2020 with a bullet (How I got it all wrong).

Around this time I write a yearly summary and try my best to be honest about the ✅ achievements and ⚠️failures of the last twelve months. It might have some use for you, but always becomes useful for me – listing errors I don’t want over again .

Old band’s rotting corpse

✅ 2019 was the end of the Severed Heads era – which was the right decision given that our live shows were starting to become ‘more selective’ in a Spinal Tap way … excellent timing, as touring as a whole became extinct in 2020. ⚠️ But I still have people asking if Severed Heads will do this or that and that’s impressed on me how difficult it is to publicise the absence of something.

⚠️Dropping the known for the unknown is a miserable slog. I’ve lost a lot of kudos and support and often feel like I’ve erased years of work and achievement. But the old thing was stale and if I am going to laugh at bands like Kraftwerk for that, I have to eat my own medicine.

✅ A measure of it – when I analyse my followers on social media, they follow other bands that died 30 years ago. I want to align with the here and now. Taking a risk earns that.

✅The notable 2020 achievement of the old band is the CLIFFORD 2000 LP just out through Medical Records – I’m delighted to present something recorded this century after years of endless juvenilia. It’s taken much to get even this far.

Internet

⚠️ Shutting down sevcom.com and tomellard.com was a complete mess. I thought that the internet would repatch reasonably quickly – after all that is the point of internet – but it hasn’t at all. I’m still seeing unwanted traffic to my dead tte AT sevcom email and have difficulty getting any traction to nilamox – (then again where was sevcom after one year?) I also misunderstood how blogs work. I thought I’d backed up my old blog. I started this one expecting to be able to import the old entries but I’m stuck finding and re-entering posts manually which could take several decades.

⚠️The new site is still finding its purpose. It wants to be library and a museum and other things and it can’t be all of that. Technically, it is still a jumble of WordPress and Muse based pages, which have to at some point be made whole.

⚠️Because few people visit web sites anymore, I’ve had to visit Twitter and Facebook and try writing ‘nilamox.com’ as many times as possible. The problem we all have now is to lead people away from the walled gardens back to independent websites. The answer might be exclusives – like online video sites such as Disney+.

Music

✅ Musically it’s been good. Even back in part time teaching work⚠️, I’ve managed seven releases on the new label. Two are compilations of older Sevcom releases, two are updates to these, two are collaborations and one is just my idea of weird fun shit. That’s a good burst of energy that will now need to slow down.

🚮 The old SevCom label is also getting a clean up with some titles being compacted and others dropped. I think it’s right to retire recordings when no one has wanted a copy for a long time (and I have already done this with no one noticing for months). Some older albums sell, some newer ones don’t and that’s just the test of time. Having too many titles at once just confuses people. Attempting to preserve every release ends up being a major chore with very little reward.

⚠️ Don’t talk about merch. 2020 was a cluster fuck.

Slipping into the future

There has been some progress on Progress. Because this has been a working year I am behind schedule. But:

• The third game (currently named Luna) has become an enormous project about four times the size of the previous titles, and with much stronger design. A major work is a major undertaking – that’s just the way it has to be. I think I should try apply for some funding to work on it. I’ve never applied for funding before!
• I still think there needs to be virtual performances but others have already gone far with this and I should just follow their lead.
• The latest version of Nuendo now includes the full Dolby Atmos production tools, which solves my being too small to apply for access to the technology. I don’t think there’s much chance of my getting soundtrack work but this is where ‘indie music’ must fight for an audience (and not hide in safe/obscure formats 📼).
• Nilamox is supposed to be difficult to define, with depth that can’t be found on Facebook. I have only the bare bones of the idea. It needs some love and courage to leave the safety of the past.
• Merch. Bigger, bolder, more fun, more art. Send it from the northern hemisphere. But how?

The byword for 2021 is Courage.