The Past

A few of you may remember this: Bottle Imp Productions really started as Killdevil Studios back in the mid-90′s. Killdevil Studios was more designed to be a regional web resource for dark/industrial music, mostly focused on Indiana, but also the general Great Lakes area. We helped book shows, we connected other bands together for shows, remixes, etc. We released a bit of music, which was a bit more awkward then, before MP3 files were easy to send/receive.

Then I moved to the west coast. Long story short, the domain I used to run Killdevil got snagged by a domain squatter who wanted to sell it back to me. When I moved back east, I decided to land in the Detroit area. I felt I wanted to explore some different ideas musically anyway, and decided to reinvent Killdevil as Bottle Imp Productions. Pretty sure I registered this domain in 2000 or 2001. At first I was using it to work as an artist showcase. Not quite a record label, not even quite a Netlabel. I was sort of helping show case artists I met through various places over the years: mp3.com, people I chatted with on Soulseek, local musicians I met.

I partnered with a friend in 2002 or so and we started working on putting up a stage at the Detroit Electronic Music Festival. We succeeded in this venture in both 2003 and 2004, even though a combination of administrative backfires and incredibly awful weather made the overall experience somewhat sour. I did however team up with a lot of interesting people, labels and musicians and was then able to start promoting touring artists at venues locally, mostly down in Detroit’s Eastern Market.

Obviously, this all spiraled into 2007-2010, where I was releasing some albums by a handful of talented, mostly local artists, with kind of our flagship being Scott from BLÆRG.

The Present

The past year or two has been slow. My own output as Life Toward Twilight has dipped significantly. Scott has been super busy. We sort of entered a period where, in most cases, artists can promote themselves just as effectively as they could with a label. I haven’t been promoting shows for a variety of reasons, and simply, we haven’t been releasing much. A few of our artists do have releases coming down the pipes, but in all of our cases, a lot of life situations have slowed down progress.

The Future

While I am still interested in helping artists release their material and giving them a bit of a built in audience, my objective was never to exclusively be a record label. I’ve tried starting music blogs elsewhere, but feel I really just need this to happen here. So what you may see over the next few months is this blog space changing from a Record Label’s news feed into a more music sharing/music review blog. I would expect mixes, podcasts, one of features and who knows what else.

I will still be releasing music. The actual structure of this site may change, but rather than having multiple hubs to showcase everything I am interested in doing, I want it all to be HERE. After all, that has sort of been the objective of this bit of digital real estate since its inception.

One pervasive vision of Detroit is its ruins – the monolithic hulks of an industrial era gone by, documented in striking photographs and tales of urban exploration. Missing from this narrative is the other side of the coin. In place of those decaying buildings grow plots of wildflowers and wildlife. After knowing these secret gardens and hidden blooms, we feel this crucial story needs to be told. Thats where you come in. Wildflowers of Detroit is a community technology project for cataloging wild plants growing in Detroit, an effort which can enable people’s appreciation of its open space. Though experiencing and appreciating the “empty” fields, we can discover together the emerging ecology of this area. Our technologies collaborative WinterRoot is teaming up with Detroit’s Omnicorp Hackerspace and Alley Culture’s Seed Exchange to bring this vision into being.

If of interest, help if you can.

Go here to download

BLÆRG, Life Toward Twilight

Inhabitants – preliminary tests by Amnion

DAMNED III

Part 1

Part 2