When Chief’s Tale eventually disbanded in 2000, Alex moved to NYC and started working at the legendary Bottom Line Club where he handled the live sound duties for a ton of great artists and gained a lot of experience. He and Tiffany ended up working together through JABOA, and eventually falling in love and getting married. Bill and I both moved to Cincinnati after the band and started doing audio work in a studio located outside of Dayton under the guise of Mind Ignition Unlimited along with fellow partners Jim Hansbauer and Bordley Palk. We always kept in touch with Alex and Tiffany up in NYC. When they left NYC after 9/11 they eventually decided to come join up with us in Cincinnati.

All of our individual talents really benefit each other and we decided to form an LLC in late 2003. We’ve spent the most the past three years doing service based projects such as album recordings and audio for video and film. The video side of things has filtered in as we’ve gained more and more experience in that realm and Tiffany has headed up that department. We started doing video shoots for local events and even shot our own short film in 2005. Jim and Bordley have since moved on to other projects or geographical locations so Mind Ignition is currently the four of us…Alex, Bill, Tiffany, and myself.
I don’t think there was ever any discussion on why we all decided to start working together, it just sort of seemed natural because we all seem to have the same goals in life and really dug being involved in projects together. I must say that it is a true honor to have met these people and to have the chance to try to build this thing with them. We are more than just partners, we are true friends and have been through the ringer together so it is a really special vibe to be a part of.

ENS ~ Tell me a little more about the website and its features and member benefits.

MI ~ The Mind Ignition Channel website (aka On The MIC) has been a dream of ours for years. I think when we first started hinting about it many years ago, we all kind of had the foresight that the internet and the current streams of entertainment, information, and learning usually associated with television would someday start to merge together and we would eventually end up with those things becoming totally on demand via the internet. We all seemed to agree that we wanted to eventually have our very own “channel” to house our creations and now we have taken the steps towards making it a reality.
When we finally set out to design the site we looked at a lot of different ways to put it all together. Truely there are so many ways for you to present all of the content online that you can have a lot of fun with the design, layout, and the functionality of the site, but the #1 most important thing to all of us is the content itself.
We wanted our site to be as clean and easy to work with as possible (at least to start) and we wanted to display the highest quality video that we could, so we spent months testing it and currently are offering up as clear of a format as anything else we can find.
It just so happened that some of the “playlist” scripting technologies and capabilities in the php world had just become available and we realized we had the opportunity to allow our viewers to save their own playlists much like they can with other non-internet based entertainment applications such as ITunes. We definitely wanted to offer playlist capabilities so we added that in. If you become a member of our site, then you can even save and post your own playlists for others to view. We hope this will become more and more fun as we add more and more video to the site. I think you will start seeing this concept being used heavily across the internet really soon. You already can see this sort of format on CNN’s Pipeline and even many local television stations’ websites with their news stories right now.
The most important idea and feature of our website, in our eyes, is exclusive content. Stuff you won’t be able to witness anywhere else, but on our site. There are thousands of sites that are now offering up video content, but many of them depend on “user generated content” to create their content pool and that usually seems to end up in video minutia and legal problems. There is certainly something to be said for having the ability to pull up a clip of just about anything you can dream up just by typing it in such as on sites like YouTube or Revvor and I think people will always want to check out crazy home movies or find that funny clip from the Ali G Show, etc. However, we knew we didn’t want to try and exist as another video uploading and hosting site. We are all taking this risk together in order to be artists and enjoy what we are creating and we feel that there is enough of a market out there that eventually we can build a fanbase large enough to support us as long as we put out an entertaining or informative product. We may not have a hundred thousand videos any time soon, but at least we will have some shows with some really cool musical artists whom we feel that you really should get to know. And the only place you’ll be able to find that performance will be on the Mind Ignition Channel.
One of the next steps for the site is to add on the “download” feature. We’ve been taking our time with this because of the functionality and the legal demands that come along with selling units of intellectual property. We hope that this becomes not only a means to help support ourselves and the artists, but also a new avenue for giving to charity as well.
The “On The Mic Live” show is also simply the start of our endeavours. We have quite a few projects and ideas up our sleeves for the future and can’t wait to get to them, but it is all a matter of time and budget.
ENS ~ So far, what are some of the bands and artists you have worked with for Mind Ignition?