The weirdest project I’ve accepted

The most random project I’ve ever contributed to is currently gaining momentum, and hopefully it will be public by the end of the year.

No, it’s not even close to being related to open source, and far from real coding. It’s closer to one of my biggest passions: heavy metal music. Metal is possibly my greatest source of inspiration, and I have more guitar-grinding heroes than technology-producing heroes. Sorry Steve Jobs, but I’ll take Luca Turilli before you any day.

Sadly, the metal scene in Costa Rica is mostly dead. There are very few professional bands around, and most have conformed with playing a few local gigs and selling a few hundred albums in the area. Lame. And this is where Pneuma steps in. Pneuma is a Costa Rican progressive thrash metal band lead by a friend of mine, Antonio Masís (vocals and bass). It’s also my favorite local band and pretty high up my global preference list. They’ve been around for a while, and already have a studio album which sold decently, although only locally. Their second album… that’s a long story.

They met with delay after delay in the production of their second album, until they decided to take matters into their own hands and record it again independently. Here’s where I step in. I volunteered to invest in their album, as well as contribute with my ‘Internet skills’ to give them more leverage in a worldwide market that no longer requires mega-corporate backing to enter. I’ve already studied several alternatives, such as CDBaby and TuneCore. They both look very promising.

The album is already fully recorded, and it’s now in the mixing/mastering process in California. It’s absolutely amazing. Nothing like this have ever been produced in this country, and I hope it will do well internationally as well. I’ll do my best to make that happen. For now, I’m setting up their website, pneumarock.com, which doesn’t have much now. We’ll begin more aggressive marketing soon, when we’re closer to the release date and we’ve sorted out a few details.

I’m very excited by this project. I’m happy to be able to make a contribution to local artists, specially artists as good as Pneuma. I also think there’s a very real possibility of making good money out of this, which is good because I’m not a complete socialist .