Brina Palencia Joins The Team As Author AND Actress; Interview With Ryan Kairalla!
almost 9 years ago – Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 12:09:57 PM

Welcome back to Pieces, the first project in history that's going to tell a distributed story by spreading passages across hundreds of distinct, uniquely recorded albums. Today, we have not just another voice talent to introduce, but a new author.

Brina Palencia

Brina Palencia is a Honduran-American actress and director, best known for The Walking Dead, One Piece, and Borderlands. On Pieces, she's not just a voice actress: she's also writing. She has a role to play in our story that I can't tell you about yet... to learn more, backers will have to take the individual fragments they receive across the hundreds of copies of the album and piece her tale together!

Brina's a returning talent from Music To Die Alone In Space To and I am so jazzed to be working with her again. To hear a sample of what we've accomplished together in the past, here is a copy of Music To Die Alone Space To made public by backer Annie Donahue, who chose to use Brina's voice on her copy.

Interview With Ryan Kairalla

Ryan brings three sets of talents to Pieces: he's authoring a passage, voice acting it, and he is the entertainment lawyer who contorted his brain to make sure a project this weird can actually exist, in the legal sense.

How do you obtain works for hire while making it clear to voice actors that you are going to be mangling their passages with no supervision over how they come out? How does copyright law even exist as applied to an album that's going to exist in 1,000 forms? Can existing laws handle such a thing? In this video interview, Spruke and Ryan go over what it was like to work on Pieces, as both a writer/narrator and a lawyer.

Nearly $5,000, Chris Sabat, & An Interview With Taurus Savant
almost 9 years ago – Thu, Oct 26, 2017 at 02:12:05 PM

Almost one third of the way to the goal! Guys, we are so jazzed. Please help spread the word about this groundbreaking project: we need your support to help take it across the finish line and make sure we can record all these copies, print these gorgeous art books, and hire this remarkable Hollywood talent!

Speaking of remarkable Hollywood talent...

Chris Sabat Joins The Project

Chris is best known as the voice of Vegeta from Dragon Ball Z as well as over six hundred other characters. One of those characters: a stranded astronaut who was cut loose from his spaceship. Yes, Chris rejoins our team after providing the voice for dozens of copies of Music To Die Alone In Space To. Below, a clip of Chris voicing the stranded astronaut.

 An Interview With Contributor Taurus Savant

Taurus is an R&B musician from Rochester, NY. He contributes all the source lines to the nondeterministically assembled rap in this project. There is an algorithm that randomly pairs up lines to make couplets and then syncopates them, to create unpredictable rhythms and interjections. Taurus recorded about 60 bars of rhymes to train this engine, and some of them have storyline hints (although none in the passage I'm about to link you, I'm not putting any out there yet)... Listen to a brief sample of the engine running here (note: bringing it back in time from the future distorted it a little, what a shame (ᵔᴥᵔ)) and you can hear how it scrambles, recombines, and syncopates his rhymes; then, read on to learn about what Taurus brought to the project.

Who are you?

I'm Taurus Savant! I'm a entertainer and community advocate and I love to create! It's my passion in life.

How did Spruke and you meet?

We met on Twitter! He actually lives in the adjacent town from me! I follow his work and he's good people.

What qualifications do you bring to this project, and what's some cool stuff you've done in the past?

I've been producing music for the past eleven years and did some work for other artists, as well as songwriting and recording. I also have a world of inside I enjoy sharing with the world. I put out mostly instrumental tracks for folks to listen to, and I just released a full-length album, Off My Chest on October 13 on all digital music services!

Do you have a unique point of view that comes through in your contribution?

Storytelling! I also write poetry; I feel that I have a way with words that can portray a saga and still be engaging and thoughtful. No matter the medium, I find a way to bring my own personal flair through whatever it is I'm doing so that I can be easily identified and stand out.

How did you bring your own experiences to life while working on your contribution?

I always have a lot to say so I pull from my subconscious, my ideals on life and using my words to relate to and connect with others. When you've been doing it for a long time, it comes easily.

Like Music To Die Alone In Space To, I find working on such disturbing material incredibly therapeutic. Making depressing art, for me, doesn't cause me to wallow me in my fears, but helps me deal with it by taking the horror from within and examining it under bright light where it isn't so scary. Did you find contributing to Pieces therapeutic? What other emotions did you feel while working on your Piece?

For anyone, being vulnerable can be a challenge. There's such a stigma about coming across as weak or pitiful, but there is an essence of strength that comes through when you open up and realize not only is the world not as scary as it seems, but that there are millions of folks just like us who find the courage to bear their souls. By expressing my feelings about my struggles and self-worth, I gain power over them. It's a very cathartic experience and I felt it while working on my Piece!

Over $4,000 Funded! Mikey Neumann, Colony, & Interview With Contributor Lauren Orsini
almost 9 years ago – Wed, Oct 25, 2017 at 12:35:51 PM

Pieces is off to a strong start, more than a quarter of the way to its goal one day in. I'd love to get a sense for how many of you are returning Music To Die Alone In Space To backers versus new to Pieces; if you're a returning Music to Die Alone In Space To backer, let me know in the comments! Please help spread the word about Pieces, if you can. If you know a blogger who would find this interesting, you can introduce us via email: [email protected], or via Twitter, where I'm @spruke.

We have some new names since I did the prerelease streams (on Monday, prior to launch, I did two streams showing off the content) and we didn't have Mikey Neumann or Colony on it yet. So, if you haven't checked out closely the Our Team graphic since Monday: big ups to Mikey Neumann and Colony for joining us!

Mikey is the entertainer behind the successful Movies WIth Mikey online video series. He'll be contributing voice acting. He is so, so good at conveying emotion. Here's a clip of his voice acting from my previous project, Music To Die Alone In Space To.

 Colony is a Trinidadian producer of both CDM (Caribbean Dance Music) and emo post-hardcore. On this project, he's contributing a track to the album within an album. Below, his soundcloud, to show off an example of his talent. In a later update, I'll be sharing pieces of his contribution to the album within an album, "Tracer Signals".

Official Colony On Soundcloud

Interview With Contributor Lauren Orsini

Lauren's a blogger and writer from the D.C. area, and you can hear her tape in this example: 

Why is this couple fighting? What are they fighting about? What is happening to them, during the end of America? Let's talk to Lauren.

Who are you?

I'm Lauren Orsini, a DC-area writer, journalist, and web developer. I've been blogging for eight years about fandom subculture at Otaku Journalist, but most people know me from my work at Forbes or Anime News Network.

How did Spruke and you meet?

I was a cub reporter at the Daily Dot. I shared a song from Spruke's "Tha Gatherin" project, which blends both hip hop and geeky card game Magic: The Gathering. He immediately suggested I contact Spruke for an interview. The resulting 2011 article is one of my first bylines. After that, I kept up with Spruke's continuing musical projects. I also was interested in his "day job" as a web developer, since it overlaps with my own day job. Over time, we struck up a friendship over Google Hangouts that felt natural even before we finally met in person in 2016.

What qualifications do you bring to this project, and what's some cool stuff you've done in the past?

I've been writing professionally for almost a decade now. I've self-published two books and had two more books traditionally published—Cosplay: The Fantasy of Role Play and Make: Raspberry Pi and AVR Projects. The first of those led to me getting a series of interviews on Fox News as a "cosplay expert." I am not an actor myself, but I definitely thought about the way cosplayers adjust their speech and mannerisms to convey different characters while acting out my script for the project. My co-actor in my contribution, Mitch MacDonald, IS an actor, and his advice and experience were vital during our recording.

Do you have a unique point of view that comes through in your contribution?

The most important thing I bring to this project is my extensive knowledge of DC and its landmarks. I've lived in Northern Virginia since I was seven years old. Today, I live walking distance from the Pentagon. The National Mall is just a two mile jog away. My contribution relies heavily on the sights I pass on one of these jogs. Listeners who aren't from the area might be surprised to know that the Pentagon is not heavily barricaded or anything—it's flanked by a 9/11 memorial park and a pedestrian trail that allows you to jog right past the entrance.

How did you bring your own experiences to life while working on your contribution?

It's become easier to talk about this over time, but four years ago, my husband's workplace was involved in an active shooter situation. I found out on Twitter and immediately tried to call my husband; but he wasn't picking up. I never understood what people meant about the "sinking feeling" you get in the pit of your stomach when a loved one is in danger until it happened to me. My contribution involves a dialogue between a husband and wife while DC starts to crumble around them. When I thought about how it might feel to try to call a loved one during a disaster, I thought about frantically trying to call my husband to see if he was alive.

(By the way, it turned out my husband was working with a client off-site that morning, and his first reaction was to be quite puzzled by my hysterical phone call—he wasn't aware of the situation until I told him. One of my husband's colleagues who did go to the Navy Yard that day did get shot, but survived.)

Like Music To Die Alone In Space To, I find working on such disturbing material incredibly therapeutic. Making depressing art, for me, doesn't cause me to wallow me in my fears, but helps me deal with it by taking the horror from within and examining it under bright light where it isn't so scary. Did you find contributing to Pieces therapeutic? What other emotions did you feel while working on your Piece?

Recently a friend from the west coast came to visit me. She landed at Reagan Airport and said to me, "Is this heavy feeling in the air the humidity, or is this just what DC is like ever since Trump was elected?" You might not realize DC is a very liberal town. Those of us who don't work directly for the government either have connections to it or know at least one person who does. When Trump does (or threatens to do) something crazy, like cut a government office's budget or order fighter jets that run on steam power, that affects real people I know and love. I think it's harder here than anywhere else in the country to ignore or deny the sheer insanity of 2017. I will not be able to get rid of this creeping anxiety, perhaps not for the rest of my life. But working on my piece gave me a chance to channel my anxiety toward something productive.