Hi all,

I’m glad to say that I am now endorsed by AHEAD drumsticks! I will be joining an artist roster which includes Lars Ulrich, Tommy Lee, and one of my favorite drummers, David Silveria of KoRn!

I highly recommend AHEAD sticks to drummers of all types, so check out their offerings here: http://www.aheaddrumsticks.com

 Hey everyone! 

This Friday, January 7th, our new video will be premiering on the internet! Before it, does, we’ll be doing a live internet performance from our studio via the web at: 

http://www.ustream.tv/user/vertigovenus

Join us at 6:30pm MST on Ustream for a live performance from our studio. followed by the premiere of the Video on YouTube.com.  The Video will premiere at 7:30pm MST at our YouTube channel at 

http://www.youtube.com/vertigovenus

We’re very, very excited about this video, so we hope you join us for it. This is the first video we’ve ever had that features all of us in glorious HD, professionally shot video.  Rip Williams (http://www.ripwilliamsphotography.com), a great local Photographer, shot it, along with Steve Groves (http://www.esi-media.com), Jason Alexander (www.wolfnetarchives.com), Deyona Gundlach (www.otakuphy.com), and Brad Cole ( www.i-systems.us)  We’re very lucky to have the group of people who shot this for us, so we hope that you’ll join us for it.

To RSVP for the event, click here: 

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=187807004564362

Please spread the word, tell others, tune in!  Thank you all for your support! 

-brian, Vertigo Venus 

Which is why I don’t blog very much. 

But here’s the gist.  

In July I released two CDs.  One of which, “SOS”, I released with my band, Vertigo Venus.  It dropped on July 9th, 2010, with a CD release at The Launchpad in Albuquerque.  The Strand, from Arizona (one of my favorite Industrial bands), played a set, and kids got rowdy.  It was quite nice to finally release a CD that was the culmination of the hard work of a group of people I love.

Soon after, I released a CD, one that I’ve been meaning to release for a long, LONG time.  It’s called “Welcome to Postwar USA”, and it’s the culmination of about ten or so years of writing, self-doubt, and re-construction.  I’m pretty happy with it.  I released it with only 100 CD copies, about 70 of which are left.  It’s for sale over in the store, if you’re interested, or you can get it digitally at all your favorite e-tailers. 

I had a CD release on July 24th, 2010, at Burt’s Tiki Lounge.  The Booty Green played, which made me very happy, and so did Vertigo Venus, the band with whom I plan to take over the world. The interesting thing about this day was that we’d already played a show earlier that day, in Farmington, NM; 200 miles away from Albuquerque.  So, I drove 400 miles in one day, and played three concerts.  I work really, really hard.  I was joined onstage by my friend Clint, who destroyed my beats and sounds with his unique noise/FSU sound.  I think it was pretty good.  Some super great fans bought the CD, and supported the hell out of me.  I’m really grateful for that. 

Some time passed, some more shows were played, and now another birthday has came and went.  I’m now 30 years old, and I feel like I’m only getting started on all the work I have to do. 

I’m pursuing a lot of avenues right now, including a radio promotion for Vertigo Venus, an Ableton Certification, and a lot of other hard work.  I’m keeping myself on the path to do things I want to do; play Coachella, tour heavily, and be a successful musician. Nothing, NOTHING will stop me from doing this. 

Thanks to everyone who reads things like this, supports me, and continues to listen to me.  You mean the world to me.  Thank you. 

/brian

It’s been about ten years, tons of various releases, and now I’m finally doing a CD release.

It’s a CDr, yes… but I don’t personally want to release a full-on silverback CD right now.

The CD is nine tracks:

Hey all, my band, Vertigo Venus, has got a TON of great shows coming up, and we hope to see you out!

Firstly, we’re opening for the RED ELVISES at Corazon in Santa Fe, NM on May 17th:

This is sure to be an AWESOME show!

Next up, we’ve got a great gig in Santa Fe again, at Warehouse 21 – ALL AGES and FREE!

We follow that up with a REALLY IMPORTANT GIG. On May 26th, we’re playing an instore appearance at Hot Topic at the Coronado mall in Albuquerque. yeah, that’s right.

So here’s the deal. We need as many people as we can get at this gig. Why? Because if we can show HT management that we kick ass (which we do), they’ll sell our new CD. That means a lot of good things for us.

so, what we need YOU to do is show up at 5:30pm to Hot Topic in Coronado mall, ready to rock. Bring EVERY FRIEND YOU HAVE with you! PLEASE! I know we ask a lot of you, but this is REALLY important!

And Finally, we are still selling tickets for our june 6th show with SLICK IDIOT, featuring former members of KMFDM and PIGFACE, for only FIVE DOLLARS! This is sure to be an AMAZING GIG. Get in touch with us at vertigovenus@gmail.com to purhcase your tickets, do it now!

Thank you as always for your support, it means THE WORLD to us!

-brian, drums

On friday, Feb. 19th, we played a gig in Santa Fe at Corazon, a great upcoming bar on the corner of Guadalupe and Montezuma Ave owned by Mikey Baker (a phenomenal guitarist whom I’ve always admired for his work in The Gluey Brothers, amongst other projects). The event was a fundraiser for Current Mayor David Coss; we’re not a band to take political stances on things, besides “politics suck”, but we decided to do this event because, we rarely get to play Santa Fe, and a number of people we respect were involved.

So, let it be said that we don’t really support any politician; but, we do support rocking out. And that we did.

As DJ Featherricci dropped some tracks, we loaded in (dressed to the nines, as we often are), set up shop, and after an intro by MC Max Friedenburg, we were rolling with our first song, “Everybody Down”. People were a bit put off, but by the time we were dropping our cover of “She bop”, they were grooving. Some folks were obviously confused; let’s face it, Santa Fe isn’t our scene. We don’t play there much, and it usually caters to a much different crowd. Jeff worked them over with his usual dry and razor sharp wit, Jesi blew their faces off with her keys, Chris and Kenny held it down, and I did my best to continue to beat the hell out of my drumkit. As people loosened up (likely thanks to liquor), things got better. By the time we closed with “Punk rock cheerleader”, they were electrified enough to even sing along! We destroyed things as we usually do with our closer; cymbals flying about, lots of noise from Chris and Ken.

We were called back for an encore, which is not something we’re used to getting to do, and so we dropped our cover of “Dancing by myself” by Billy Idol, got people dancing, and hopefully wanting more.

As we packed up our gear, MC Max stood on the stage and asked the Mayor to say a few words, the first of which was, “I love Vertigo Venus!”. You don’t get to hear that too much about a riotous synhpunk act playing to a crowd that’s used to blues or latin jazz on a friday night.

A good night in general, and well-attended; Corazon can definitely pack in the heads. We look forward to making our way up to Santa Fe more often, so look out Sfe-ans. We’re coming for you.

/brian

My band, Vertigo Venus’ song, “Everybody Down”, has been selected for the Reverbnation Playlist 7 promotion, which is a pretty big thing, we get one week of featured play starting monday the 15th, so I just wanted to throw out whatever lines I could to ask people to check the song out when it drops. The URL is:

http://www.reverbnation.com/playlist7

The song will be free thru the playlist7 site for a week, so the more downloads, the better for us, because we can keep getting featured.

So, if you’re looking for some music that’s outside the scope of most of the rock bullshit currently being played ad nauseum, check it out.

Thanks!

Late, late afterthoughts, I know.

I went out to Anaheim, CA to check out winter NAMM on January 14th.  The show was well attended, with thousands of people, as per usual. I went out with the guys from Five12 software, as well as my good friend, Jason Wolf. We arrived on thursday and set up shop in our hotel room just across the street from the Anaheim convention center.

Walking into the packed center (thousands of people were in attendance, after all), I found that many of the usual suspects were exhibiting, such as Ableton, MOTU, and Korg.  Some, however, were sadly absent,  most notably Native Instruments, as well as some companies I know well, such as Audiocubes, and no editors from Computer Music Magazine.  I suspect that much of this was the cost of setting up at the event; it’s a huge, huge expense, and one that more and more companies are finding is not something they can work into their budget.

Another interesting happening was Avid’s almost total lack of a booth; their exhibition space literally was a chunk of floor, a single Avid sign marking it.  One display case showed off some Avid products, such as the Eleven Rack and Digidesign Mbox – but no more than that.  It was truly sad, actually; the booth felt lifeless, with no excitement about new products, or showing off the current products offered by Avid.  It’s unclear how Avid is planning on marketing themselves outside of their new slogan – “We’re Avid”.

One surprising exhibitor was  Teenage Engineering, showing off their OP-1 modular hardware synthesizer, which featured an FM radio scanner with the ability to sample FM radio signals and use the sampled sound as an Oscillator:

I was impressed by the hardware, but I don’t think that the $800 suggested price point will get me to buy one.  One cleaver feature on the synth was shown by pressing a key, which then displayed info about the hardware, with PRICE: proudly displayed.  Turning a knob made the price go up or down – showing that T.E. doesn’t yet have a total cost set in stone.

Of course, there was goodness by Access with the Virus TI:

Some lovely analog synths by Surfin’ Kangaroo:

Guitar Stomp boxes:

And one piece of gear I really looked forward to seeing, but was sadly very let down by; the Roland AX-synth Keytar:

I had high hopes for this piece of gear, but it was one of the cheapest feeling keyboards I’ve ever held.  Being made by Roland, I’d expect a sound brain capable of some serious sonic power – unfortunately, the sounds were like that of a cheap Casio.  “Trumpet”, “Guitar”, and “Piano” were amongst the sound choices, which resulted in horrible, super simple sounds that I couldn’t see anyone ever wanting to use.  Of course, you could route this into a synth of your own, but with a $1500 price tag, I can’t understand or justify buying this thing.  C’mon Roland, I expected better.  The only good feature found on this synth is a d-beam, and that’s not saying much.

I also attended a number of NAMM parties, including “Wham, Bam, Thank you NAMM” at the Downtown Independent movie theater in LA, which was quite the throwdown; sets from Henry Strange, Moldover, and the ever-cool Trifonic and the IDM man-beast Richard Devine, along with softaware demos (by yours truly of Five12′s Numerology software) and lots more goodness.

On Saturday night I attended Ableton’s VIP party.  Ableton, having announced “The Bridge” – a new way for software to talk to Ableton, along with their partnership with Serato DJ software, took over a tiny LA bar and turned it into Ableton HQ.   I’m a big fan of Ableton, so this was a real honor to attend.  I think we ended up in the super-VIP area at some point, because Velvet ropes surrounded us, Serato and Ableton team members sat with us, and no one kicked us out

And, of course, there were the late night sessions in the Hotel room with Five12′s Numerology, four macs, and a ton of gear thanks to my pal Jason Wolf, Jim Coker (Five12′s main man), and Geoff White:

I also had the chance to meet the Soundcloud team, which was very cool; got to pick their brains about future software integration, having just heard that the Presonus Studio One software now supports Export to Soundcloud.  Always loving what these guys do.

I saw some new hardware by Steinberg, the CI2 studio controller:

And a slew of drums, of course.  Pearl released an analog drum kit with electronic drum kit capability, which could prove quite useful for many drummers.

I also got to see Richard Devine throw down some demo sets at the Toontrack Booth:

So yeah, I was quite busy   I was liveblogging/tweeting/live video feeding a lot of this from my G1 phone, which kept me quite busy.

I made my way home with Jason late sunday night, and was glad to see my own bed.

The big winner at this NAMM, as far as I’m concerned, was Analog Synthesis; it seems to be making a real comeback. Lots of super-wirey synths were all around, squelchy noises abound, and plenty of geekery to be had.

Overall, NAMM was enjoyable as always.  However, I have to question how viable NAMM will be, over time; it’s a great place to network, but it rarely equals any deals for independents in the music industry.  Many developers and companies don’t see much from NAMM, simply because their audience isn’t there.  Their audience is out in bars, clubs, home studios, garages, and bedrooms, making music.  That’s where many companies need to focus, and I think that we’re going to see a turn in this direction over time.  Many companies are dropping out of NAMM, and as time goes on, you may see less and less of the big names setting up their booths at the big show.

However, this could lead to a renaissance in the show; smaller companies and developers might find their way into the show more easily (Teenage Engineering is an example of this – a new, first year company, getting onto the main floor in their first show? Quite impressive), and therefore, new growth in the direction of grassroots music industry sales and business.

The question of how Viable NAMM is will remain to be answered, but for now, it can still be said that if you want to know what’s going on in the music instruments and music industry, check out NAMM.

Our new song, “Everybody Down”, is available now ONLY to those who sign up as a Victim of Vertigo Venus . It takes about one second to do, and you get free shit if you do. So, do it:

Or don’t, be a little bitch, and we’ll laugh at you. That’s what we do here.

Hey everyone, I’m happy to announce that the software synthesizer I did sound design for in the KVR 2009 Developer Challenge, FMMF by Delamancha, has taken 3rd place in the competition! I’m super proud. Download it for Windows here: http://bit.ly/vhfWr

Thanks to all those who voted for the synth! It means a lot.