Being a 'promoter' isn't that fun right now

Some thoughts on promoting an event in the current state of world affairs and the future of kinetic parties

Hi all, writing to you with some fairly severe but hopefully not overcome-able promoter anxiety.

Our 2nd birthday is fast approaching and being completely honest, posting or thinking about anything except the ongoing global atrocities right now feels extremely pointless, thoughtless, tone-deaf and unhelpful.

For over a year our brains and instagram feeds have been inundated with videos of children being blown apart, whole neighbourhoods burning down, and yet I didn’t think it was possible to still be as surprised or horrified by something as much as those images from Al Aqsa hospital.

It goes without saying but I’m finding it hard to find the energy & desire to promote a party right now but this doesn’t stop feeling like I need to promote. And this got me thinking…

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A few weeks ago I also deleted instagram. It sounds extremely clichéd, but it’s true what they say, it really does it make you feel better.

Naturally though, promoting a party without instagram isn’t just hard, it’s actually just almost impossible right now. But what if it wasn’t ?

photo by Ava Eliza Smith from our last party back in May

It’s always been a dream of mine to create a community solid enough & trusting enough of my curation that I could keep my line ups unannounced. Now I’d also like to think about how we can become much less reliant on instagram & social media and much more involved in the community side of things. People have been telling me for a while that one of the things that feels special about kinetic as a party is its community aspect & I guess I’d like to start by exploring why people feel like this.

Why is it a community? What is community? How can I help my community? How can I help the wider community?

I’ve thrown parties before which are completely off social media & rely on word of mouth, I guess the reason I’ve steered away from this with kinetic is purely that it’s just me, and its a scary thing to be throwing a party on your own, let alone an unannounced party which also doesn’t post on social media.

This being said, the dread I feel at the idea of having to spend 2 hours creating content & copy, open up instagram right now, & create a post that instagram either will or wont show to people, feels a lot more scary.

photo by Ava Eliza Smith from our last party back in May

For now, I’m going to focus all my energy on trying to make next weekend as cathartic as possible for everyone involved, but after that I’m going to have a little break and continue thinking about where we go next. So I guess you can treat this as a

w a t c h t h i s s p a c e .

All this being said, we ARE celebrating our 2nd birthday on the 26th October and although I’m not excited about the promotional aspect of it right now, I am extremely excited about the wonderful artists joining us, each of whom I know will challenge us, excite us & help us feel something on the dance floor. It’s definitely our most daring line up, but one I’m extremely proud of.

As a thank you for reading this monologue and in a bid to help me begin to focus more on our organic connections & community (and hopefully never have to go on instagram ever again), I’ve created a discount code which makes the tickets just £5 (:

Saturday 26th October w / Nono Gigsta, Marylou, Tutu Ta, sinny & Dj wiggles.

I’d love to see you there & hope you’re all doing ok / coping in these extremely scary, overwhelming and depressing times.

x

Ps. We will be sharing the recordings from our label launch party at spanners on Friday - make sure you’re following us on Soundcloud so you don’t miss them! :)