Week 4 Review + Announcement Prep!

Hey! Welcome back!

We are now onto week four of this nine-week bansheebeat project! If you’re just now coming onboard, this project acts as a means for me to stay organized and focused this spring, working toward preparing, releasing, and promoting my new album! Being nearly half way through the project, a lot of things that have been incubating are very close to being realized! The official announcement of my new release, along with all of the details I’ve been withholding here with my updates, will be secret no longer!

Most of this past week has been working to prepare all of the materials necessary for the full announcement, and while that might just sound as simple as saying “hey I have a thing coming out soon,” there was actually a lot more to it that I wasn’t expecting.

In order to finally announce the release, here is a list of a few of the things I need to complete:

Finalize the resolution of the album artwork, along with extra resolutions for phone and desktop wallpaper applications
Finish putting together the announcement trailer
Type up album liner notes, credits, and thank you’s
Draft up a press release and artist bio for promotion
Obtaining image usage rights for promotional photos

While a few of these are still in progress (I’m aiming to have everything submitted to the record label in charge of the release by this weekend), I will still go through my process in preparing these materials for the release.

Album Artwork

Although I’m trying to avoid sharing the artwork in full before the EP is announced, I will share the mobile wallpaper version that will come with the full release once it drops. Here you can get just enough of a teaser of the front album artwork until I unveil it with the announcement.

Announcement Trailer

My friend Pixelon and I are still pushing to wrap up the announcement trailer, but I can share a bit of our process thus far. Unfortunately, I don’t currently have access to an exported copy of any of our drafts, as my computer cannot process video terribly well and thus left all of the hands-on work to him. The concept we’ve gone for is to introduce a snippet of a couple of the songs set to an animated rendition of the album artwork! This was our second idea, as our first thought was to combine segments of all of the tracks into a collage for the trailer, but we eventually settled on using only two of them to neatly accompany the two separate art pieces featured in the video. Pixelon is a video wizard when it comes to editing and doing really neat things with text and imagery in a video context. We’re rapidly working to finish the final draft, and will release it along with the announcement!

Liner Notes, Credits, and Thank You’s

This has been incredibly difficult for me to come up with. Now that the album, artwork, and everything else is complete, coming up with the words to really send it off into the world have been difficult for me to manifest. The album was drafted, arranged, and produced from November of 2015 through roughly September of last year, and after that I’ve spent that time up until now doing other post-production and pre-release work. I have so many different things I could say about what this release means to me. Do I discuss how I felt about it during the writing process, how I feel about it now, or what I want to impart on the listener as a companion to listening to it? Nailing what I want to say has been a struggle, not made any easier by the fact that I find it incredibly difficult to convey my thoughts through text. In addition, so many different people had individual impacts on the release, whether in the drafting process, production, or in post, so coming up with a concrete “thank you” list has been impossible. I have too many people that I feel were essential in some way or another for making this record possible, so I really want to genuinely thank everyone who participated in helping me bring this to life.

Press Release

As per the advice given to me from multiple friends and colleagues, for the first time in my life I’m drafting up a full blown press release to use when promoting the EP. I’m the furthest thing from a journalist, and writing anything involving words is honestly not my strong suit. Luckily, I’ve been reading enough music publications over the last several years to have enough of a grasp on the overblown descriptive language and hyperbole that is incredibly common in this field. Also, my friend Lachlan Johnston, who is a music journalist that writes for the Japanese division of the New York Times, sent me a few press releases he’s both received and written himself to use as a reference.

dosing press release, used with permission

While the write-up is still far from perfect, and that I need to convert it from pure text into a multimedia document, is well on its way to being a sufficient piece of media promotion. Describing my music in a regular conversation is already very difficult for me, so to explain everything that definitively informs the reader on exactly what this release is sonically and thematically was extremely hard! But, after a lot of time spent pulling for astute descriptions, and feedback from various music journalism colleagues of mine, I think I was able to come up with something acceptable!

Above I've include a screenshot of my current draft, and to the left is a look at how it will might appear once I include everything else in the document.

I’m still scrambling to have everything ready to go by the end of the week, but I’m very satisfied with all I was able to accomplish thus far! This project has seen me doing things I’d never even considered doing with a release, such as the press release. I’m very excited to share the final announcement I’ve been working toward for the past several weeks, but after that I will have an entirely new list of things to work on up to and following the day when the release is finally here!

Thank you again for joining me in this undertaking! It’s been an incredibly insightful process and I’m very glad I can share this experience with you all!

See you again next week~

- Dylan