Development.

June 14th, 2014

I am still pretty frustrated with Facebook's "holier than thou" approach on many things. Most are aside from this topic, but wanting to switch the name from "Battle Cry" to "Newline Character" on my friend account should not be the issue that is. At this point, I doubt it would accept the name at all, thus to not continue to confuse people, I will have to close the account and lose the contacts contained within. This is aside from Facebook outright demanding persons use their real names. Granted I'm old, but pre-Facebook days, it was pretty stupid to run around blasting your real name on the Web and from what I continue to learn in school....that's more dangerous now than ever. So, please don't think I'm paranoid...I'm just cautious :).

Onto the much bigger topic at hand. Newline Character is still in the planning stages with the only content being some visuals to use as a profile picture and album photo for the Facebook page. This is merely just the beginning. Visually, which I still believe is very important to a project or band, I will be designing the a logo myself which will include at least a variation of the programming character "\n". I'm not as fluent in logo design as I'd like to be and that is such an important piece that I would even be willing to hire someone temporarily who is more skilled in Illustrator, for example. I'm also planning/designing a site to house all of my musical projects: Battle Cry, LaconicAura, and Newline Character. I plan on coding/embedding the songs myself rather than using third party (like SoundCloud), who would be just another cost above the website itself.

Musically: (influences) I continue to be on a huge kick of 1990/2000s Gary Numan. Albums like Sacrifice, Exile, Jagged have been driving me pretty hard. Massive Attack's been feeling like a comfortable vibe. Of course there are more common influences such as Front Line Assembly, Front 242, Skinny Puppy, The Cure, and so on....not all electronic either. Switchblade Symphony also has been giving me some mental notes on a sound I want to at least start off with. There's also a lot to be said about acoustic use too, especially if I upgrade from my Epiphone acoustic guitar to an Ovation acoustic. The concept of Newline Character is to not really have a "sound" based on a genre. The ever evolving/changing entity.

One newer development that I have been playing with in my head is that I think, unlike Battle Cry, Newline Character might not end up being a solo project. I've been playing with the idea of getting it "set up" and then looking for people to collaborate with. Other than loving to mix creatively and come up with things out of the box that I wouldn't have thought of myself, with school: I have less time to spend on music as a hobby. I used to be able to sit and play and work with a song for 4 hours at a time quite often. That's still likely but maybe not as often. In short, I'm finally starting to grow tired of doing everything myself. Unsure on if I'll still ever play live though. Word of mouth is my method I suppose.