Check it out! There are new photos and concert posters in the gallery! Earlier this year I had finished getting this website up to speed in terms of design and functionality (with exception to the turkish section). However, I found myself unable to find time to take things to the next step: actually fill the site with content. The gallery was easily the most lacking part of the site and now I bit the bullet and finally put stuff in there to look at. I plan to take new press photos soon for the upcoming release and post those as well.
Woah, you go to bed one night and suddenly 8 months go by. I haven’t exactly been doing nothing though: Russian Spy Camera’s third album was finished tracking in May but since then it’s been a slow and steady climb through the mixing process. After the album was finished being tracked in May, I moved myself out of Athens Georgia and over to Barcelona, Spain. The plan is/was to live as an immigrant for a year in another country. Fortunately it’s allowing me to focus on many things like this website, my portfolio, the record, and other work while traveling. In 5 days I will relocate to Vienna, Austria, which is one of my favorite cities on earth.
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Today marks the first day of tracking for Russian Spy Camera’s third album. There is currently no title or release date for the upcoming record yet but there are 9 confirmed tracks, 2 potential tracks, a dozen possiblities, and a working title for the album, M. You can read more about M in the music page.
Today we put down drums and bass for three songs: “Let’s Draw Straws”, “M Withdrawals”, and “Cliche Pop Song”. Donovan Babb plays drums and Alec Wooden plays bass. CK Koch is recording and helping me produce the record as we start the steady climb to completion.
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Today’s the greatest day I ever lived
and I spend it all alone with Solitude
in Beyoğlu.
People here speak in coded embers
that hypnotize me with their pretty patterns.
I moved you like a crossing ship and you moved me too.
Today’s the greatest day I’ve ever lived
and I spent it all alone with tea for two
in Beyoğlu.
Somehow somewhere I know this circle
will complete itself (even in a spiral)
and together complete us too.
M.
So lately I’ve been doing a ton of web design and this means listening to a ton of music. I’m kind of an “album” guy. I grew up on albums. I love albums. It’s kind of a dying thing nowadays but sometimes a song sounds better within the context of the album it sits on.
Anyway, so Lodger, David Bowie’s 1979 album and the last of his famed “Berlin Trilogy”, is this amazing underrated and overlooked record. For those not familiar with David Bowie’s crazy history, here’s a quick catch-up: In 1976, David Bowie moves from L.A. to Berlin with Iggy Pop to kick his cocaine habit that L.A. had been supporting. He and Iggy Pop live together in an apartment in West Berlin and he manages to beat his addiction… but then gets addicted to heroine. And as if the story couldn’t get much more legendary, he proceeds over the next three years to produce Iggy Pop’s first two solo albums and record three records of his own that are considered now to be among his finest artistic achievements: Low, “Heroes”, and Lodger.
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So as it’s been posted in the past, Russian Spy Camera’s third album is in the works. I’ve been trying to write songs for the past 2 years but I’ve been in a severe case of writer’s block. And when I say writer’s block, I mean don’t-even-want-to-look-at-a-guitar-writer’s-block. Fortunately, this is all kind of going away and I’ve been writing some new stuff lately. Though I credit my recent Queen and David Bowie binges (I listened to all 14 of Queen’s studio albums in a row over the course of 3 days!) as being events that started turning the hamster wheels of inspiration, I think it was the sudden creation of a song I wrote last week that really lit a fire under me. More of that will come later though. Read more of this article…
I’ve been doing a bit of work on the store section lately, mainly getting it all organized to sell tracks and album downloads. I’ve decided to do the music sales through Bandcamp because it’s free to set up, it’s customizable enough to look like its apart of russianspycamera.com and it seems to be about helping artists. Not a bad deal!
The in-site store needs a bit more work such as a jQuery pretty photo viewer so that you can look over some pics of the product by clicking on its respective icon. I also need to actually take those pictures to put on the site. All in due time… all in due time.
Anyway, check out the store as both albums are up for digital download and You Are A Vulture is also there for a physical purchase. Hopefully in the new year I’d like to make some t-shirts and posters and get those going. There will be updates!
This is a blog post I posted on the blog of the company I work for: J House Media.
“Let us prove to the world that good taste, good art, and good writing can be good selling.” The man who said this quote is Bill Bernbach, one of the three founders of Doyle Dane Bernbach (DDB). You may not know him but you certainly know his work.
Doyle Dane Bernbach, one the most legendary advertising agencies in history, created what is considered to be the most effective and successful advertising campaign the western world has ever seen: 1959′s “Think Small” Volkswagen advertisements. DDB essentially took a German car originally created for Adolph Hitler (the Volkswagen Beetle) and sold it to post-war Americans through radically styled advertisements. Read more of this article…
My friend Mark got me into You’re The Man Now Dog a few years back, also known as YTMND. If you don’t know what You’re The Man Now Dog is, it’s kind of hard to explain at first. The website describes themselves as “a site created for the purpose of furthering the creativity of its users. It stems from an idea that, using sound, and image, and some text, the users can convey a point, funny, political, or otherwise, to the general media.” Read more of this article…
So here we are… like two young lovers feeling each other’s skin in the dark. I’m not exactly sure as to how you start off blogs as this is something new to me. Perhaps I should start by explaining why this is here. Actually, perhaps I should say why this entire site is here. I mean, there’s an enormous amount of blogs on the interwebs and I suppose the need for another one is kind of pointless, right?
Basically, Russian Spy Camera is my life-long musical project, but it’s also my platform for doing whatever I want. This is actually the 4th incarnation of Russian Spy Camera dot com (and the closest to an actual real website), and since the very beginning I’ve put everything from photography to music to graphic design on my sites. So, that’s why this site is here: to serve as a multilevel platform for my artistic interests and musical endeavors. Read more of this article…
