It's been pretty exciting working on our new record and we wanted to share with you our journey so far. Winter was pretty peaceful and warm in Brooklyn, which means we didn't have to retire our bicycles for the season. Together we have been reigning in our lives to hunker down in various studios, catching concerts and visiting art galleries for inspiration between sessions.

We've been studying Tantric Buddhism, meditation, yoga, nutrition, and developing practices to strengthen our foundation as we architect our current project. This has really helped us develop technical discipline as well as creative expansiveness while maintaining a balanced lifestyle. The book True Perception by Chogyam Trungpa has really served as a guiding light. So have groceries from the farmers market. We've also started drinking tea made from the mushroom of immortality every day.

In the studio, it has been breakthrough after breakthrough. Phil Moffa at Butcha Sound has been an incredible guide. Working with him is like playing on the 1992 USA basketball dream team—it's all alley oops and slam dunks. He's contributed so much already and we still have more work to do with him. It makes us cringe to think of putting out a record with a couple hits and a bunch of filler songs, so we're treating each song as a masterpiece, spending several weeks on each one. They sound amazing so far. It's a lot more work than we predicted because we're really raising the bar for ourselves, and it's been really worth it. We're lucky to have input and perspective from a lot of our musical heroes we get to call friends—so far members of the bands Great Tiger, Tayisha Busay, Little Star Dweller, Vinyl Life, and Shark? have all contributed to our creative process in some way. It's glorious.

With a lot of reflection and focus, we've developed a new vision of our live performance that will include both the mediums of music and video that together will deliver our message more powerfully. This is really exciting, and we've already begun making the video art. So this album will be intended to be performed from start to finish in accompaniment with our video projection, which will sync with the music and help tell the story. We are visual creatures, and it's really fun to create visuals that will compliment the already very exciting music.

We're turning down offers to perform live until the record is complete and our new live set is mastered. When will this be? We hope soon, so we can get back on stage. But lacking patience will lead to shortcomings in the creation process, so we are making a point of not rushing. We still have a few songs left to go. That's all we can tell you for now without giving too much away. In the meantime, we're still DJing as an way to deliver musical energy in the city. Our next DJ gig is on May 15 at Dominion NYC for Chappo's album release party. If you want to come tear things up with us, tickets are going fast but you can grab some here.

That's it for now! We'll post again soon with some photos.

Planet Rump

To our loyal fans and friends who have pledged allegiance to the Rump:

THANK YOU so much for supporting our campaign!!!  It turned out to be a smashing success and, in the words of Mr. Miyagi "Your faith in us gives us the strength to fly".

It's been a fun winter so far. The weather here in Brooklyn has been incredibly mild and we can still ride bikes around town.  We mostly ride the bikes to dance parties and concerts—otherwise we've been staying inside working on writing and recording music.  We've begun our sessions at Butcha Sound Studios and it has been really amazing—the Butcha is very passionate and professional.  We'll start posting some cool photos of that sort of stuff on this blog, so stay tuned for more updates!

In the meantime, we have a very special Valentine's Day DJ mix for you because this year, Planet Rump is your valentine!  You can stream or download (by right-clicking) this link.  Be sure to give Planet Rump a big kiss on the cheeks next time you see us!

<3 Forever yours,

Planet Rump

PS Planet Rump's DJ Tantric will be spinning at Glasslands (Brooklyn) on February 17 and Tayisha Busay will be playing live!  Come out and see us tear the roof off the place!

Hey awesome Planet Rump backers!

Since we've made such great progress already due to your support, we'd like to express our gratitude by creating a special DJ mix to share EXCLUSIVELY with all of our backers!

Here's another chance for you to participate:  We're asking YOU to request a song to put in the mix!  That's right, we're making YOU part of the DJ team! This may be the first international listener-created DJ mix in all of Kickstarter history. Let's try to make the theme dancey, OK? Just leave a comment here with your request!

We'll take your requests until the end of the campaign, then mix 'em together and email you a link to stream and download! We'll make it our Valentine's Day gift to you!

<3 <3 <3 Planet Rump

Thank you to all our wonderful backers! We made our goal of $2,000 in less than a week---thanks to your generous donations! We'd love to keep the momentum going an unofficially increase our goal to $5,000! The extra funding will enable us to spend more time in the studio, write more songs, and even make a music video, all by Spring 2012! Please spread the word to anyone you think may be interested in supporting our project. We couldn't do this without you!

Love and appreciation,

Planet Rump