Sounds and Shadows

Everyone needs to get Klacked! I have been a big fan of the EDM super band team up from Madison WI “Introducing the 1984 Renault LeCar“. The band is comprised of Matt Fanale (Caustic/Daddybear) and Eric Oehler (Null Device). It always strikes me when I listen to Klack these are two long term friends having fun. You can hear it in the music. An effortless communication that makes every track feel like a dialog without singing to each other. The samples have a glorious tongue and cheek blend of listening to LA Style and beating Portal at 2am. Eric and Matt have such contrasting and distinct vocals that expand the dynamics of looping dance beats.

Modern Production | klack (bandcamp.com)

Why? EVERYONE must klack.

Klack has built our foundation on revering our influences and electronic past while moving the genre forward and beyond. Klack‘s mission is bringing the world together under the beat. Join us. Klack with us, as we are the keepers of the beat, and we are the ones that move you.

Favorite Tracks:

Beat Unity – Glorious glitchy bleep bloops with a gravelly chanting refrain. They are the keepers of the beat, the ones that move you. Taking a simple concept and executing it with no margin for error is a bold and beautiful thing. It makes me want to dance, dance all night long.

Dot Dot Dot – I had to call out this track because Eric has such an underrated voice which features heavily here. Brilliant Pete Burns Dead Or Alive vibes. Sassy and stinging intricate layers which return to a vocal hook.

Let’s Go To Berlin – To anyone who has gone to Berlin in their 40’s and thought “24 year old Ken would have thought this city was the coolest place in the world, but 44 year old Ken needs a nap. This song hits on every note of slamming beat, and self aware humor. I love when a book “A Confederacy of Dunces” for New Orleans as example, turns a city into one of the primary characters of the story. This track perfectly encapsulates the city of Berlin as an American middle-aged tourist. I was transported back in the best possible way. There is true power in a song that can take you somewhere without a passport.

Modern Production is another great example of two great artists paying homage to something they love and having fun. It’s so easy to get lost in a sound when you can hear the people playing it are just as big a fans as you are. When Matt and Eric put out this album, Matt put out an essay of some of the modern promotion techniques used to get folks attention. I ask Matt to include it in the review.

So let’s talk promoting a new album. It’s time to talk MODERN PROMOTION! It’s long, so apologies in advance. Hopefully it’s interesting.

We finished Modern Production in January. For a breakdown of our workload, Klack works like a restaurant– Eric is back of house in the kitchen, and I’m up front taking care of the guests. I come up with the song ideas and write the lyrics and find samples and Eric works on the music and production. We offer tweaks to each other’s side of things to tighten everything up, and ta-daah! BRILLIANCE!

And when it’s all finished I take over to promote it (with his input of course).

In the past we’ve always released albums as a surprise to ride the momentum and energy of the reaction. This time I wanted to be more “traditional” with the release, as we’d already built some steam when we released Beat Unity as a remix single (Eric did several remix styles) and “Body2Body2Body” with remixes from an amazing newer artist (Crystal Geometry) and legendary ones (Portion Control). I also handled an extended DJ remix I did that went to our DJ list.

So that’s where we’ll start…

Last year we compiled a list of all the DJs we knew who wanted to get our stuff early. We added people as we discovered them and now have a couple hundred on the list. I used a macro in Mailchimp to send them their own Bandcamp codes. Why that instead of links to a Google Drive or Dropbox? Because when they download the album in any format they want we start building the avatars on the album page. Optics is sometimes a small thing, but it’s a) Nice to see a bunch of people already checked out your album, and b) We can see how many codes were redeemed.

In this case about half of the codes sent out were redeemed. Some emails probably got caught in spam filters, and some people probably forgot. 50% was my goal anyway, as that’s higher than previous codes we’d sent out. Success.

Next I made a plan to contact any media sites friendly to me over the years to get the the album early. I wanted those sources to get as much advance notice as possible in case they were interested in interviews or writing about the album, as most are DIY and have a lag time. We got a few interviews out of it as well as some better-than-usual press coverage. After all, we wanted to get as much enthusiasm towards the album as possible, but in that challenge I also wanted to come up with ways the album could get attention and stand out promo-wise from the pack. Then it came to me: promo flyers.

I figured since online is a quagmire of algorithmic horsefuckery that PHYSICAL promotion may get noticed more. If nothing else it may have surprised a few folks seeing something other than social media promotion. I contacted a ton of pals who are DJs in the U.S. and Canada who had semi-regular nights and asked if I could send them some. Almost all of them said yes. I got the info for flyers to Eric (including the “LONG LIVE THE NEW BEAT” catchphrasey-thing I came up with) and he designed them. We also included QR codes to our Bandcamp and Linktree for ease of access. Prices for high quality flyers are pretty damn reasonable these days and the turnaround was incredibly fast.

While doing the flyers I worked separately on getting a lyric video for Weight of the World together so we could get another track out, and we thought Weight had the most appeal to it. Always put your best foot forward.

In terms of online stuff I tried to build up our Instagram and Tiktok presences, just to have more avenues to find potential fans (especially younger ones). Our numbers didn’t go up by thousands, but after liking a bunch of newer artists in a similar vein to us we got some more traction there.

We kept dropping little nuggets of content we thought would get people excited, like the aforementioned lyric video and that we were doing vinyl as well. Basically I wanted to roll the content out intermittently, but always wanted it to be something a chunk of people would be into. The more cool information the better.

In regards to the vinyl, we considered waiting on producing it until after the release was out so we could gauge interest, but ended up just going for it as we’re very confident in the material and Synthicide was crazysexycool and said we could release the three tracks from our split cassette on the album. More value = PROFIT$$$!!!

I sent Weight of the World in to Spotify’s editors for consideration, as well as discovered how to send it to Bandcamp’s editors. I didn’t hear back from either, but it was good to practice and for Bandcamp I now know it’s an option.

The other big thing we pushed was pre-saves on Spotify. I even ran an ad on Facebook for a week to see if that would inspire more. We didn’t get a zillion– maybe 40– but I wanted to spike our numbers on streaming services as hard as possible. We prefer people get the album on Bandcamp (ideally spending a few bucks), but still to stream the crap out of it otherwise.

The flyers came in and I packaged them all up about a week before April. We also sent Klack the Planet stickers with them so people could put them on their laptops or cats or something.

We had previously gotten in touch with Post-Punk Magazine, who had done a great story on the Body2Body2Body video, and were able to push the album and Weight of the World there. We were able to time the story to get out the week of release, and ultimately released the album the Thursday evening before Bandcamp Friday to capitalize on the relative lack of email notifications going out then, as opposed to the onslaught the next day. We also let people know when the limited metallic silver edition and “regular” editions were going on sale the next day.

When it comes to Bandcamp Fridays I hyperfixate on the numbers like a freak. When things slow down after the initial push (especially for the vinyl) I hit Facebook groups with info on the album, as well as Instagram. I don’t want to overdo it with posts to Bandcamp followers, but another reminder email later in the day always gives us another spike in sales/downloads. The same with another post on my wall here. There are so many places to post it’s good to space them out. I also do a big “thank you” post on our Klack page and on Bandcamp because we are INCREDIBLY thankful, but it also serves as another reminder to get those last people in there to push our numbers up a bit more.

Yes, it’s a lot of work. Yes, it can be tiring. Yes, it’s worth it if you’ve built a foundation and make it fun for everyone (especially yourself).

So how did we do, and were the monetary investments worth it?

In short, pretty damn great. We didn’t get thousands of downloads, but we did get our biggest sales day to date. A lot of that was for the vinyl, but either that or shirts helped our previous largest sales days. We had a ton of people grabbing the album for free, which is to be expected. About 1/2 of the people paid for it (minus the DJ codes that were already claimed), and a decent percentage of those people paid more than we would have expected.

We’ve always gone the pay-what-you-want route with Klack. When we say “Klack is for everyone”, we kinda mean it. We just want our music in people’s ears. Most everything we do is in-house (literally) so our overhead is minimal minus promotions. Plus we believe in our klackprodukt and people pay what they can, often generously. We hope they stream it on their platform of choice, too. Then we make money on both ends.

We had some solid improvements on Spotify. For the first time ever we have a song doing better than the Hatari remix that was put out a few years ago. Our followers and plays are also up significantly and the album looks to have been already saved by twice as many people as our last release.

Modern Production also topped a bunch of the charts on Bandcamp (where we’ve now got dozens of new follows to promote to) and was the lead mention on pages like Synthpop Fanatic and some other sites, which had never happened to us before. That’s a big win to me. Lots of firsts.

The biggest relief was that the vinyl sold very well. At this point we have about 25 copies of the ltd edition left and most of the regular edition. That’s what we wanted, however. We’ve made enough back to pay for the entire run plus most of our promotion and still have a lot to sell at shows and online. That’s a great feeling.

Some other small perks popped up. One fan hooked us up with a German store to help with some European distro, and we were directed to another potential place to work with. It’s not a zillion copies, but this allows us to get our albums into the European market more and ideally if they sell we can build our relationships further for the next release. We’re also hopefully taking the DAC by storm again. We don’t expect Modern Production to top the charts like DEKLACKED did for like 5 of the 6 weeks, but we hope it will do well again.

I still have some things to do, like get the album up on Soundcloud and keep a FB ad going for a bit if it looks like it’s getting some attention. We did a great “unofficial release” show in Milwaukee to celebrate our new effort, which went really well. We can only also hope all the reviews are as amazing as Kollektiva’s, which just came out.

I think overall I did a pretty damn good job promoting the album given our limited budget and me not doing something of this size in years, let alone having it be organized. The response to the album has been amazing so far, so now we just need to keep maintaining that momentum. We’ve had several hundred downloads so far and sales keep coming, so fingers crossed Modern Production stays in people’s minds for a while. We’ll be doing our best to keep it there.

We’re almost three weeks out from the release of Klack’s Modern Production and things are slowing down a bit. The big push is over, but now we’re relying on word of mouth and a lot of “fingers crossed” things to happen, like positive reviews (heck, just REVIEWS) and play from DJs that might turn someone new on to the new release. Yesterday was the first day we had no downloads for the album on Bandcamp, but that’s the longest we’ve got to the best of my recollection before it happened. Our Spotify numbers have dipped some but I’m using a boosted post on here and all the other Meta bullshit to try and boost those numbers a little bit more. Regardless, things are still moving positively. I could blame Taylor Swift’s new album, but she didn’t top EBM in Bandcamp so I don’t see her as a threat.

Whenever I see a new review (and fortunately they’ve all been really positive) I make sure to thank the reviewer and post it on the Klack page. The big thing that happened this week was we debuted at number one on the German Alternative Charts. The DAC is a DJ poll of a few hundred DJs, most of which are European. We’ve fortunately always done well there, but this was a real confidence boost when you normally see significantly bigger names debuting that high (Cassandra Complex, who we bumped to second, for instance). It doesn’t mean that it will translate to more sales, but the optics on it are great and it’s nice being recognized by a lot of people we don’t know for our hard work.

I’m holding back at posting on Bandcamp to not lose anyone. We continue to have a nice uptick of followers and I don’t want to jeopardize that. I’ll post when the vinyl is in, most likely. That should stoke the embers enough to move some more sales and not annoy anyone too badly.

I need to step up my Tiktok stuff, as I haven’t said much there recently. Instagram is chugging along, and Threads is whatever. It all helps incrementally and is easy to post on (and free), so I’ll keep hitting it. I’ll also hit the Facebook groups when more reviews come in so I can toss some more quotes in for the album. The key is to have SOMETHING to talk about that’s worth hearing. It doesn’t need to be earth shattering, but something to keep people interested and motivated in some small way to keep paying attention.

By the way THANK YOU AGAIN to everyone who generously helped us push the downloads over another mountain top. We hit a pretty big number for us, and Modern Production is already the 11th most downloaded Klack release in LESS THAN THREE WEEKS. We aren’t doing Boy Harsher numbers but we’re staying in the game, and continuing to push the release weeks after it’s out is imperative to keeping ears on it and making sure it’s not forgotten in the next wave of releases.

tl;dr- We’re in maintenance mode, just hoping the word keeps creeping out, that new people give the album a listen, and that everyone else who already likes us keeps downloading the album. It’s not as much about the money (much as we can use it), it’s about building and strengthening the foundation for longevity.