In the midst of producing the next VUA album, The Sounds of Zero, co-producers Bilian and John LaSala recently got Josh Wentz  on the horn for a bit of a chat and to preview some of the new music. And you can hear it on his new podcast, Radio non Grata.  Go have a listen!

Well, after a prolonged silence, VUA is getting ready to bust out with more music than you can shake a stick at.  An album—and then some—more than a year in the making is getting achingly close to wrapping up. Stay tuned for more on that over the coming weeks.

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This is a re-posting from our blog at The RPM Challenge (that yearly challenge to record a whole album in one month), announcing VUA’s plan for this year.  Click to read on: Read the rest of this entry »

Very Us Artist superstar, Joshua Wentz, puts out a quarterly ’zine called HEY! Quarterly. The latest issue, HEY Junction!, has just come out, and it features a heated conversation between HEY and VUA. Only one can survive. And it’s three against one.

To read this remotely-conducted bloodbath, get yourself a copy today. And the logomachical showdown between him and us is only a drop in the bucket of all the cool stuff you’ll find between (and on!) the covers. There are contributions from several other Very Us Artists in there, too. It’s only $12 and all the proceeds go to charity, specifically The Anti-Cruelty Society. Being rather unfond of cruelty, your animal friends will admire you for it.Order HEY Junction!or even better: Subscribe to HEY! Quarterly(Either way you’ll be a hero to your animal friends.)

On February 1st, the Very Us Artists entered the annual RPM Challenge to write and record 10 tracks or 35 minutes’ worth of music before the month was up. We met—nay, surpassed!—that challenge and made quite a few new friends along the way. The result is eleven—count ‘em: eleven!—albums of brand new music from several Very Us Artists, most of it free for download. Below is ours. A quick review of many of the other then can be found right here: VUA’s Challengees

Roughly Produced Masterpieces is our wildly eclectic offering, 16 tracks strong, with contributions from merely six previous Very Us Artists (though for John LaSala and Jeremy Simmons, this marks their first solo contributions.) Five others are folks we’ve been actively courting to get on a VUA album, and the remaining five are new artists we met through the amazingly positive and encouraging RPM community. Our cover art was an original painting by Christine Pollock. We took exhaustive pictures and sent RPM the original, making it a truly unique album.You can download all the music and read up on all the music and the artists who created it here: Roughly Produced Masterpieces

In case you missed it before, future Very Us Artist* Jeff LaSala’s first novel, The Darkwood Mask, commissioned by Wizards of the Coast for their Eberron “The Inquisitives” series, has been officially released today. There’s even a chance that if you were to pop into your local big box book store you’d see it on the shelves in the fantasy section. It’ll look like this:

You should read it. It’s really great! But don’t take our word for it. Prove it to yourself. Of course, it’s also available on Amazon and places like that too.

And why not read the first chapter for free? Here it is: sample chapter

So, a super-big congratulations to Jeff. We’re quite proud.

*At some point in the future, somehow or other, Jeff will likely become a Very Us Artist. As gazing into the future is speculative at best, it’s hard to say just how this may come to pass. But being John LaSala’s kid brother, a little bullying and arm-twisting shouldn’t be ruled out. So, taking advantage of the time machine we’re using to produce The Future Is Now, let’s just say that in the future, Jeff is a Very Us Artist. Thanks for playing along.

This February, VUA encourages musicians everywhere to participate in an exciting project called the RPM Challenge. You can read all about what that is here, but in short, it’s just a challenge to write and record an entire album in the month of February. The goal is to write 10 songs or 35 minutes-worth of music, burn it to a CD, and mail it in by the end of the month. You don’t need to create a production masterpiece. It is just a challenge to see if you can pull it off.

While some of us (see who!) will be doing our own solo albums for RPM, this year The Very Us Artists will also be doing one…VUA-style. This album will be a bit different from our regular “Opus” albums, but it should be fun and relatively easy. When it’s over, we’ll post our album online for free download.

Here’s our page.

And here are the only two rules:

1. Write and record one or more songs during February and send us your WAV file(s) by the 27th.
2. Like other VUA albums, this will have a theme, but it’s very loose. The album will tentatively be called Roughly Produced Music, and all you have to do is make sure that the name of your piece is a feasible explanation of what RPM stands for. For example, “Remember Plastic Mustard?” or maybe “The Relentless Pursuit of Monkeys.” Beyond that, everything else about the music is up to you.

Want to contribute? Let us know!

If this whole RPM Challenge idea intrigues you, and you think you can do a whole album on your own and still submit a track for the VUA album, then go for it! We’ll promote your album right along with our own, starting by putting you on the VUA’s Challengees list, so let us know!

And hey, tell a friend!

VUA founding member and frequent contributor Carpentron (aka Chris Torgersen) has been awarded Track of the Day status for today, January 10th, for the entire Rock genre at GarageBand.com. This is the third time his song “Existential Lullaby” has received an award. It was also Experimental Rock Track of the Week last September and Track of the Day the previous May.

The track has been working its way up the charts there since early summer and is currently ranked ninth on the Experimental Rock chart (247th in Rock). You can check it out, along with others from Carpentron, at either of these locations:

Virb.com
GarageBand.com.

Also, John says that this Perry Bible Fellowship cartoon always reminds him of “Existential Lullaby”:

(click to enlarge)

Future Very Us Artist* Jeff LaSala’s first novel, The Darkwood Mask, commissioned by Wizards of the Coast for their Eberron “The Inquisitives” series, will be officially released on March 4th. As that date approaches, you can bet we’ll be abusing…stretching the definition of this forum to talk about it some more. But here’s the book cover for starts:

*At some point in the future, somehow or other, Jeff will likely become a Very Us Artist. As gazing into the future is speculative at best, it’s hard to say just how this may come to pass. But being John LaSala’s kid brother, a little bullying and arm-twisting shouldn’t be ruled out. So, taking advantage of the time machine we’re using to produce The Future Is Now, let’s just say that in the future, Jeff is a Very Us Artist. Thanks for playing along. :)

Very Us Artist Joshua Wentz has been interviewed by independent music distributors INDISTR, discussing improvised music, regurgitation, skirts, Mike Oldfield, and even us! You can read it right here.