Behind the Scenes at Ill-Advised Records
There’s always something going on at Ill-Advised Records!
Sometimes, this fact is pretty obvious - we just recently finished a series of 5 new album releases which lasted about 2 months, so the volume of new music and physical releases was pretty hard to miss.
Things aren’t always a matter of releasing tape after tape, however, and so I thought it might be interesting to talk about some of the behind-the-scenes work that goes on in between our periodic “seasons” of album releases.
The Website
Many of you may have noticed that there has been a fresh coat of paint around here! I’ve been busily working away over the past week or so, combing through each page to make things a little more visually interesting, removing outdated content, streamlining the flow and just all-around trying to put the “fun” in functional. At the end of the day, I want the website to be an extension of our overall artistic vision, and I want folks to be as interested in checking it out and browsing the various pages as they are when they listen to our music.
The Discord
Out of all the social media profiles we manage, the Discord gets the most attention after our YouTube channel. Both I and our resident Discord wizard WAYVEE both believe that Discord is a unique platform among all of the options out there, as it allows genuine real-time connections not only between fans and other fans, but between fans and the creators of the material they follow. The instigating event in the recent website overhaul was actually a conversation between myself and WAYVEE. We decided that it would be cool to set up a sort of Discord invite landing page on the website so that it could be customized to look cooler than a standard invite page, and one thing led to another. The Discord page looked cool enough that everything else looked less cool, and so the whole site needed a re-do. There have been a lot of great discussions recently between WAYVEE and I about ways to engage people on the Discord, drive new membership and so-on. We have a long list of ideas including everything from bring back movie nights, to contests, community mixes, and even rewards for dedicated fans that help spread the word. Discord has launched some new features recently as well, so there are a lot of creative ideas in the works to utilize them. If you’re not already a member of the Discord server, head to the Discord page to get started!
Vinyl
Another exciting project which some of you may have heard me talking about here and there is our first official vinyl release! The vinyl industry is absolutely slammed with orders right now, so it is a tough time to jump in, but we’re doing it anyway. I placed an order and made the down payment for our first run of vinyl several months ago, and it will be several months still before I can expect to receive anything. That said, there has been an exciting development - I am expecting a shipment of test-pressings to arrive in a week or so. It feels like things are actually moving forward, and that is very exciting. The plan is to release a Halloween vinyl compilation this October, so we are still on track from that. If it sells well, I hope to continue to press more, and to increase the number of annual vinyl releases depending on demand. And so, how many records we make available is entirely up to you!
The Dark Door
My vision for IAR has always been more than just another lofi label that sells tapes. Our audience is a wonderful niche of weirdos, and so there are a lot of other products and projects which have a clear overlap. The Dark Door, our horror fiction zine, is just one such product, and we are now on our second issue, with the third well underway. The reception has been positive, and it has been such a fun project. This of course takes time to produce, and so when we are in-between releases, this is one of the projects that gets some much-deserved attention. As we increase the number of different projects that we have going on, the week-to-week workflow of the label becomes more varied. Who knows what the future will bring!
VOID Apparel
Some of you may also have noticed that the merch shop is looking quite different! I noticed that so much of our merch was just album art plastered on a T-shirt, and more importantly, that nobody seems to want to buy that. The original designs (like the dark lofi girl shirts) were the main thing people wanted to buy, so it didn’t make sense to keep uploading new designs of every bit of album art, as that variety will become too large over time and oversaturate our line. My solution to this was to nuke the shop and remove all of the album art shirts, plus many redundant designs, and to create an entirely new brand of clothing.VOID apparel is a standalone line of clothing. It doesn’t feature any label-specific references, but the style will resonate with anyone who likes our music. Divorcing it from the label identity allows for total creative freedom, and the design philosophy is centered primarily around creating clothing that just looks cool and unique, as opposed to representing specific releases or references from the label.
Head to the VOID Apparel page if you want to check out this exciting new line! We’ll be releasing some more promo photos and videos in the near future, and plan to periodically release new design lines.
Halloween
It may seem pretty far away still, but around here it may as well already be Halloween. Work has already begun on new music, videos, releases and more for the Halloween season. In particular, some projects include The Weather Channel 3, Halloween Lofi Mix 4, the Halloween vinyl release, a fall issue of The Dark Door, a possible limited edition cassette release, and much, much more!
And that’s only the half of it!
Things are always busy around here, and that’s because we have amazing fans like you, who enjoy our crazy projects. Thank you for supporting us in all the strange things that we do, and I hope you are looking forward to what’s to come as much as we are!
Chris (Dated)