ALI's INTROVERSE

The SoAlive gig went well. We forgot how pleasant Mixtape 5 could be... The format of having interlaced gigs in the small and big hall of the club is quite cool as it allows both the bands and the audience to check out different experiences just a few steps away and take a break if necessary. Less and less people take Friday night for what it used to be several years ago. It could be just our age(d) group. In any case, we loved seeing a 200ish or so crowd despite the less than ideal start time and last minute announcement of the gig. We were enjoying Me And My Devil's performance after ours. They fit so well in the post-midnight hours where conscious and subconscious often collide. Another highlight was that quite a few people saw us for the first time reminding us that it's hard to over-gig a market, even one as small as Sofia's underground. The best part, though - sharing the stage with Kalo who was relaxed and in a great mood, I'm very much looking forward to the rem...

Another eventful week started off with the release of the Toaster video, continued with internal meetings setting up for the future, moving into the SoAlive conference workshops and meetings and is still to be capped off in several hours with our live performance at the same conference. The Toaster video has been the biggest production that we've ever had for a video. Philippe, Alex and the team put their heart and soul into it - their own words which we subscribe to fully. All of us incredibly proud to share the video, its message and the story behind it. But fighting algorithms of big tech without paying a fee progressively feels like a losing battle. Toaster accumulated 2.4K views. By comparison after the same period Don't Hate Me had 2.7K, Bliss & Blasphemy 3.8K, The List 4.3K and Freedom 5.8K. We're using the same strategy, platforms, etc. and addressing a larger fan base. Yet the results are disappointing. We don't mind not being noticed, it's part of the ...

 Several highlights in the past week - all good. We did quite a bit of homework for the SoAlive conference where we'll be attending a few workshops, a few speed meetings with booking agents from across the European continent, and also perform a 45-minute set to hopefully build a music bridge into new lands. What happens, happens. One of the things we did was to take a good look at the delegates list (both manually and using Claude , our AI partner of choice) and create a shortlist of people we should get in touch with and why. The list was shared and double-checked by Deni who's also working on bridges for local bands. There's going to be a workshop on the process of releasing IDLES ' latest album (TANGK) - another lucky coincidence because we constantly quote them as one of our inspirations. Of course, it won't be the band themselves, but still getting a peep into "the creative process, strategic decisions and marketing strategies that brought this highly anti...

  One could say that a lot has happened in the past 10 days. The truth is that it happened before that, but we decided to keep the full story for later. We continue the same strategy for now, but some parts we'll share. The photo is our last group photo before we heard the biggest news of our history so far... Kalo decided that it's time to focus on things more important than the band. And there's many of those. We understand and respect this move unconditionally as hurtful as it is. First and foremost emotionally.  But it also means that we needed to get to work on an issue we never faced before. We had people leave the band, but we never had to introduce a new band member. Turns out - it's not easy! For obvious reasons, we cannot share too many details - but it's a non-professional musician, who fits into our family/office day job rhythm (anything else would be frustrating) and can play some mean bass. These are our core criteria, but only time will tell how every...