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

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.

One of our original Very Us Artists, Nick Parton of Mr. Glide fame, leads a double life. When he’s not producing perhaps the most professional-sounding VUA music, he’s producing a whole other thing called Fine Excuses. And today, Fine Excuses released their second fine excuse for an EP, Mild Peril. (If you missed it, their just-as-fine début EP is Hail to the Harmless Grudge.) They’re both free, so check ‘em out!

The hardest working man involved with The Very Us Artists (not counting all the other hardest working men involved with The Very Us Artists) is Joshua Wentz.

Josh has contributed in multiple ways to each of our albums, in ways both musical and visual. Oh, and he designed and administrates veryusartists.com. Oh, and he does the layout and graphic design for the parallelogram jackets.

All that and he still finds time to crank out his own full-scale projects under the banner Sidedown. And today several of these things (words, pictures, paper, music, stickers, etc.) are being unleashed, each one including contributions from a few Very Us Artists, namely John LaSala, Jeremy Simmons, and Mr. Wentz himself.

There’s Monograph #2: Polylemma
(containing decidedly random content, also goes great with Monograph #1: An Enemy’s Friend)

There’s Parallel/Serial Port
(includes a supercool serial story by author Jeff LaSala, plus ranting, raving, and a dolphin)

And then there’s “HEY Convenience,” the latest issue of his lo-fi ’zine, HEY Quarterly
(all proceeds go to charity!)

Do check ‘em out. Consider the gift of art—of mental stimulation—for your year-end gift-giving plans. Quick, before it’s too late!