Re: What's experimental?

["Warren Sirota" <wsirota@wsdesigns.com>]

OK, I'm really interested in the exploration of what effective marketing terms are for the non-song-form, non-jazz, non-classical kinds of things that many loopers including myself tend to do. So I'm really interested in Kris' and anyone else's real-world experiments in this. I have, in fact, thought about test-marketing my next published work, presuming I put out something new in purchasable format someday, under different labels to see which is the most effective (cf "The 4-hour Work Week" to realize how easy this actually can be). Actually, mostly, I'd like to get into a lot more venues and street fairs where I could be exposed to a mainstream audience without having to draw people in myself, but I don't know how to present myself.

I have pretty much come to believe that attempts at accurate description are counterproductive, and that evocative terminology is better. I like "New Music" myself, because I come from an academic environment and know what that means - I'd immediately take a close look at any announcement of a New Music concert that I see. But I doubt that this has much appeal to the world in general. I like the term "Creative Music" even tho it's meaningless. 

I think I need to change the name of my group to "Mindf*ck", and let people interpret that as they may (after all, my goal often isn't so much making music as messing with people's heads anyway). (actually, if anyone has a gentler way of saying that that they could share, I'd be interested).

And Kris, if your community supports jazz, more power to you. Here in the NY exurbs, jazz is not a "draw", and i don't think it's much of a draw in NYC either unless you're a big name.

No answers, just random thoughts. sorry if i'm rambling.

Warren