Wanted: Attitude Adjustment
What I’ve recently noticed quite a lot in steampunk is rather a sad and worrisome development.
Namely the fact that a lot of new things and newcomers get shot down immediately.
This attitude frankly plainly reeks of elitism, something 90% of this international community has been priding itself on that it wouldn’t tumble down that road.
Newsflash ladies and gentlemen, we’re well on the way to become equally bitchy and elitist as the average Lolita community (no offence meant to the nice followers of said J-fashion, I know for a fact those exist by the bucketloads!).
The approach to someone trying something new, or just joining and making some (common) mistakes is NOT to go and bitch at them or moan like some grannie with god knows what ailment.
It is not ok to tell people to go find someone else that knows about these things to have them done for them if they can’t do it themselves.
How do we expect people to grow to love steampunk as much as we no doubt all do if we treat them like that?
How do we expect his movement to continue growing and being diverse if we act like that?
And perhaps most importantly: how do we expect people to learn new skills and improve on existing ones if we put them off doing so?
Instead of bitching, moaning and generally acting like jerks, we should take a good long look at our general attitude towards all things steam and start afresh.
By seeing how we can offer help so we can all enjoy this thing we love together and have a collective good time. And heck, maybe we’ll learn something new and make new friends along the way. Bonus!
There is a good chance you have heard about this already, but in case you have not: The European Steampunks, Dieselpunks, Clockpunks and whatever other shades are available are planning a major event in September.
In order to get some initial funding, a project was set up on IndieGoGo.
The fundraiser for the European Steampunk Convention (that is the name of the event) has just over two weeks left to go and the road is still long.
In all honesty, the original target is too high, but we rather aimed high since we did not know how expensive clubs and bands would be. But we did not overestimate the amount we need that much. As the situation is at the moment, paying for the fundraiser goodies will eat up most of the money we have collected, leaving us with little to actually support the convention.
In essence, the fundraiser fails.
Although the convention will still happen, it will be less well connected as originally planned and fewer things will happen.
As of me writing this, there will be major events in or near Madrid, Luxembourg, Vienna, Prague and Moscow. Further, number of events of various sizes (some of them may well be major as well) will happen from Scandinavia to the Adriatic Sea.
Interview with Strange Artifact
Strange Artifact
But now it looks like the break-through has finally arrived and the Japanese steampunk subculture will grow into a full-fledged counterpart to its brethren scenes on other continents.
The Gatehouse spoke with Strange Artifact: Japan’s first steampunk band who with their looks and sound represent the growing Japanese scene.
"Antikythera Mechanism" album cover by Jun Kawamura
MaRy’s unconventional melodic voice is a perfect addition to 130JET’s compositions. I would go as far as stating that the small imperfections of her voice in some of the songs only add to the charm of the band’s sound. In a lot of bands they would bother me but with Strange Artifact it somehow works.
The music isn’t easy to label or clearly define but I can assure you that it isn’t traditional J-rock. There’s some hard rock, straight rock, Gothic, EMB, and some clear avant-garde in there, mixing it up into a refreshing and original sound. It’s all the more impressive you realise that this band is initially a two person collective.
I also especially like the diversity of the album, it’s still a coherent package, but the line-up of the songs makes it interesting to listen to. The different tempos of the songs are mixed together well, making for an album you can gladly listen to over and over again without it getting boring. It’s also a good showcasing of the band’s capabilities as composers and their musical range.
Definitely a band to keep an eye on, because if this album is anything to go by, they’ll be doing awesome things in the future and they could be going very far indeed.
Stay tuned for the interview with Strange Artifact, which will be up tomorrow!
