Hey Kidz,

 

Been a little bit of time since I last contacted you & a lot is going on. 

 

First off we just got in the remastered version of Lycia's Cold.  You can buy it on our front page.

 

Second off, in addition to the Lycia, we have four other releases coming out over the next couple months by Origami Arktika, Plumerai, mwvm, & Hotel,Hotel.  mwvm & Hotel, Hotel are both new to Silber & I'll be getting their webpages running on the Silber site in a couple weeks.  Both of them are kind of in the post-rock-drone vein that you remember from before Remora & Aarktica got hung up on writing songs.

 

Third off (THIS IS THE ONE MOST IMPORTANT TO YOU), to make space for the new releases, we are having a sale where you get a lot of our releases pretty darn cheap (wholesale plus a little for shipping).  Go to www.silbermedia.com/sale  Feel free to spread the word on this.

 

Fourth off, Remora is doing another string of shows, here are the dates:

July 11 - Pittsburgh, PA - Garfield Artworks - with Rick Gribenas, Margaret Cox, & Pancreatic Aardvarks
July 12 - Cleveland, OH - Parish Hall - with Yellow Crystal Star, The Ear is the Brain, & Spires that in the Sunset Rise
July 13 - Bellevue, OH - Strange Fest - part of music festival
July 14 - Columbus, OH - Madlab - with Ryan Jewell/Larry Marotta, Samarkand, & Devilcake

 

Fifth off, I started doing some things to make the "Silber Start" page a little more useful to anyone interested in it.  It now has a ticker tape with Silber news, a review of random sites (plan to change the site every week or two), & of course the Google search box & tons of links.  So go ahead & make it your start page. www.silbermedia.com/start

 

Sixth off, below are some relatively recent reviews.

 

hrt

Brian John Mitchell

 

VLOR: A FIRE IS MEANT FOR BURNING
Oh so much is expected of the electric guitar.  It seems always to be trying to be something else & sound like something else.  Not to belittle the new ground staked out by so many musicians, but now & again it's refreshing to hear a guitar simply being a guitar.  That seems to be a good chunk of the premise for Vlor's (Brian John Mitchell) new CD.  The pieces are solidly anchored by an arpeggiated style at times reminescent of Michael Rother's work.  Vlor stretches farther by inviting collaboration from a number of other artists & by playing with the resulting signals.  The outcome is twelve distinct yet closely related pieces that infer a carefully considered range of variations within a fairly finite set of elements.  At times these prove familiar.  "Trust in Weapons" is a very effective, interesting & simple idea because it remains simple: slowly arpeggiated chords occasionally interrupted by an irregular single note stammer.  "Potential New Sound" is just that, one of those things that happen in the studio now & again, a particularly fortunate turn of voices or combination of elementsthat actually sounds new /7, in this case, calm /7 lush.  Throughout, Mitchell's sense of restraint & economy of scale remains admirable.  In an era of infinite tracks & infinite processing we are continually reminded more does not automatically equal better.  Because the music of A Fire Is Meant for Burning chooses to repect its own limits, it succeeds where many others fail.
~ K Leimer, Expose

 

Guitarist Brian John Mitchell of Remora, Small Life Form, and other sundry units of musical attribution has assembled a nice set of peri-ambient instrumentals (save for one track featuring the diaphanous vocals of Jessica Bailiff) in the form of A Fire is Meant for Burning. The 12 tracks improvised herein by Mitchell and his six collaborators resonate most clearly as incidental soundtrack scores, with no particular unifying motif other than subdued, pastoral melodies of the horizon-gazing variety. This sameness is either the music’s biggest strength or its biggest weakness depending on one’s affinity for shoegaze strumming singularity. From this listener’s perspective, the songs wield a more convincing and interesting presence when allowed to stand on their own as discrete listening experiences. Insert any number of these tunes into a film to provide background or transitional mood to a scene and its immediately obvious where this music would have its greatest emotional effect. As it stands, A Fire is Meant for Burning wafts just enough air across the embers to keep them aglow, but it hasn’t got the fuel to produce a flame.
~ Mike Trouchon, Your Flesh

 

ALAN SPARHAWK: SOLO GUITAR
Low guitarist Alan Sparhawk's solo debut is a studied series of electric guitar improvisations which use loops and reverb to summon up orchestral effects. Although the technique is nothing new, it's refreshing to hear that Sparhawk's exploration of drone guitar is firmly dug into rock and even Metal territory. These roots are especially obvious on the occasions when his looped orchestra plays on in the background while he energetically lets rip with the kind of riff that would bring the house down at an Eddie Van Halen concert.
~ Edwin Pouncey, The Wire

 

BLACK HAPPY DAY: IN THE GARDEN OF THE GHOSTFLOWERS
Black Happy Day is a collaboration between acid folk outfit Stone Breath's Timothy Renner  and Lycia's Tara Vanflower.  In the eighties and nineties, Lycia roamed the dank, darkened halls of ethereal goth ambience, and knowing this will give you a fairly good impression of the sounds on this disc.  Their self-identification as purveyors of ambient roots music just touches on this recording.  Over the course of seven orugunals and four traditional covers, Black Happy Day create an at times discomfiting inner world where reflective banjos parry with electronica, music box ballerinas twirl through mutant gospel chants, and Eastern psychadelia drones over faux medieval atmospheres.  Unsurprisngly, In the Garden of Ghostflowers works best when the duo are not exercising dark-wave pretension and flirt with Americana, and this is best heard on the traditional covers.  For example, opener "The Leaves of Life" (also known as "Seven Virgins") becomes an acapella spiritual of deeply echoed vocals, which is quite arresting, and certainly sets the stage for all that follows.  On the original "How They Weep and Moan," processed wailing soars around a primitive banjo and vocal.  The song skirts annoying, but in the end is effective.  The disc closes with gospel number "Be Thou My Vision," the most straightforward track here.
~ Michael Meade, Skyscraper

 

HELLER MASON: MINIMALIST & ANCHORED
Heller Mason's debut recording, Minimalist & Anchored, is a quite satisfying blend of dreamy Americana and the slow/sad-core aesthetic.  Conjuring by turns Mojave 3 and the seventies folk-rockers, the band burnish their bittersweet tunes with cellos and lap steel, imbuing them with a soft amber glow that only occasionally turns twee.  Opener "After All Was Said & Done, More Was Said than Done" is a shoe-in for country-rock ballad of the year, main man Todd Vandenberg's vocals all honey and warmth.  The title tune musters all the heartbreak ever felt by Bob Wratten, and "Fools & Angels" is sensitive boy folk brought to perfection.
~ Michael Meade, Skyscraper

 

TARA VANFLOWER: MY LITTLE FIRE-FILLED HEART
Gothic preponderance in echoplex upon hallucinating a mystically morose escapade.  Imagine being buried alive, serpent in one hand & a rainbow in the other, with corrugated air swishing through your near-dead corpse approaching the delights of an impending claustrophobic grand mal seizure.  Instead of gasping for breath, lie there, mouth agape, mind dumbstruck by this aural nightmare frenzy slowly building true insanity over your embittered senses. This is a dark sojourn.  Slightly creepy, ethereal experimentation at its nefariously reflective zenith, crawling the insurmountable lenghts it takes to escape a nadir this deep, ripe witth perpetual helplessness & pain.  Tara Vanflower, at least in this permutation, gives credence to the necessary existence of straightjackets.  Going into muted zones such as these is not for the fainting heart brigade.  Although the sonorities remain light on the VU hashmasrks, her output is heavy in a heady way.  Granted, if it was all you chose to listen to indefinitely, you would need reservations at your local Rubber Room Inn.  This is certifiably no treacle diversion.  As a respite from the norm of mundanely regular existence, it fairs fruitfully, albeit a tad on the spooky end of vine -- hell-bent on a brimstone prismatic.
~ Cesar Montesano, Expose

SILBER HEARTS MOM
Celebrate how much you love your mom with the Silber Hearts Mom mixtape. It's full of ambient drones our Phil Collins-loving moms are sure to hate!
~ Paper Thin Walls

 

MINI-COMICS
I've always been a big fan of mini-comics. Spending time in the early 90s in Boston meant that every record shop, comic shop, penthouse and outhouse in a 5 mile radius carried tons of them, usually for a price so low you wouldn't blink to pay it, and get tons of reading value out of them. More to the point, with these comics you really could "see the brushstrokes" and get some real kicks out of seeing the work in progress, and know that someone out there had your own brand of odd humor. However, I never imagined that I'd see mini-comics as small as this output from Silber media.
Looking to be about the size of a large business card, and fitting exactly one panel to a page, these 22-page beauties fit just about anywhere, and are a blast to read. All three were written by Brian John Mitchell, with Mitchell, doing the art on Lost Kisses, Gardner the work on XO and Traub on Worms. That's the cover to Worms #1 on the top left.
The books cover different genres, even in only 22-26 panels. Worms is a horror/thriller, about a girl whose home is invaded by people she really doesn't expect, XO is about a guy who can't stop killing people, and an opportunity gets served up to him, and Lost Kisses is a sad kind of love story. Lost kisses alone is worth the price of the package, as it's this alternately bitter, sometimes biting, sometimes regretful look at a guy who has a lost love die at an early age. They've both moved on, and years have passed, but he hasn't figured out who to blame/hate for her death. He goes through lots of stages in a pretty short time.
~ Bart Gerardi, Paperback Reader

 

XO has strong human interactions and incredible drama.  Lost Kisses #4 is a lot of philosophical insight of the world around us.  Worms #1 contains a lot of mystery.  It entices you to keep flipping the pages to see what is actually going on with the story.  These cute little books are enjoyable to carry around in your back pocket and when boredom sits in, pull one out and ENJOY! 
~ Paul Dale Roberts, Jazma Online

 

A young man struggles with the vagaries of life in Lost Kisses, a sociopathic assassin tries to change his life in XO, and a young woman experiences a dream world in Worms.
Independent writer Brian John Mitchell crafts three very off-beat mini-comics – each one only about the size of a book of matches. The results are surprisingly deep and fascinating stories told in a minimum amount of prose and space.
In Lost Kisses a 20-something, directionless young man learns that a former girlfriend died of cancer two years ago. The story follows his reactions as he deals with guilt, the randomness of life, his own self-centeredness, and the future. XO moves in a totally opposite direction as a sociopathic hitman tries to retire from his life of death and develop a heart and conscience. In this outing he does so by agreeing to stay with his elderly grandmother while his parents go on vacation. An unexpected event, however, could set his plans for redemption back. Finally, in the last mini-comic, Worms, a young woman finds herself wrapped up in a nightmare involving strange things, shadowy conspiracies, and a fight for her life.
Mitchell proves to be an able and capable writer, perfectly capturing voices and spirits with just a few words. His protagonist in Lost Kisses is someone readers have either known or been ourselves – a young person trying to make sense of an insane world that seems to ask much of us and ask nothing of us by turns. The ruminations are silly, funny, sad and serious – just like life itself. With Worms, Mitchell’s writing style changes drastically and here he perfectly captures the voice and logic of the dream world. Things happen, things that make no logical sense but, as with any dream or nightmare, the sleeping mind simply accepts it. The reader travels along with the unnamed protagonist, wrapped up in a story that, while the details are different, feels like a place many sleepers have been in their own dreams. The third of these mini-comics is also in many ways the weakest of the three. While XO strives for black humor and dark satire it still feels a bit hollow. The unnamed protagonist remains distant throughout the story and so takes some of the bite out of both the irony and satire.
The art is as diverse as the titles themselves. Lost Kisses is penciled and inked by Mitchell himself and consists of a series of stick figures. Despite the limitation one might think this would impose, Mitchell manages to make the simple figures quite expressive and subversively fun. XO features the work of Melissa Spence Gardner and is, perhaps, more what most readers are used to. Her work has a cartoonish quality with a bit of an amateurish gloss still to it but it works for the feel of these home-grown comics. Besides that, Gardner manages to create effective figures that move well within the story. The final artist is Kimberlee Traub for Worms. Kimberlee’s style is very abstract – some pages put one in mind of a Picasso print. While, to a certain extent, this is perfect for the nightmare world of the comic, the panels do, occasionally, get a little too abstract, making it difficult to understand what is supposed to be going on in the panel.
For a flavor of something a little different, any of these three comics would be worth the purchase price. Be forewarned, the little books can easily slip out of your hands but on the other hand they are immensely portable and can go anywhere with you.
~ Tonya Crawford, Broken Fontier

 

While we’re on the subject of people who were nice enough to send me comics, I really ought to mention Brian John Mitchell, who contacted me a while back about sending me a few of his mini-comics.
I’m not really what you’d consider a mini-comics guy–unless of course said mini-comics involve the One-Man Army Corps–but I’m always interested in seeing new stuff, so I asked for a few and he sent them over.
And the first thing I noticed, of course, was how tiny they are.
About 2 postage stamps, I'd say.
I imagine that’s the first thing everyone notices when they see them, since Mitchell’s putting the mini back in mini-comics with his work, and it’s a novel format that I found utterly charming when I sat down to read them. Each of the three he sent me (one issue each of XO, Worms, and Lost Kisses), is around 44 pages, with each page as a single panel, and while they’re not really my thing, they’re pretty enjoyable.
Pictured above is Lost Kisses, which, coincidenally enough, probably best fits my stereotypical definition of “mini-comic,” seeing as it’s an autobiographical tale done in the fine art of stick figures, where Mitchell deals with finding out an ex-girlfriend of his recently died of cancer. And it’s the best by far, mostly because of jokes like this:
"Stick with me & you won't get cancer!" "I think I'd prefer the cancer."
[If I had a nickel for every time this happened to me...]
In another novel concept, all of Mitchell’s comics can all be viewed as videos or purchased as physical copies on the website, so if you’re curious, check it out.
~ Chris Sims, Invincible Super Blog