Generally more branding work over the last day. I've needed event images for Fall in Green performances several times, so have a template for these for Facebook, Eventbrite, and similar online event sites. I've also got an A4 (or bigger, smaller, as needed) image for a poster. I thought it would be a good idea to have templates of these for each of my music artists, so I've been making these up.
I've updated the Cornutopia Music website too, adding separate pages for Marius Fate and Oldfield 1, and a new Marius Fate mailing list. It made me think of the vast amounts of e-publicity that accompanies any new show or event, like a music release. Ideally I need digital events creating, email newsletters, social media tweets, snaps regularly too, then real-world events like taking part in fairs, signings, press releases and that sort of thing. I've tried all of that at one point or another, but rarely all of that for one event. Doing it for every event would be a full time job; I have an announcement or event worthy of that sort of publicity about every two weeks, and as such, do not have the time to do it. At RedShift, I needed to do the e-publicity stuff all day as one of my duties and I'm not sure if it had any impact at all; it felt like it had none. The few times I have gone all-out on that sort of publicity, like the Phenomenology of Love exhibition in London, and The Life and Death of Arazmax Kane exhibition in Chester, also seemed to have no effect at all.
I was reminded of Tubular Bells and Virgin Records; it seemed to be simply a hit, and didn't seem to need publicity, and their other releases at the time were flops despite a massive amount of effort. Perhaps this is a naive view, and perhaps Tubular Bells did have huge amounts of work on its publicity, perhaps because it was the first release of a new label, and perhaps all of that effort focused on one thing made that release popular, but I suspect not. I suspect that hits simply generate a sort of magic by themselves.
Yet this doesn't mean that great things don't go unnoticed. There needs to be a door open so that things have a chance of being discovered, holes in the box so that the liquid greatness can leak out, and in the modern age there is so much out there that being seen at all is very difficult. Many discoveries from the past decade seem to have been due to the newness of platforms with little content (like a needle in a tiny haystack) rather than good things found among the swarm.
I'll be performing some Marius Fate songs live at the All Saints' ArtsFest in Crewe on October 5th, 11am, and performing as part of Fall in Green at 2pm. I will need to develop the songs in a way that makes them better to play live, and ideally find musicians who would like to play along. The audience will consist of casual visitors to the gentle art exhibition and perhaps be as few as one or two, well certainly under 100.
Next task on this is to design the cover artwork for the music. I'm eager to get this stuff out of the way and work on new music for a change. Something new, groundbreaking, that can rival the best albums by Genesis, Kate Bush, Renaissance, Rush, Queen, Beethoven and the other musicians I admire.
