Kickstarter

$5,000! We're making an album!

But don't stop sharing the warm, warm love just yet!  $5,000 was just our minimum, tight-budjet estimate for recording, mixing, mastering and printing the album, as well as printing our rewards - posters, stickers, and screenprints - and paying postal to ship those rewards to you.  But we also gotta pay Amazon and Kickstarter 8-10% of our funding.  

The higher we get over the $5,000 goal, the more money we can put towards the actual album, and not towards all these extraneous costs!

The Swimming Machine runs on combustion.  Fill it with fuel – a blend of upright bass, sax, guitar, banjo, mandolin, violin, xylophone and plunger-muted trumpet. To ignite, whistle, shout, and sing.  Oxygen is required.  Stomp if it gives you any trouble. When its belly is hot, shovel the music in. 

Hi, I'm Justin Lacy, and this is The Swimming Machine.  We're a big band with lots of moving parts, stark dynamics and diverse timbres, and we want to share our original songs with you, in the form of a cohesive, full-legnth album.

Cover of Encore Magazine, Nov. 30, 2011 edition.  The full article can be found here:  http://www.encorepub.com/welcome/?p=12059

We would love for our recording debut to be a large-scale, singular work of the highest quality possible.  We can get help with recording some of the 10 songs we want to include, and 3 of them are already tracked, but mixing, mastering, printing and spending time in the studio are expensive.  

We're asking for $5,000 to kickstart our project - just enough money to get our tracks mixed, have our album mastered, and present it to you in a little environmentally friendly 4-panel digipack (hopefully not with a lot of plastic around it!).  

We got 40 days and 40 nights to reach our goal and get this machine swimming, or we receive zero funding (and thus, we're sunk). In exchange for your gracious, gracious donations, we'll send you digital downloads, posters by the lovely Brittny Roller, stickers, screenprints by the great Brian Reed, and signed copies of the printed album, before it's released.  Anyone who donates $15 or more, at any rewards tier, gets their name on our website and in the liner notes of our CD, declaring that this album would not be possible without your support.

Please help in any way you can, even if it's just Facebook liking this Kickstarter or sharing it with your friends.  We thank you so much for your support, and we hope to share our debut album with you in 2012.  

Love,

Justin Lacy and The Swimming Machine.  

P.S. We'd like to give a special thanks to Kate Winchell for giving us access to her splendid "Swamp Dandy" gator drawing and Brittny Roller for her amazing graphic design.  Also, to Adam Gilbert and Austin Stinson of Blueberry Fusion, Oliver Mellan of Freaker USA, Rob Leon, and The Soapbox Laundro Lounge for helping us make this Kickstarter video.

Video shot by Blueberry Fusion at the Soapbox Laundro Lounge, 255 N. Front St. Edited by Justin Lacy and Adam Powell, with some help from Rob Leon.