paniq

Final Goal Reached! You Did It!

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 12:26:00 +0200

41 days ago, Sylvia and me started raising funds for the next paniq album. I expected it to be a slow and exhausting uphill-battle, where we would have to convince each and everyone that giving us a few cents would become be the best thing they ever did.

Little did we expect the torrent of support that almost swept us away. Close friends and fans alike were the first to donate, and sometimes we even worried they spend a bit too much on us. After 14 days, the basic production costs were paid, but it did not take long to make the professionally produced CD a reality, this time from a lot of trusting first-time supporters.

You people are awesome. I simply don’t know what to say other than: thank you, times and times again. Never would we have believed that it takes only 190 people and a few days to make something good happen.

Until now, YOU did the hard work which turned a possibility into a fact; now it’s our turn to keep our promise.

What happens next? Fundraising will still run until July 12th for laggards who still want to receive the album early. After that, the fundraising page will be archived, and the album front page will reflect our ongoing production status.

Production starts July 31st, as planned.

If you backed the album with at least €10, you will receive your digital download November 5th, 2010.

If you backed the album with at least €20, you will receive your CD via mail until December 1st, 2010. Sylvia sent everybody a confirmation mail asking for shipping details; if you missed out on the mail, please let us know.

If you backed the album with at least €40, you have already received an invitation to the VIP lounge, where you will be able to watch the daily video log and check out new tracks early. If you haven’t received an invitation, please let us know.

First Goal Reached!

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 09:31:00 +0200

Yesterday evening, after only 14 days of fundraising, we reached the first funding goal of €4588, which means that we can produce the most remarkable album on this entire planet exactly as planned.

It’s amazing how fast you guys & gals reacted. We are speechless, and we love you all. Again, a big thank you to everyone who carried us this far.

Now for the second and final goal: as soon as all of the money has been pledged, the manufacturing and shipping of CD rewards to our donors is secured. If you have pledged €20 or more, you will receive your CD until December 1st, 2010, ready for Christmas. If you have pledged less, it’s not too late to up the ante. Your donations will be accumulated, and you become eligible to receive larger rewards.

I will record a new video where I will explain what’s going to happen next and how we are going to organize production.

Goodbye Blogger, hello Tumblr!

Fri, 04 Jun 2010 07:05:00 +0200

“Wha..what happened to the blog?” you may wonder, to which I softly whisper, with the intonation of a madman: “Like what I’ve done with the place?”

I like Tumblr’s nicer user interface, theme database and templating system. On first impression, it can do a lot less layout-wise than Blogger, but I like how clean and web 2.0-ish everything looks. I imported all old posts, but I couldn’t manage to move the comments as well. They are imported into Disqus, all right. But until I’ve found a way to move them, they will stay there.

Anyway, our fundraising is still running, and we have approximately 37 days to go. We passed the 50% threshold and raised €3634 so far. Thanks to everyone involved, you are crazy! And if you haven’t considered giving us some cash yet: now is a really good time to do so. We are closing in on the goal.

It’s only €821 until basic production cost are entirely covered - from then on it’s just the question when everyone will receive his CD. I hope it’s going to be on time for Christmas.

The Shout-Out Post

Fri, 28 May 2010 13:29:00 +0200

Here are the shout outs to our most generous supporters of the most remarkable album: Reza Esmaili, Yuriy O’Donnell, Martin Klein, Richard White, Andrew Holland, S.J.Bennett, Dominik Rothenberg, Mathias Garbe, Oliver Grünewald, Felix Bohmann, Fabian Giesen, Alex Brem, Richard Hafner, Malte Thiesen, Marcel Stritzelberger, Ulrich Bär, Tammo Hinrichs, Sandro Manke, Andrew Conkling, Andrew Denyes, Liam Jones, Felix Schütz, Tim Bartel, Kai Pöthkow, Peter Knight, Michel Meyers, Michael Sänger, Martijn de Boer, Johan Burell, Angela Grünewald, Michael Schulze, Johannes Grabowski, Holger Rosenlöcher and Jürgen Markert.

New Tracks: Two Remixes

Wed, 26 May 2010 07:15:00 +0200

I held these two tracks back for a few months. Here they are.

The Most Remarkable Album On This Entire Planet

Tue, 25 May 2010 16:37:00 +0200

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.

Results From the Fan-Funded Album Survey

Fri, 21 May 2010 17:11:00 +0200

A big hug to everyone who took the time to take part in the survey.

There were 54 participants in the survey. We added the last question later, it has only been answered by 39 participants. Just for fun, we added the survey donations and ended up with a hypothetical $1620. That would already buy us almost one month of production.

We will most likely go for a fundraising with four distinct milestones, where the first three milestones mark one month of production time, and the fourth one marks the shipping of audio CDs to everyone who participated with an appropriate contribution, once the full amount has been raised.

Fan-Funded Album Project Survey

Thu, 20 May 2010 06:42:00 +0200

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.

HALP! - The Odyssey of Crowdfunding My Next Album

Tue, 18 May 2010 14:34:00 +0200

Dear internet. I have a plan, reality is chaos, and thus, I humbly ask for your guidance and wisdom.

You see, I wanted to make a new music album this year: The Most Remarkable Album On This Entire Planet. In fact, that’s the actual title of the album. I own all kinds of technical equipment and musical contraptions, all waiting to join the action - yet the last piece of equipment missing from my home studio is … time.

As we all know, time equals money. I earn my living as a programmer. Being a full-time occupation, such a job can become quite stressful, and stress (my dear friends) does not contribute to an environment that nurtures the brilliant, focused and relaxed creation of amazing soundscapes. But that’s exactly what I have in mind. So where would I take this time from?

Then my musical colleague Auditory Canvas’ recent album release made me aware of Kickstarter, a site that organizes “fan-funded endeavors” or “crowdfunding” in a quite clever way. You set a monetary goal for your project and a fixed count of days to reach this goal. Fans can then pledge a small amount, in exchange for an appropriate reward (e.g. a physical copy of the album for a pledge of $20). Here’s the kick: no money is being transferred until the goal is reached. Only when funding has been successful, pledges turn into actual donations, and the project is completely financed. No risk for backers, no blame for the artist.

“Awesome”, my wife and I thought, and so we went ahead and started planning costs and rewards. We calculated for about four months of production, including manufacturing and shipping of CDs and other rewards, and we ended up at around $15,000 for the whole thing. I set up the project at Kickstarter, and everything seemed to be fine.

This is the timetable we’ve been setting up:

1. Launch project May 29th.
2. Collect pledges until July 12th. If goal is not reached, abort here.
3. Start writing & recording July 31st (my birthday).
4. Finish production November 5th.
5. Have all CDs shipped by December 1st. Merry Christmas.

Except for a little detail. It seems in order to receive funds, you need an Amazon Payments account linked to a U.S. bank account. The U.S. bank account in turn has to belong to someone with a U.S. social security number and a U.S. residence. We are Germans. Drats! We went around and asked our american friends, but no one wanted our money on his bank account. I should have claimed that I am the attorney of a Nigerian prince. I heard it works sometimes.

Allright, so we couldn’t use Kickstarter. IndieGoGo appeared to be a similar site on first sight, but the big difference is that there is no escrow account to hold pledges in limbo. Money is always being transferred, so in case the funding fails to reach the goal, we’re stuck with money we can’t use, and IndieGoGo has already taken 9% of it.

I started to panic (no pun intended). I checked other sites. Fundable is defunct. The Point looked good on first sight, but there’s something shady about the way they transfer funds. First of all, the FAQ remains awfully quiet about the nature of the payout. The only thing I could find was in the project setup form, where they ask where to send the check. Right. The check which gets lost in the mail, but someone cashed it anyway. I get it.

SellaBand looked real good until I checked their Terms and Conditions (thanks to @torusle for warning me!). First of all, they take 10% on each donation before adding it to the fund (so you pay $11, I see $10), then they take another 15% on the payout. That’s a whopping 25% on the entire transaction. Second, funds are transferred after I sent them an invoice, so it’s not a donation and I pay a purchase tax. Third, funds are paid within a maximum of three months. Three months! We wanted to get this baby done by Christmas!

Moving on. There are more sites like IndieGoGo, of which Pledgie seems to be one of the sweetest. They have no transaction costs. All they do is maintaining a little progress bar for your PayPal account, that’s it. But there is still the looming risk of a missed goal, and the manual reimbursement of funds - minus PayPal’s transaction costs. I doubt that backers want to take that risk.

Long story short: we need your insight and your assistance. Can you think of another way? Shall we try to circumvent the whole crowdfunding service thing and do the raising on our own? Would you contribute to our project in exchange for a professionally produced CD and other rewards? Would you take the risk of paying in advance, without knowing if the goal will be reached? Would PayPal be okay? Or Google Checkout? Or what?

If we can’t find any replacement for Kickstarter, we would have to do our own pledge-site using PayPal; we would only store email addresses and the pledge amounts, then manually collect the money when the goal has been reached. In this case, people who have changed their mind could have us end up in the same situation as the IndieGoGo-case.

Update: if we dropped all physical rewards, we could go down to about $8000. In this case, all we could offer to backers is a download link to the album prior to release, and delay the release by at least a month. What do you think?

Update 2: due to a few open questions, we opened The most remarkable survey on this entire planet My wife & I would be super-happy if you could take the time :)

Update 3: TwtSurvey closed the poll after 20 submissions. I opened a new one: The Fan-Funded Album Project Survey. This one should last. Your input would be much appreciated!

New Video: "Aliens on Earth"

Thu, 13 May 2010 10:54:00 +0200

Finally managed to compile my mini-documentary of plants at Planten & Blomen, thanks to OpenShot. Also features some of my music, check it out.

Aliens on Earth from Leonard Ritter on Vimeo.

New Track: "Time"

Tue, 11 May 2010 16:13:00 +0200

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.

Figuring out my life bottom up: loose ends, analysis

Sun, 09 May 2010 06:50:00 +0200

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.

YouTube Suggests Revenue Sharing, Then Threatens Me

Mon, 03 May 2010 06:44:00 +0200

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.

Death on a Birthday

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 08:05:00 +0200

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.

About Page Expansion

Sat, 10 Apr 2010 06:16:00 +0200

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.

New Track: "Unresolved"

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 16:21:00 +0100

I did this one all for myself. So screw you if you don’t like it! It’s my baby *sob*

Ah yes, THE LINK.

New Track: "Stolen Identity"

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 12:59:00 +0100

More orchestra work. Getting better. Here it is.

Fan Videos on YouTube

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 05:15:00 +0100

There is yet another reason for me to spend a lot of time on YouTube, and it’s you. You, who made all these videos featuring my music. The videos that I search for when I need some cheering up.

So I built a fan video playlist for everybody to enjoy. I’m going to extend the playlist as new videos come up.

New Track: "Perseverance"

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 17:45:00 +0100

Allow me to entertain you once more with my trusty MIDI orchestra.

Voilá

New Track: "Get Me to Hollywood"

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 18:11:00 +0100

Another short piece. In this case I also wanted to test a new set of free instrument patches.

Enjoy.