Alive and well, but buried...
posted on 06 Jun 2006 under category News
You might have seen me on boards.
You might have even seen me drop a blog entry or two here.
But I’m really out, and have been for the past month. So it’s high time I explained myself and try to get back on track. As some of you may already know, our second son, Michael, was born April 24. Both mom and son are doing fine, but the time demands of caring for an infant are enormous. Plus, even when I’m at work or with an otherwise free moment, I’m usually either catching up on other regular work that had been shoved aside because of Michael or just plain too dead-tired to do anything at all but rest.
As this post hopefully testifies to, that’s getting (slightly) better.
But what really complicated things was that, a week after Michael was born, my home desktop PC bit the dust. Hard. I won’t bore with the ugly details, but in a nutshell it took me about a week and a half to be able to get up and running in safe mode enough to try to salvage as much data as I could before resorting to the “complete reformat C: and reinstall Winblows” option.
Needless to say, this set my timetable back. And I did have a timetable.
I’m still not totally sure that I can even save all of Bellum Aeternum, which was completely recorded but not mixed when the crash happened. In fear of the possibility that I might have to rerecord it all again, from scratch, I have just been pressing onward with my original plans for what I was going to do for the next few months: organize releases to bring UHR out of mothballs and renew ADR’s webstore.
So, the nutshell of what’s going on for the next few months:
ADR - As most of you have seen already, the ADR webstore is back, and with a vengeance. This 6/6/6 pack special has been keeping me horrendously busy, but we have sufficient funds now for the next two ADR releases.
However, this flurry of business has shown me just how unwieldy this old-fashioned static html store is. I want to fix it, and to this end Dante and I are working on implementing a CGI-based shopping cart type of webstore in its place. We still will only accept Paypal and cash/MOs as payment, but ALL orders will be able to be reserved via the shopping cart instead of having to make people e-mail stuff. It’ll also make updating the stock list very easy (I hope). We’re also basically set to release the next Vrolok release(s), but some details need to be settled first.
UHR - I mentioned before that I was backlogging releases to be able to spit them out a couple a month for the next few months. Stuff in the hopper to go, or very close to it, includes:
Chemikiller/Rampage - Twelve Inches of Blasphemy (split tribute to Venom)
Demontage - Sacrilege & Miscreancy
Black Torment - Obscurum II: The Return of the King (Reissue)
Hellgoat/Panzerfaust - split (Title TBA)
Vrolok - demo compilation/reissue (title TBA)
Rampage - Misogyny II: Every Woman is a Whore (packaged with rerecorded version of Misogyny I EP)
Rampage - Fucked Raw
And while I’m not sure who will be releasing it, I am compiling all of Death Beast’s demos. The raves the album has been getting have made me think people might be interested in the demo stuff, even if it is mostly just older versions of songs you already have if you have the album.
Quite a bit, isn’t it? Also, since I really have not the time nor the inclination to make, cut, burn, label, etc. everything by hand, I will be paying for professional duplication of these releases. I’m thinking that with the right cost breakpoints I can still make money on these and increase the release quality drastically while not really increasing end-user costs that much.
THE MUSIC FRONT
As for what I’m working on musically, other than getting Bellum Aeternum mixed, (assuming I don’t have to rerecord it), my plate is empty. I have three main projects I am toying with, but I don’t have (m)any firm timetables on any of them, so I’m just as interested as you in seeing what will come next.
First, for Rampage, we have enough in the hopper that I don’t have to worry about it for a while. Letters From Hell is really the last pre-planned project we have to take care of, but that’s still on a slow simmer. Ideas are starting to gel, however.
Next, Dauder Sofa, something I think you might have heard Aerik and/or I talk about. Aerik has some haunting, poetic lyrics and wants something more gentle - and I too have been wanting to indulge in my more mellow side. It won’t be hard, it may not even be metal, but I hope it will be beautiful. I’ll really give this new Strat a workout.
Finally, Death Beast - we have already titled the next album The Onslaught, and we’re kicking around ideas in pre-writing sessions. Or were, until a month ago. Still, this is one we actually have something of a timetable for: we’d like to get this written by the end of the summer/mid-fall and record it before/by the end of December this year.
So, that’s where we are and where we’re headed.
(I keep thinking of this time period as a non-productive period, but looking back at posts like this I realize I mostly think that way only because of what didn’t get done. No, Letters From Hell and The Onslaught aren’t finished, and only the latter now really stands a chance, but of that eight-item list in the middle of the page I did actually finish five of them, and of the other three one fell through because of one of the bands, not me. The Death Beast demo compilation of course came out as “Prophecies of Doom” on UHR, and the Vrolok demo compilation ended up just becoming a remix of their first demo, Nocturnal Isolation, minus the cover song and slightly re-ordered.
I suppose I should tell the ideas we had for some of these projects. Some day…)