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UPDATE: REACH GOALS!
First of all, let me just say that we are completely blown away by the support you've shown us over the last few days. We were genuinely concerned that we would not be able to make this album at all and you beautiful, insane idiots blasted through the goal in 4 days! So again, thank you from the bottom of our disgusting hearts.
Needless to say, we were not prepared for this and it took us a little bit of time to come up with some reach goals. So today we got together, tossed around a bunch of ideas, talked to some people about what things cost, and came up with 2 new goals.
REACH GOAL #1 - $11,000
If we can raise $11,000, we'll be able to afford string and brass players to accompany us on our album. We've got plenty of stuff already written that was probably going to need to be handled by a computer to cut production costs but now we would get to use REAL INSTRUMENTS and REAL PEOPLE to play them. This is a major upgrade and also means that we have a lot more freedom in what we write. If we hit this goal, the album will sound bigger, weirder and cooler, guaranteed, so we would absolutely love this opportunity!
REACH GOAL #2 - $15,000
If we can hit this goal, and we've already discussed this with our video guy, we'll be able to produce two music videos. This will hopefully bring some of these songs to life in a way that only the visual medium can. We could just make the one, but making two costs only a little bit more and why make one when you can make two? DUH! As stated, they will both probably be very dangerous and we can assure you that none of the budget will go towards safety, first aid, or medical bills. Furthermore, our backers will get to see a bunch of behind the scenes footage as we make them and get free downloads of both videos.
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HOLY HELL, FINALLY!
For the past year and a half we've been nomads. Even when we weren't touring across the country playing shows, breaking things, losing teeth, bronzing, laughing, whining, puking, shivering, and sweating, we never had a home. We were setting our gear up in storage units, parking garages, basements, wood shops, and anywhere else we weren't instantly chased out of to work on a bunch of weird, loud songs to make our second full length album. And now those songs are done. Fucking finally.
This obviously pleases us for a whole mess o' reasons, but also puts us in the uncomfy position of having all the material for an amazing record and none of the resources to actually RECORD and PRESS the damn thing! Now, we understand money can be made any number of ways, but if you know anything about us, you know we have no skills to speak of. Chris tells me has bow-hunting skills but he's lying and, let's be honest, bow-hunting is probably the only career path more doomed to fail than being in a stupid band like ours. SO - Since Kickstarter has provided this awesome platform for the new music business model, we figured we'd give it a shot!
THIS AIN'T NO CHARITY
We go on the internet. We've seen the excitement over Kickstarter Projects and we've heard the unavoidable criticism. Some feel that Kickstarter has provided a platform for artists to use their celebrity (whatever little bit of celebrity they may have) to sell phone calls, skype sessions and retweets to fund their lifestyle and not their art. That's not the point of Kickstarter and that's definitely not the point of OUR Kickstarter Project.
- First of all, our entire collective celebrity is worth about $12/year total. That's about one pizza pies worth. Your mother can achieve that level of fame by going to the same pizza place every couple of weeks and ordering the same thing.
- Second of all, if you take a look at our rewards section, you will see that we're treating this as more of preorder than a fundraiser and offering products and services with real world value (t-shirts, CDs, screen printed posters, recording time, per-order music, priceless collections, etc).
- Third of all, we are VERY good at spending money and you can rest assured that not one dime donated will be pocketed by any member of the band or go to anything other than expenses DIRECTLY related to the launch of this record. This isn't going to feed us, pay our rent, buy our clothes or even go to other band expenses such as gas money or gear. The more money that comes in, the more stuff we make (vinyls, more art/packaging, etc), end of story.
THE PLAN
We're looking for $8,000 to get this thing made. Some will say that's low, some will say that's high, but the bottom line is that we didn't make it up. We just did the math and that's simply how much making our record the way we want to is going to cost.
So what does that mean? How do we want to make it?
If you're only interested in getting what many would call 'the gist', then skip the next two paragraphs.
- First, we want to record it at Square Studios with none other than our main man Steven Sopchak AKA The Dewmaster AKA The Internet. You may recognize his name from the liner notes of albums by ICE NINE KILLS, SUCH GOLD, THE ATARIS or maybe you know him as the genius behind the production of our last EP, The Pits. The man's insane, mountain-dew-fueled fervor for getting the biggest sounds ("the drums need to shake the fucking earth" -Chris) is matched only by his attention to detail, making him the only guy we'd trust to polish up the layered, chaotic mess we're about to make.
- Now, we're old, so we come from a strange and ancient generation where people went to stores and bought their music on an actual piece of what is scientifically known as matter. They then put that thing in their computer, copied the data onto an iPod (we're not that old), and put it on their shelf never to be listened to again. But that thing was pretty cool! It came with art, lyrics and looked awesome in your collection of similar objects. It was also something you could buy from the band at their merch table, where you knew the money was going to support their touring and not to some major online distributor. So we want to make those, and we want them to look REAL pretty.
WHAT'S IN IT FOR YOU?!
As we've stated, this Kickstarter Project is less about old-fashioned begging in the modern era and more about offering some unique deals, products and services to the people who trust that we're going to make a cool album and who want to make sure it gets made. These are things that all those idiot peasants who find out about us AFTER this album comes out are never going to have a chance to get. Your faith in us now is worth a lot and we worked VERY hard to come up with as many ways to reward that as possible.
A list of what you get at each pledge level is to the right and should be your first stop after reading this sentence but if you're lookin' for a visual aid, check the section below.
SHOW ME THE GOODS!!!
(PLEASE NOTE: Some of these designs have not been finalized. For example, images of album art, stickers, screen print posters, exclusive kickstarter posters are for illustration purposes only. We'll be updating the images as soon as we get more info.)
You got anything REALLY special?
The following rewards are one-of-a-kind. AKA, REALLY special.
Yeah, but what will you DO for me?
THE END!!
Risks and challenges
The immediate goals are pretty simple (recording, pressing) and we've made sure to work with people we trust to limit some of the risks and hang ups we've encountered in the past. As we've said, this ain't our first rodeo. We're even prepared to cover for each other in the event of some personal injury since most of can play each other's instruments. We've got back up pressing options. We've done our best to think of everything here since we can't really afford to not get this thing together.
That being said, weird things are always possible. We live very... uncertain lives. The amount of time and dedication it takes to work on something like this means we have to take a pass on a lot of the things that might make life more.... certain. For example, at this point, all of our cars are broken. Seriously, all of them. We've been bumming rides instead of fixing them. That's not to say that money from this Kickstarter is going to go towards any of that, as I hope we've made clear at this point, but things like that in our personal lives occasionally do delay our plans. We could run into necessary medical treatment, legal trouble, who knows! My point is, anything is possible but you can rest assured that If something weird comes up, our backers will be the first to know.
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Funding period
- (30 days)