a'tris

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Hope this finds you feeling well. I just wanted to share a video our friend, Tiger Darrow, taped of herself covering our song "Automatic Doors". If you enjoy this clip as much as we do be sure to check out her original music at myspace.com/tigerdarrow!

This week has been treating the guys and me very well. Thanks again to everyone for supporting us by downloading "Dark Lotus" on Microsoft's Myspace! While it looks like we won't be able to afford to repair our van, thanks to you, we've been able to pay down some of our tour debts and are very grateful for that.

We are also thankful for the continued support of our friends at Headcase Radio for continuing to keep us as one of their featured artists for the past couple months since we released our new EP.

I received an email from Rob at Deuce Management today and am really excited to share with you that Grant, the Music Editor at Podcast User Magazine, has added our music to his Three From Leith podcast. It's fantastic to see continued interest in records.

Speaking of records, I recently relocated to Virginia and am staying here to finish writing some of the material for our next full length. If you live in the Charlottesville area I hope that you'll keep an eye on our tour schedule. I will be starting up an Open Mic here shortly to begin testing out some of the new tunes and create an outlet for the many talented musicians from this area. If you're into independent music keep your ears peeled. I'm really looking forward to sharing some music from the local artists I meet here with you!

Hope this finds you feeling healthy!
-Mason

A Message from Mason

Hey everyone,

Our friends at ReverbNation invited us to create a video promoting Microsoft’s Sponsored Songs Program to be considered for placements on many of Microsoft’s web properties. The guys and I wanted to take this opportunity to thank you all for helping us to promote our music. We really appreciate your continued support and are grateful to Microsoft and ReverbNation for allowing us to share “Dark Lotus” with you for free.

Hope this finds you feeling healthy!

-Mason

Hey everyone,

If you follow us on Twitter then you probably already saw that the guys and I made the front cover of the new Somojo Magazine! While tweets are cool and I love to use them to quickly share things with you as they happen, some news items are better blogged and I feel that this is definitely one of them.

Somojo Magazine is awesome. Kevin and his staff are true supporters of independent music and I can’t tell you how cool it was to be featured in the first issue of their magazine. The interview I did was a blast and you can view selections of it atissuu.com

If you’d like to get the full dirt please consider purchasing the PDF version at lulu.com

This is one of the in depth interviews I’ve done so, if you’re interested in getting some insight into what it’s really like to be an indy artist, I hope you’ll enjoy what I had to say.

Speaking of interviews, if you still want to hear more about a’tris, be sure to tune in to the next Deuce Radio show.

Hope this finds you all feeling healthy!

-Mason

Hey everyone,

It’s been a while since I’ve written one of these. My apologies; I’ve been moving around so much lately I personally had to catch up with everything before telling you what’s new!

Now that my head’s on straight here’s some cool news:

Music Connection Magazine just featured a nice plug for a’tris thanks to our friends at AirPlay Direct! Music Connection is THE Trade magazine for our industry and we are extremely honored to be in there with some of our favorite engineers, producers, songwriters and recording artists.

We are also honored to be receiving airplay courtesy of Miss B0mb from Phoenix Radio. The guys and I have been getting a lot of AirPlay in the UK thanks to Rob from Deuce Management and Promotions and I can’t tell you how grateful we are for that. We are especially thankful that Rob reached out to Miss B0mb on our behalf. Seriously, she’s so good looking we would have probably had an extremely difficult time just asking her to please play our songs.

See for yourself :)

Speaking of DJs, I just had a great chat with Joe Ferrett from Skyline.FM a few days ago and he’ll be airing it on his pogram on Monday 1st June (this coming Monday) The show is on from 8pm-10pm (English Time) and is available online at www.skyline.fm. I hope you’ll check it out. I haven’t seen a picture of Joe but, after hearing his accent, I’m willing to bet you that he is very sexy as well.

Hope this finds you all feeling healthy!

-Mason

This post is long overdue. About two weeks ago I shot our good friend Philippe from GKRadio Europe a message to ask him how he created the following animated gif:

Some of you might have noticed this banner in my last blog post. Hopefully many you will recognize it because you’ve checked out Philippe’s site! The first time I visited GKRadio this animation really caught my eye so I thought it would be cool if I could figure out how to make something like this for a’tris.

Philippe’s my html guru. He always seems to be able to point me in the right direction when I can’t figure something out, so I assumed he might get back to me with a website written for dummies or introduce me to an application with an idiot-proof guide. Boy was I surprised to see these in my inbox the very next day:

(just as a warning - some of these include flashing lights)

How awesome is that!? Big thanks to Philippe! What do you guys think? Do you have a favorite? I’ve tried to use my basic knowledge of html magic make it easy for you to share these. Just click the banner you like the most, copy the text you see, and then paste it anywhere on your blogs or profiles to make it visible!

Speaking of banners, be sure to click the one I’ve included below. Radio Gets Wild just named us their artist of the month and we’re honored and grateful for their support! Be sure to check out what they’re doing at



Hope this finds you all feeling healthy!
-Mason

As we come to the end of Cancer Fatigue Awareness Month I think it's only appropriate to salute the many men, women, and children who are staying strong in their fight against cancer.

A couple of days ago I received an email from Wes Simkins who I hope many of you might better know as DJ Chainsaw from Acoustic Alternative Radio :) Wes has been a big supporter of a'tris and when I saw "You gotta read this" in the subject of his message I hoped to see good things happening for his station. Instead, I was touched by an incredibly heartfelt message about using music as a vehicle to help raise awareness for cancer.

Wes' wife, Monica, lost both of her parents to cancer, her father in 1977 and her mother in 1994. For this reason Wes and Monica will be participating in a Relay For Life in Louisville, KY. The event is June 12th and 13th at Moore High School and Wes will be live on the air during parts of the relay.

In Wes words, "I would like to challenge each of you to either join our team (if you're local) or use the link below to make a donation to the cause. Donations go directly to the Relay For Life, but we get credit towards our goal of only $2,000. I think music lovers and musicians can raise a lot more than $2,000 for something as worthy as this!"

To learn more about Wes' relay please take a moment to visit the following address. There you will be able to read his message, make a donation, and -if you're local - join his team! 

http://main.acsevents.org/goto/lafamiliaunplugged 

Don't forget that cancer is More than a Zodiac Sign 

-Mason

Hey everyone,

I'm really stoked to share with you that our new merchandise headquarters is up on http://www.zazzle.com/atrishq! I personally designed the shirts this time around so I really hope that you'll enjoy what I came up with! Please take a moment to check it out!

We've partnered with Zazzle to make it easy for you to be able to customize your a'tris tee by choosing from a wide rang of colors and styles. I've displayed my favorites in our featured products gallery. Let me know what you think! If you'd like to support us by buying a shirt but can't find a certain style please don't hesitate to drop us a line; we'd love to hear from you.

In other web news, I've been doing a lot of work to a'tris HQ lately and I think you'll really dig the additions I've made. Almost all of the links now feature rollover images to make them a little more interactive. Many of the issues I listed in my recent post have been addressed and the blog on our homepage now displays audio and video so I hope you're reading this there! I'm pretty stoked about the new layout and really hope that this layer of polish might encourage you to put it in your bookmarks if you hadn't already made it a web destination :)

Speaking of bookmarks, Kristyn from one of my favorite websites, Pop Culture Madness, really showed us some love a while back by featuring our video for "Dark Lotus" in her blog. Kristyn is the best so be sure to check out what she's doing and get to know Pop Culture Madness!

Our good friend Turtle has also been throwing tons of support our way. His blog, The Last Broadcast, is synched to my mail app and I always enjoy reading what he has to say. Especially when that something happens to be like this! Don't miss his review of our latest EP.

And, more great news on the radio front, Rob Saunders from Deuce Management has been doing a fantastic job of helping us to promote our music in the UK and we've been receiving some incredible support from many radio stations there! I've posted his latest radio show below as well as a couple of banners from the stations with whom I've been corresponding lately. Please join me in thanking them by visiting their sites and letting them know that you appreciate them helping us share our work.

 

..

 

 

Warm regards,
-Mason

In alphabetical order, because they're all equally awesome:

 

Hey everyone! The new a'tris HQ is up and it actually works! Woot!

So, what are you waiting for? Copy and paste http://www.atrishq.com into your browser or click the banner below and let me know what you think!

 

I'm really stoked about how everything turned out. It took a little bit of doing but I was finally able to get iWeb to work for me. The site is still lacking in terms of a few features but I discovered a couple of apps like the fantastic iWeb Valet that helped me to really get this job done. For someone who never took a web design class I'm pretty proud of what I was able to accomplish here! Thanks to everyone who reached out to me with tips and advice. I really appreciate your help!

Speaking of help please drop me a line if you find that something's not working for your browser. As you may have noticed from my last post, all of this stuff is pretty foreign to me but I will do my best to figure out how to fix any problem you might encounter. I've posted a list below of the bugs I'm currently aware of. I'm also working on making each page's new content appear in a window within the main template so the background and icons don't have to load each time. Any thoughts on how to make that happen with a little html action?

I'm really trying to make a'tris HQ a site you'll want to add to your bookmarks. It has some pretty nifty Twitter integration and RSS action going on - if I don't say so myself - so expect new content on a daily basis! Most of my tweets are about stuff the guys and I are doing and artists whose music we're really digging so, if you're looking to get some insight into what it's like to live in a'tris land be sure to follow us -

http://twitter.com/atris

Hope this finds you feeling healthy!

-Mason

Known a'tris HQ Bugs:

• Humorously enough, many browsers seem to be displaying a warning screen stating that the link I've posted to our music on Microsoft's Zune store is untrusted and may harm your computer. All I have to say is that's Microsoft for you.

• Firefox displays a Purple line across the top of our Tweet badge. I'm not quite sure what's up with that but I'll pretend that I intended for it to happen.

• Safari V4 Public beta doesn't display the ReverbNation plugin I'm using to stream our music and videos in the media section. That's not my fault :) I'm open to your thoughts/sugestions if you feel that you know of a better solution.

• No browsers show the scroll bar for the RSS stream I created to display our tour pictures. I have no idea why that is because they all seem to display the scroll bar for the blog on our homepage and that uses the exact same code. Does anyone know why it's working in one place and not the other?

• The a'tris favicon doesn't show in Safari. Maybe this is a .ico thing? I'd never seen/heard of this file type before but apparently it is the Windows equivalent of an icns or rsrc. *update - to get around this I've formatted the photos section so that you will be able to view our four most recent galleries. It's not quite as sexy and the thumbnails aren't as big this way but you'll still be able to easily access tons of new pictures when we're back out on the road! Follow us on Twitter and I'll let you know when they post!

• The site doesn't work for Internet Explorer 5.2 for Mac. I'm not sure why that is either but who the hell uses Internet Explorer 5.2 for Mac?

So for the last two days straight - and I mean straight - I've been working on re-designing a'tris HQ. The guys and I have been wanting to overhaul the site for some time now but have just been utterly swamped trying to pay our bills and record our next album. The Lensing template always seemed a little under cooked to me. It continues to do its job well but I feel that it could be far more streamlined and polished.

Unfortunately I've recently come to learn that I am not the person to affect those changes. :)

Perhaps it's unfair of me to blame iWeb. It is not Apple's fault that I have absolutely no basic knowledge of HMTL. I should have picked up that skill set a long time ago. Alas, I did not. However it was, for that reason, that I - with much glee - upgraded to Apple's latest iLife suite of applications. I love Garageband and I now use it to help me plot each and every a'tris song, station ID, and an occasional singing telegram or two. iPhoto is AMAZING and it allows me to easily edit and sort my favorite photographs and I did all of a'tris' video blogs with iMovie. The promise of the new iWeb's ability to upload directly to an FTP server was a golden orb to me.

Sadly though it turned out to be a gold-painted tungsten one. Sure it's great if you use Apple's templates. Just click on the "Comic Book" option and you're good to go! But, if you're like me, and you want to build your own custom website when you see this app turn and run for your life. After finally managing to publish a copy of the new HQ to my desktop I was extremely disappointed to find that what had looked absolutely beautiful in the builder was completely screwed up in every single one of my browsers. Graphics were jumping all over the place. Text colors where wacky. Everything was off. I've tried and tried to fix it but nothing has seemed to work. Usually I'm up for a puzzle; if you have a killer cross-word bring it on! But today... I'm just burned out.

On a positive note, our friends DJ Meatwad and Paulie from Headcase Radio and Dibivegas respectively have been showing us a lot of love lately and we really appreciate their support.

Meatwad directed us to this cool banner (cut and paste HTML I can handle) when you get a chance give it a click to check out what he's doing!



Also make sure to to send Paulie a comment to request an a'tris tune or two ;) Here's how:

Go to podcastalley.com and enter DIGIVEGAS into the search field. Once his show pops up, click on DETAILS and then click on COMMENT.

Last but not least I've included some pictures of the website (as it properly appeared in iWeb) below. At the very least, we can all revel in the site that could have been together. If anyone would like to assist with this project please drop me a line; I'd be very, very happy to hand it over. If you are like me and don't know how to help - or don't have the time - that's perfectly cool too. Leave me some feedback and let me know what you think! I'm really hoping to make the new site simple, intuitive, and rich with frequently updated content. For example, in the upper right hand corner you'll notice a speech bubble which I successfully synched with the Twitter account we just created! On the homepage you'll see my blogs updated in real time and, on the photo page, you'll be able to view my snap shots almost as I take them from the road via an RSS feed. I really hope to get this up and running in the not too distant future and look forward to your thoughts!

Hope this finds you feeling healthy!

-Mason

From a'tris HQ

From a'tris HQ

From a'tris HQ