Made this with processing:

Finally after nearly 3 months of going into the studio, Brandon and I finished the Skin Pink Album.  It wasn’t a stressful process at all, as it has been in the past when I went into the recording studio with my previous band, Paperhouse.  The recording process is a very robust emotional experience that entails frustration, love, hate and competition. It taking everything that want, and setting it in stone.

Brandon and I have been friends since mid-high school, but only recently did we start playing music together.  We each, for the most part of our friendship, had our own respective bands, and rarely, if not ever, played together.  About a year ago, upon a quick visit to Pittsburgn (where Brandon went to college at Dusquesne), we went to a Bob Dylan show and wrote our first song together named “Drink It Quick”.  An experimental country tune, I think we both realized that maybe we could make something together that was unique, yet completely accessible even to the popy-ist ears.

This experimental pop, if you will, matched our personalities perfectly, as well as our conventions in songwriting respectfully.  I am more of a pop writer.  I have never found interest in experimental sounds.  To me, anyone can sit down and make sounds that sometimes, out of pure luck, produce a song that sounds interesting or really conveys a powerful emotional response.  Now in pop music, and by pop music I mean music that makes you want to tap your foot, dance, sing out loud and is so accessible it appeals to every audience.  I do not mean music that is produced by major labels with tons of production and requires almost no intelligence to create.  Ok, off that tangent and back to pop music.  Pop music, to me, has the unique ability to touch some kind of inner part of us that appeals to everyone in some profound way and is at the same time insanely creative.  I love that. That is what I want to create, listen and ponder when it comes to music.

Brandon, on the hand, takes all of this one step further.  He is an experimentalist.  A crazy man who throughs himself into a black hole of originality, and comes out perfectly understandable to those who are willing to listen.  Yes, sometimes it comes off as abrasive.  But almost all of the time, it is deep and relatable, and makes you either laugh or cry.  And I mean these things in the best possible way.  He is by far and away, the most original and creative individual I know.  And when it comes to music, his experimental side really creates an experience to listen to.

Now when you combine the both of us together, you get our new album.  It’s a pop artist, and an experimental veteran of creativity.  Boom. Experimental Pop.

The album starts with a straight up rock-punk piece thats about devotion and the absurdity of love.  Then goes on to detail a psychedelic paranoia adventure of the anxiety of growing older, back to the timeline of love from knowing how deep it goes to experiencing its end.  The lyrics that Brandon wrote, are beautiful.  I highly recommend you listen to what its trying to say as much as how it sounds.

I couldn’t be happier with it.

Download Here

Well hello there friends! As you can easily see, I redesigned and re-implemented my blog. It was way overdue for a refresh, and I always wanted to make it much more minimalistic…so here, I present to you: evansamek.com 2.0.

I guess this means I have to start writing more….

As most of you probably noticed, I have been mentioning Pixel Dreamer many times in my tweets and comments around the Internet.  Pixel Dreamer is my new company, which was founded by Mac Sheller-Ogden (my partner) and myself to help small and medium sized business’ find success in the online world.

Mac and I started working together at a marketing firm located in Georgetown, DC where we both found common ground on web practices and standards based solutions.  Over time, I became increasingly frustrated with the firm with their lack of web 2.0/3.0 practices, and eventually left toward the end of summer 2008.  Mac worked there for a while longer before moving to Chicago doing exclusively remote work for the company, until finally leaving to start Pixel Dreamer.

After enough money was saved, we decided to make a run for our money and start preparing Pixel Dreamer for launch this past September.  At its core, we wanted Pixel Dreamer to be done right from the get-go.  We setup our online client management tools, invoicing systems, work-spaces, and various other communication tools. Just for reference, here are the tools that we use to get things done:

• Backpack – 37 Signals – For notes, ideas, and write-boards.
• Highrise – 37 Signals – Contact Management
• Action Method Online – Behance – Task Delegation
• Rackspace Hosting – Our Cloud Hosting Solution

Believe me, these weren’t the first system that we tried out.  We tested about 20+ management/administration tools that are available and we finally settled with this list.

In addition to opening ourselves up for business, we also created PD.AM – a URL shortener that was to be used with twitter to save character space in tweets.  We are currently in the process of improving the API documentation so that PD.AM has a chance at becoming integrated with popular twitter clients such as Tweetie, Tweetdeck, and Twhirl.  I believe we have a good chance since we still have the shortest URLs that can be found.  If you haven’t tried it yet, head on over to http://pd.am and shorten your important links!

Aside from Pixel Dreamer, I am also finishing up my studies at university.  Oddly enough, I will be receiving a BA in Philosophy of all things…nothing to do with web development.  I was in Computer Science for a long while, until I discovered web programming and realized that’s what I was really interested in.  At University of Maryland, they do not touch upon web programming languages in Comp-Sci, so I had to learned everything I know on my own, on my own time.  Having some Java programming experience did not hurt either .

Anyways, I am looking forward to the upcoming year, great things will happen with Pixel Dreamer.