Hi from Paper Mountain in Northbridge, Western Australia
Hihi! I write to you from my lunch break at Paper Mountain, where I’m in the middle of my second stint as Artist In Residence as part of the Isolatated Incidents program. I wrote a blog on my first time in here last month - have a look at that here, if you feel so inclined. I’m working on videos and music and animations and chorography (!) and some kind of drag thing (!) and having a blast.
In good/fun/interesting news, I’m now on Patreon. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a platform where you pay a small monthly subscription to an artist in exchange for exclusive content and all kinds of stuff.
Weirdly, I’ve already participated in something like this; back in the mid-2000s, I put up an offering on an Australian platform called uSync (or something like that?) - it was a brand new business model back then, and it wasn’t very popular, which was a pity because it’s ideal for cult artists like me. I loved having a direct line to the people who loved my stuff enough to put their money where their mouth was. It’s a much more broadly understood idea now, and I’d been holding off because the rewards for Normal Place are still a work in progress; that project is such a monster that spending time on the rewards was very hard to do. We’re getting on top of it though, and I’ve gotta stop letting The Irish Catholic Childhood Guilts cripple me out of doing things that are awesome.
It’s especially good because I have THREE ALBUMS WORTH OF MATERIAL coming out over the next year or so, plus videos, a movie, art, blogs, articles, all kindsa stuff. And it feels like it’s a good idea to let the people who most love that stuff be close to it and even be part of the process as I make those things. That kinda open book approach works really well for me - I’m an exhibitionist after all.
There are three tiers - the first (“Model T Ford”) tier starts at $3 USD a month and includes every new release and post I put up except for those that are about things in my Vault. Yeah, like Prince, I have a Vault. Except that mine’s online and has everything I’ve ever released, and it’s gradually growing to include a bunch of demos, alternative versions, remixes, works-in-progress, you-name-it from (mumble-mumble) coming up to 18 years of being a solo artist. To get access to the Vault, you can join the “Ford Falcon” tier for $6.66 a month - or my top, crazy money “Ford Fairlane” tier of $20 US a month, which includes tickets for yourself to whatever of my events you want a ticket to.
Anyway, it’s live and people are already on board, so stop by and check it out:
There’s a couple of free posts up, and my new single COVID-69, written with the Potato Stars’ Prozac Boy is up as an MP3 (or a stream, whatever you’d rather) for subscribers RIGHT NOW. It’s a punk song! I made it using my tenor ukulele, a pitch-shifting pedal and a bottle of whisky. It’s out properly on Wednesday August 26th - when the NEXT single will be going up on Patreon as a sneaky peek and so on and so on…
