When someone offers you an opportunity to play your songs in a 4 foot hole with whale bones, you don’t turn them down!
Maybe some people would but I wouldn’t! What an honor!
Our last show was exactly that. A gallery in an old Japanese house with holes dug out of three rooms, one with a fish pond, one with a chicken coop and one meant for art exhibitions.
I love this kind of show. Even if it’s a flop, it’s still interesting, and it was hardly a flop. It was a very strange show though, for better rather than worse. Strange and beautiful.
It started with a folk singer playing in the front of the building in a garden with water dripping over the rocks to sound of a gentle guitar and voice.
Then we played our rhythmic sound in the dirt hole to whale bones displayed right in front of us. We were surrounded on all sides by about 25 people sitting on tatami.
Then some European noise artists played after us, using tape recorders and broken records to manipulate sound and create loops with distortion.
There was Nepali curry and the audience was a mix of the most random locals and foreigners from the art scene. Oh and there were chickens and fish living in two other floors in the hole of two other rooms, a beautiful little fish pond and smelly chicken nest built into the floor of this old house.
It was truly a mysterious evening, something even stranger than the settings I write about in my fiction.
I always admired artists who could find such interesting locations to share their work and now I guess I’ve become one of them.
I was so pleased with the whole event that I was a little surprised when no one (other than one friend who had previously reserved it) bought our new CD. I had to force myself not to take it to heart. I mean in general who buys CD’s in 2026…
In Japan people still do as collectors items. When you see a big indie band they sell lots of cds. People in Japan are true collectors. Once they decide they really really like you, to support you they buy everything you make. It’s nice to know we have 3 or 4 of those but you need a few hundred to survive as an artist and a few dozen to allow it to pay for itself.
It made me realize that this is going to be a lot more work than I planned. Turns out it’s a lot easier to get likes than to get people to buy something. That is something I knew obviously, but not something I really thought deeply about.
When I got home I realized I needed to deal with my feelings of frustration. I didn’t want the magical evening to feel stained by disappointment and just ignoring feelings doesn’t make them go away.
So I tried to think logically about it long enough to find a plan to move forward and then comforted myself with a positive attitude to put that plan into action.
I was mostly confused because the positive reaction and feedback has been constant for the past 4 or 5 shows but doesn’t seem to lead to any emotional investment in our work and emotional investment is where everything from community to wealth lies for artists.
People seem to have better and better reactions to us but no one is checking out our music on streaming. Almost no one follow us on social media after shows except other performers.
But I realized that this show we got 4 followers, 4 more than previous shows where people only followed us after talking to us.
Oh that’s it! The venue tagged us and mentioned us in multiple posts both before during and after the event.
Tagging goes a long way on social media, and once isn’t usually enough. Having your name their multiple times creates reinforcement.
I realized we hadn’t really made it easy to find us. A simple search doesn’t even show up on Spotify because we don’t have enough monthly listeners for our name to register in the search engine.
That’s what’s missing.
People are too overstimulated these days. They don’t make as much of an effort to find you or follow you. You have to make it easy for them.
One scan. One click.
Venues should help with this but they often don’t or they do a poor job at it. As I said once isn’t usually enough.
I’ve posted artists and tagged artists I love in order to help them reach new friends. Many people like my posts. Some will even comment. And then those same friends don’t follow the artists.
Most things now require repeated exposure, not only to your name and face but to a means to connect.
So instead of fretting about no CD sales or streams, I realized I need to put more QR’s around at the show. On the poster. On our merch table. Near the drinks bar. At the entrance.
Nothing overbearing. Just a subtle reminder.
I think this will be the difference between people who actually follow our work and people who think “that was nice” and forget about it. That line is getting thinner and thinner every year, but we can create a pull towards staying connected.
Our next show is in late August but we hope to have another one in between. I want to finish most of the recording on 6 out of 7 songs by the end of the month though. Let’s see if we can do it.
A live album APPEARS!
