And the "Most ignored artist of all time" award goes to...LORENA!

I want to share with you a comment I wrote from the bottom of my heart after smoking a lil weed. This was in the blog post 'Beware of the insecure good taste' on the DFOS blog. The question they made was:

What feels special about the moment you share something you made, and what gets in the way?
(now that I think of it, what I did was rant about my failures rather than answering the question itself, well...)

I think I should win the award for "Most Ignored Artist of All Time". I have more than 20 years making music and only 13 monthly listeners on spotify, I have more than 20 years making artistic photography and my work has never been shown on an art show. I used to be really hopeful everytime I released or did something new, but it didn't take too long before I noticed that for some reason, nobody cared. This was a little before the big boom on social media that I saw this happening, then social media made it 10x worst, with the follower, like, etc, counting, I feel reduced to a number, and the worst thing is the mayority of people are obsessed with that number. It's like having a school calification of yourself as a human being and artist. For years I kept the hope of "the next release will matter to people", and nothing happened and so on and so on and so on. It was really depressing. At first I thought it was because of the quality of my work, and I know, that's subjective, but I don't really think what I do is THAT bad (I actually think is really good, of course, haha), I studied more about what I do, put more effort into doing this right at the point of becoming obsessive. Nothing changed. Then I started to blame the cultural infraestructure of my country (which I still kind of do, because there is none), sexism, being millenial, whatever. Turns out I still don't know what it is about me and my artistic work that I seem to be some kind of a ghost.

Real thing that happened: With all that introduction, I want to tell the most radical thing I could think of I did in terms of sharing my work. Which was to share it in the worst possible moment At first I spent weeks making releasing plans for my records and did all the visual work, website redesign, branding redesign, social media posts, press release redaction, media contact, and everything that one can possibily do to promote my music. It never worked out, not even my friends listened to it when I sent the link. The media was completely silent. The streams were shameful. Then in the pandemic I had it and said fuck everything, so I released the LP I spent more than 2 years working on (self-producing) the 24th of december, with no promo whatsoever, no press releases, no nothing. Everyone that knows a bit about the music industry (even in indie circles) know that this is basically music career suicide. I thought like George Costanza: if every instinct you have is wrong then the opposite would have to be right. I thought my radical action will have the opposite effect of what it was suppose to do, turns out...it didn't, lol. It was a huge failure once again.

For my last EP I decided not to be so radical about the release but just posting the cover on instagram the day it came out after releasing a few singles and no more than that. Turns out it was the most streamed music on my catalog in the first week of it's release. Don't get me wrong, it's not on the Bilboard chart, but I went to 3 plays in the first week of previous records to the amazing amount of 60. It was a personal achievement.

So the moral of the fable is: I don't know. I just decided to enjoy doing it and that's it, that's why I do it, to be happier in my life and have something to wake up for.