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Guest Blog: The Unkindness of Ravens
The Unkindness of Ravens are fiercely independent in everything they do. Sultry songstress, Nina Wagner, wrote us some lovely words of encouragement for independent bands out there. Read on to find out about their take on what it means to be DIY...DIY with quality
One of the golden rules when deciding to be part of a band, is to learn the business side of it. It's the direction the music industry's evolving into, so we are equally artists as well as business people. It's your best bet to learn the tricks of the trade in order to avoid getting messed around.
Not only are The Unkindness of Ravens an innovative two piece electro punk rock band, but we're also a record label getting our music out there for people to listen to. The label Sonic Fire Records, was created out of necessity; without one, it's near to impossible to release your tracks legitimately. However, having your own label defines your band as a business and people take you more seriously.
In the time I joined The Unkindness of Ravens, I quickly became more than just the singer of the band, I also had to adopt the role as a manager. In the beginning, my role as a manager consisted mostly of booking shows, but within the two years, I built up a network of good promoters, photographers and visual artists. I also developed skills such as writing press releases, booking tours and I've refined my communicating skills.
The real challenge I found in being a manager and artist simultaneously, is staying consistent in keeping the jobs separate from one another. When Ravens started gigging, we had to deal with a lot of shitty promoters. In an ideal world, I'd have ditched the shitty gig and given them the finger, but as a manager, you can't do that because you don't want to run the risk of promoters muddying your name… And with every stubborn rock eventually comes the rolling and 100 gigs later, we've developed a sixth sense on who to work with and who to avoid.
Sonic Fire Records and TUORavens hold a very strong DIY ethos, so we take the initiative and create everything ourselves. From recording, production, design, burning CD's, websites, booking shows / tours, videos and merchandise, we do it all on our own and / or with other creative souls who are interested in doing us a favor and helping out.
The nice thing about being just two people is the easy communication and the reliance one has on each other. There's less complications when it comes to making decisions and things get done faster. You have the freedom to set your own goals and you can go off on adventures together whenever you feel like it. An example of this would be that we really want the recording experience for our debut album to be special, so we've decided to go to Berlin for one month, set-up our recording studio in a cheap flat, learn about the German music scene and play some gigs. And what happens? We turn a dream into a reality! I'm sure it would have been a lot more complicated trying to organize this with a five piece…
True rock n' roll for us is self discovery, setting our own rules and standards, finding the truth and staying pure. Sonic Fire Records works instinctively, which means that certain goals we previously aimed for could change. The industry's always evolving and we try and evolve with it. One way I do this is buying music rags. I study them religiously in order to find out who's currently in and why. Not that we want to follow the same foot steps of other artists, but it's to understand their process, which helps build our awareness.
Another thing that we're proud of are our low budget music videos. Ben and I both have an education in Film, so the knowledge comes in handy when we shoot our videos. TUORavens are all about minimalism and getting as much out of something as possible. Even for just two people our sound is massive, our stage performances look huge and our videos look like a million bucks. Our aim is to make everything we do, look and sound like a million bucks and you don't need massive amounts of money to achieve this. It's the good ol' saying - it's quality, not quantity.
One of the greater challenges is motivating people to come down to see our live shows once they've listened to our music. One way to achieve that, is to make sure you put on a killer show to get people hooked, the other of course is to write ground breaking songs. Our sound is versatile and seems to fit into most genres and although people are always trying to pin us down, we like to believe that we've created our own genre. Being so different though, creates the unknown and it takes time for people to catch on and understand what we're about.
Another form we use to reach out to people is through our various social websites and keeping them updated on a regular basis. The more you're on those sites and updating, the more you catch peoples' eye. However, balance needs to be restored and you don't want it to become you're full-time job. We have to keep in check that our main priority is creating art first, then bragging about it later.
Everything we do boils down to the one true reason why we do this; the love of music. We work hard and aim high because we can and no one's gonna stop us. If making music requires some extra knowledge and skills, so be it, the world's forever evolving, so we might as well understand it's evolutionary process and be a few steps ahead.