from Plumerai coming. A new Origami Arktika release. There's a guy who records under the name mwvm. It's a lot like the early Aarktica stuff. Real droney guitar stuff with loops. This band Hotel Hotel, who are kind of a space rock band from Texas. I'm working on some new Remora stuff. I'm working on the next Vlor. I think from the Small Life Form live shows, since I have both of them recorded, I might release them free on the internet. There's a label in Italy that just asked me about doing a Remora release. I've had several radio sessions lately and I'm going to try and listen to those. They're good recording quality. And maybe send him that because some of the songs from the radio sessions are new versions of old songs and I like the idea of having those available to people who have never seen the live show. And I'm working on a Remora record that's going to have drum beats on it. I've got this drum beat software I've been playing with for about a year now and I'm not sure exactly how to work it into the band. But I have about 100 loops that I'm interested in using.
AI: Gonna add some grooooves to Remora…
BJM: Possibly. But at the same time it's just like with the a cappella EP, people clearly have in their minds that Remora is a certain way. And the thing that I'm working on doesn't exactly fit into their model. But I also have a couple EPs I want to do using the same beat software, because with it you can make melodic instruments. And I want to do some where I get my computer to cover my songs. You can program in playing these notes. And I think that might be interesting as an EP type release, rather than a major album I would try and promote. And there's another idea I've been working on that I have a few songs for. The idea would be to have recognizable riffs from classic rock songs, like the Hot for Teacher riff. It would start out with me playing that riff, and looping it, and then just going off it to its own Remora song. And doing that with several really recognizable licks. Everybody knows it but it just morphs into its own thing and then of course comes back into it. That would also be an EP rather than a major release because of the licensing with doing those things.
AI: Thanks Brian!