Originally we planned to launch the campaign on May 29th, but then I noticed that today is Towel Day, and that pretty much changes everything. You see, Douglas Adams is the name patron to “paniq”. 14 years ago on IRC, when I had to pick my first nickname ever, I went for “PaNiC”. As you can imagine, I have not been the only one using it, so I changed one letter.
Alas, here is our fundraising campaign for The Most Remarkable Album On This Entire Planet. We hope you like it :)
Update: You’ll find all the shout-outs here.
After our previous efforts at Kickstarter have oh so miserably failed, Sylvia and me set up a survey to solve the issue of how exactly we are going to fund the next album.
Please have a look and if you like, give us your opinion. That would be tremendously helpful. Thanks in advance! :D
Update: The survey is closed. Results will be published soon.
Aliens on Earth from Leonard Ritter on Vimeo.
Tried my old paths, bored myself to death. Finally found something new. I think it’s exactly the feeling I’m resonating with right now. Have a look.
This is a list of loose ends. These are things that I want to do, a collection of ambitions and general goals. I want to tie all these loose ends into one big picture, where all those ambitions build a workable master plan. This is the only way to give my life a meaning and a higher purpose.
There are a few causes which I want to support: renewable energies; environmental protection; electric cars; feed the world; healthy food; democracy everywhere; legalization of psychedelic drugs; establishment of world peace; nations without borders; free medicine; free science; creative commons; raise global level of awareness and intelligence; public transport; basic income; free information; free/open source software; politics based on research; a common language. Not necessarily sorted by priority. Whatever I can do to make these ideas popular and get everybody to think about them will be fine.
My wife Sylvia and I, we both want to do business together. We feel it would bring us closer together. The final exams for her tradeswoman for audiovisual media education will begin tomorrow. In our business, her role will be to look at the realities of things and keep our feet on the ground, while I’ll have my heads in the clouds and realize lofty ideas. In reality, everyone will do a little bit of everything.
This is an intuitive insight, with very little understanding of the “how”. We have no business model, no service to sell. The only thing we know is that we would love to start our own thing. After seven years in the salaried workforce, I feel drained. I can’t lead a company from the bottom, I need something that comes close to total control and absolute power over the thing I’m doing. I hate the status quo. For me, work must be both scientific and heartfelt. It doesn’t have to be profitable at all cost. We prefer non-profit, because that makes us more independent.
I want to free my day to work on the things that matter to me. I spend an enormous amount of time for helping causes that serve no-one but me and a handful other people. I get older every day, yet I am wasting precious time. I can’t live with this contradiction in the long run.
I want as much attention as I can get to divert it to the causes that are important to me, once I have reached critical mass. Money would be incredibly helpful to be able to successfully influence on a large scale. But it is tough to raise money without anything to sell, and with my beliefs still intact: for example, if I’m for free software, I can’t sell software. I have to live what I believe, or I can make no one else believe.
Although I love doing music a lot, I can feel that it’s only 50% of the puzzle. I need to leave my comfort zone and get deep into making films. I have bought a camera and made myself comfortable with it. I am still struggling to find a good open source non-linear editor to cut movies. Kdenlive looks good, but crashes upon re-loading my last project. That kind of put me off. I have started to learn Blender 2.5, but that’s a tour de force right now. I feel a connection to Walt Disney, and I thought about doing the movie traditionally animated. While it’s certainly a lot of no-brain work, animation by hand has the merit of requiring only little knowledge of technology, while at the same time, anything you can draw can immediately be put to the screen. I find that appealing.
I want to do the final music album to end all albums, my magnum opus, so to speak. We watched a documentary on popular people working in advertising (“Art & Copy”), which gave me the idea to name the album “The most remarkable album of this entire planet”. I want to put everything I have learned about electronic and psychedelic music into it. It’s supposed to be crazy and meaningful, with fantastic sound engineering and a lot of good lyrics in English language so everybody can understand them. Right now I can’t do any music because Sylvia needs silence to study, which is OK. I can wait.
I want to support Linux and open source, especially in the realm of creating art. I want to do advertisement for Linux apps and other non-profit organization services and products. Linux has the capability of working on pretty much any hardware in the future. When my software works on Linux, it will run on any future platform, and survive any change of hardware. I need all my software to be open so nobody can have a monopoly on the way it works. Should I ever get to the state of building my enterprise upon that software, I can exercise full control over its features. I want to multiply my options. I don’t want to be forced to a specific per-user or per-workstation license. I don’t want to be helplessly exposed to new features or UI changes that serve nobody. I want the option to fork when the software regresses.
I started to think about doing tutorials for artists who want to get the hang of doing music with Linux. But I have to work out my own flow yet. I have my MIDI based tracker now, “Jacker”, which I will use to do most of the music, but my environment lacks a good sampler synth yet. I have started work on “Mindfrak”, which I hope is going to become exactly that. I will be able to load samples and map them to instruments, use Rubberband to quantize drum loop samples, apply envelopes to pitch, filters, loop sections, pretty much anything. Using micro-samples of basic waveforms, I could also use it like an analog synth emulator. When “Mindfrak” works and transport synchronization for “Jacker” is done, I can start work on my album.
I want to go to San Francisco or Hollywood, and Sylvia is ready to come with me. It is either the psychedelic or the film making community. I think it fits my persona. I feel intuitively drawn to it. My instinct tells me that those are the right places. My reasoning mind has not followed my heart yet, and so I can’t tell why exactly.
I believe that’s about it for now.
Update: YouTube replied with questions specifically targeting the music. I provided them with exact information on used programs and instruments, and that did it for them. Thankfully, the video got approved and now shows up as “Featured Video”.
Now they suggested Masagin for revenue share, and I tried to be as specific as possible this time. Hopefully that fixes it.
Here’s the original blog post, for reference:
(All the conversation with YouTube was in German, so I’m not going to quote the letters here.)
I have gotten myself into a kafkaesque situation with YouTube. It’s so terrible that I decided to let you in on this, in hopes for any useful input from the web.
A week ago, I received an e-mail from YouTube informing me that my video Die Ewigkeit schmerzt had reached enough views to be eligible for revenue sharing. The letter offered me a request for my video to be accepted into the revenue sharing program. So I did.
They requested that I assure them that no third party had any rights to any part of my production whatsoever, and so I sent them a short note saying that all of the content was produced by me.
Today, I get a robot-authored mail from YouTube: the revenue share is denied on the grounds that the copyright information I supplied is insufficient or invalid. They ask me to give them more information, but give me no clue on what the original request lacked.
As a special cherry on top, a paragraph in the mail informed me that, once my video was ultimately rejected, there would also be a high chance for the video to be removed from the site.
To conclude: YouTube seduces me to apply for revenue sharing, then denies the request without helpful reason, and finally threatens to remove the video.
Perhaps you may have noticed that the title of the blog has already changed, and my real name is featured on the paniq.cc front page.
This is all in preparation of me ceasing to use paniq as an artist name beginning July 31st this year, which also happens to be my 30th birthday. From then on, any new release will be associated with the upbeat name my family gave me.
That’s right. It’s time to shed skin.
“Actually, I don’t care that much, but whyyyyy!?” you might shout, begging the heavens for a divine answer. Well, for starters, I get the feeling that we live in dark times, where the slightest sign of trouble evokes a horde of doomsday prophets. Using an artist name that alludes to panic is unsuitable, when our society needs a comforting hug, an encouraging pat on the back and an energetic kick in the butt. I just don’t want to contribute to the angsty mood anymore.
The change of name won’t have any effect on the content thought. paniq.cc will be turned into an archive site, and www.leonard-ritter.com, which currently hosts a blog nobody ever reads, will be transformed into the new main site. All music will remain available online. There’s not going to be any new music by “paniq”, though.
I’m taking this opportunity to thank all fans who have me supported in the past years. I hope you’re following me in the future as well.
I expanded the About page to reflect my filmmaking ambitions, and also added a new photo and a background story on my relationship to my dad, so I don’t seem all awesome and shiny. Also, it’s a sad story which happens to be true.
