Dear Kickstarters,

Thank you all, so much, again, for making this project happen! Our album release party on Friday night was a grand success in so many ways. Check out this video that Andrea shot from the stage, wherein the audience sends an enormous hello to Stephanie (who is currently in Sweden): http://vimeo.com/17033468

We apologize for not having gotten our Kickstarter rewards out yet, as due to the craziness of production the CDs only arrived in our hands on Friday afternoon! We are frantically assembling all the packages now, so if you are expecting a physical package from us, they should be reaching your mailboxes shortly after Thanksgiving.

If you are on the West Coast, we have just announced a number of dates for December/January between Los Angeles and Seattle, which can be viewed on our newly-upgraded website at corpus.cc.

As this may be, sadly, the final update we'll be sending out via the kickstarter mailing list, do consider signing up for our local and national emailing lists through our website!

And thanks, everyone, for making this album with us - this is a very exciting time for the band, and we are so glad that you have been part of it.

Yours,
Corpus Callosum

http://www.corpus.cc

As of today we have finished mixing 10 out of the 11 tracks for the album, and by the end of next week the album will be mastered and sent away to the printers. We are so close!

We ran into an unexpected and unfortunate mishap with the artwork that we had originally intended to use for the album - but have turned this into an opportunity to create new artwork, ourselves, made specifically for this album! The new artwork is shaping up to be an epic spread of cut construction paper by Andrea, photography by Stephanie, drawings by Stevie, and an oil painting by myself (Dax). I've attached a few images of the artwork in-progress - but you'll have to wait for the packaging to come out to see the entire thing in all it's splendor. We are having the packaging custom printed by a wonderful Oregon printshop, with a unique die cut and all the bells and whistles - we cannot wait to show it off!

For those of you slated to receive physical packages from us of one sort or another, please reply to the Kickstarter survey we just sent out so that we know where to send it.

For those of you who are in the Bay Area, we have announced our CD release party for November 19th at the Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco! This will be a fantastic affair, and would love to have you and everyone you know in attendance. The music starts at 10pm, is an all ages event, and will include performances by Sun Hop Fat, Corpus Callosum, and our awesome-and-famous friends Battlehooch. Do not be afraid to spread word of the show around the internet using this facebook event:

http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php...

The end is near!
- Dax

.Kickstarters, friends and sycophants

Six of seven Corpus Callosum members are currently eating dairy-free, gluten-free, fun-free cookies in the kitchen of Guerrilla Studios, Oakland Ca. Our producer/engineer Myles Boisen is sitting in the recording booth. Myles is recording Stevie on harpsichord and, our guest musician for the day, Shelia Newbary on viola da gamba. That’s right! We are in a studio—a very nice studio with a very talented engineer/producer. Myles has worked with the Kronos Quartet, the Tiger Lilies, Tom Waits, Vermillion Lies and director David Lynch as well as many other notable performers and creative people. He was nominated for a Grammy in 2004. You can read his whole bio at http://www.mylesboisen.com/bio.html

What are we doing with all the funds you gave us? Are we recording on the newest, highest quality technology? Heck no! We are blowing all those funds on good old tape. You know tape… like from the 80’s.

And are we using all the funds you gave us to rent the newest, highest quality and easy to tune instruments, to play on our album? Nope. We are employing the oldest and most unstable instruments: medieval instruments.

Just as the harpsichord is the medieval antecedent to the piano, so the viola da gamba is the medieval antecedent to the viola and the cello. It sounds amazing. It especially sounds amazing with the harpsichord. I hear you ask “where can I find a viola da gamba player for my next experimental folk and/or hip hop album?” Well, the answer of course is to just find the medieval music society in your town or city. Yes, you too can use the generous donations of fans and strangers to slowly turn your cool avant-garde band into a geeky medieval music ensemble. If you look hard enough you can even find a sackbut… it’s a real instrument! Look it up.

-Avery

P.S. expect many video updates in the next few days

Good game team! We did it. High fives all around. Everybody into the mini-van; pizza's on me tonight.

Thank you so much everyone for supporting Corpus Callosum. It means quite a lot us that so many people put their support (by donation and otherwise) behind this band. We not only now have the funds we need to complete our album, we now have an obligation to return your support in kind by making the best album we can possibly make. We want to make something really special and something to which each one of you will be proud to have contributed.

We will be sending more updates soon. We are talking to our top choice studios and engineers and we will record in August. So those of you who signed up for all the advanced digital rewards should expect those by late August or early September. The physical album will be shipped in the months to follow. We will let you all know as soon as we settle on an engineer and a studio and we will send video updates from the recording sessions.

Thank you so much everyone.

-Avery

I've been promising more substantive updates and here is our first: we have confirmed an artists for the album's front and back cover art! Her name is Mira O'Brien. Mira earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from UCLA in 2004 and her Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University in 2008. She currently lives in Berlin where she performs and makes site specific installation art from large pains of broken glass.

The pieces we will use for the album, however, are from her earlier period--before the glass breaking. I have long dreamed of using these paintings for our fist in-studio album and it is very fulfilling to know that this dream will be realized. We haven't made slides of them yet so we can't show you any jpg's, but I will describe them here and post a few of Mira's paintings from around the same period.

The paintings are both 4 foot wide by 6 and a half foot tall wall hangings. Both are watercolors painted on dense paper--apparently very dense watercolor paper is coveted for its ability to hold and display the vivid colors of the medium. One wall hanging depicts a cross section of a brain and the other depicts a heart. The style of each organ is a nod to the large 19th century French anatomical wall hangings the artist so admires. Each organ, though, is surrounded by animals represented with varying degrees of verisimilitude. A photo realistic wide-eyed lemur clings to the brain steam; an impressionist fruit bat hangs from one ventricle and an akida nuzzles in another; a cartoonish lunar moth rests across the cortex. The effect is at once inviting and ominous, human and animal. Perfect for Corpus Callosum.

The album will be completely white accept for the brain on one side and the heart on the other. Neither the front nor the back covers will contain any information; just these striking images.

That's it. Let me know what you all think. We are currently in conversation with our two top choices for studio engineer. Our final decision may be influenced by the level of donations over the next few weeks, so please let your friends and family know about our project and how cool it is.

Thank you very much.

-Avery

Bam! Popfly to the end zone! Go all the way to the finish line baby walrus, you're made of gold! I mean: Corpus Callosum's album project is fully funded as of now!

We are grateful to you all and we feel it is incumbent upon us to deliver you the best album we can make since you have all been so generous to us. As I mentioned in our pitch-video, however, $4000 is our absolute minimum. We have big plans for this album and we now have 32 days of fund raising ahead of us. Anyone who donates now is not only guaranteed to receive their donor gift, they are also directly contributing to the production of the album and, therefor, raising the quality of the product everyone will eventually receive. So with that in mind please continue to blog, vlog, facelog (or flog, or whatever it is you do on facebook) tweet,squeal and, yes, even talk about this project. Remember the more donors the better the product you're getting.

One last thing. I promised more substantive updates, but the funding reached %100 faster then I was expecting! So I'll have those updates very soon.

Thanks so very much everyone

-Avery

Just a quick update to all our kickstarter backers: Someone just pledge on the "nostalgia" level. I believe this was to bump us up to 2,666, the donation level of the beast. Well done donor.

On a more substantive note, we are holding off until we reach %75 funding to begin to reveal album details like the cover art. So, once we can feel more secure about actually being able to pay the people involved in production you will start to get more interesting updates.

thanks again, and welcome to our new donors.

Avery

It's day two and we are %57 funded as I write this. We have also been added to Kickstarter's list of recommended projects. Wow! I must say that we are taken aback by your levels of support. We will have to write a song for some. Neither me nor Dax have ever written a song for a person with whom we are not romantically involved... Draw your own conclusions about that, $1000 donor.

Usually, a few hours before a show starts I become convinced that no one is coming to so see us play and I start to get nervous and agitated and pace around and mutter to myself. I am entering a smiler state of anxiety with regard to the kickstarter funding. I will now pace around and mutter like a crazy person until we are fully funded. So if anyone has any good ideas about promoting the kickstarter project let me know.

Also, if you are interested in this project but do not feel like you can give it your finical backing please feel free to follow its progress by following our twitter feed at http://twitter.com/CannedCorpus and our flicker group at http://www.flickr.com/groups/corpuscallosum/.

Thanks you so much, everyone.

Avery