As many of you know, Bottle Imp Productions has been around for a while, but it should also be immediately obvious that activity has slowed down the past year or so. I have been assessing what I want to do with it going forward, and I figure that makes now a good time to write about where we’ve been, what we’ve done, and what we’re doing. This will likely get broken into multiple parts.
The Past
A few of you may remember this: Bottle Imp Productions really started as Killdevil Studios back in the mid-90’s. Killdevil Studios was more designed to be a regional web resource for dark/industrial music, mostly focused on Indiana, but also the general Great Lakes area. We helped book shows, we connected other bands together for shows, remixes, etc. We released a bit of music, which was a bit more awkward then, before MP3 files were easy to send/receive.
Then I moved to the west coast. Long story short, the domain I used to run Killdevil got snagged by a domain squatter who wanted to sell it back to me. When I moved back east, I decided to land in the Detroit area. I felt I wanted to explore some different ideas musically anyway, and decided to reinvent Killdevil as Bottle Imp Productions. Pretty sure I registered this domain in 2000 or 2001. At first I was using it to work as an artist showcase. Not quite a record label, not even quite a Netlabel. I was sort of helping show case artists I met through various places over the years: mp3.com, people I chatted with on Soulseek, local musicians I met.
I partnered with a friend in 2002 or so and we started working on putting up a stage at the Detroit Electronic Music Festival. We succeeded in this venture in both 2003 and 2004, even though a combination of administrative backfires and incredibly awful weather made the overall experience somewhat sour. I did however team up with a lot of interesting people, labels and musicians and was then able to start promoting touring artists at venues locally, mostly down in Detroit’s Eastern Market.
Obviously, this all spiraled into 2007-2010, where I was releasing some albums by a handful of talented, mostly local artists, with kind of our flagship being Scott from BLÆRG.
The Present
The past year or two has been slow. My own output as Life Toward Twilight has dipped significantly. Scott has been super busy. We sort of entered a period where, in most cases, artists can promote themselves just as effectively as they could with a label. I haven’t been promoting shows for a variety of reasons, and simply, we haven’t been releasing much. A few of our artists do have releases coming down the pipes, but in all of our cases, a lot of life situations have slowed down progress.
The Future
While I am still interested in helping artists release their material and giving them a bit of a built in audience, my objective was never to exclusively be a record label. I’ve tried starting music blogs elsewhere, but feel I really just need this to happen here. So what you may see over the next few months is this blog space changing from a Record Label’s news feed into a more music sharing/music review blog. I would expect mixes, podcasts, one of features and who knows what else.
I will still be releasing music. The actual structure of this site may change, but rather than having multiple hubs to showcase everything I am interested in doing, I want it all to be HERE. After all, that has sort of been the objective of this bit of digital real estate since its inception.
Good luck with your plans and viva musica. 🙂