The first question that might pop into your head while reading the headline to this article is most likely ‘what is Everything Is Noise?’; rightfully so. Well, to put it briefly, Everything Is Noise is the new identity we have assumed for ourselves over the past couple of months behind the scenes, effectively moving away from our past moniker of It Djents. This move was necessitated by a couple of different factors of which we will seek to shed light on in the following paragraphs, as well as answering some of the questions you, our esteemed readership, might want to raise about us taking on a new brand.
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Why the Rebranding?
Let’s start by addressing the elephant in the room: the reasons for us choosing to forge ahead into the future under a new name. To the discerning reader, it should be painfully obvious that we haven’t been about only djent for a good, long while (probably a couple of years) now. Although many of us still appreciate the contributions of the genre, the team as a whole just isn’t as invested in the scene as before for multiple reasons. Chalk it up to our collective and individual change/development in musical taste, or to the growing frustrations with the scene itself many of us experienced over the years – a good portion of us has been around the djent sphere since its very beginning, yours truly included, and observed it degrade from an exciting gateway for a new generation of prog into the largely repetitive and forgettable morass of low-tuned chugs it can be today – the genre has lost a lot of its pull on our staff over time.
Our coverage has extended into musical realms we didn’t envisage ourselves venturing into. That’s a fact. What kinda stifled our opportunities is our current – or already former – name, It Djents. In many, many ways, it became extremely limiting regarding the content we could produce under it, the music we could cover, and the audiences we could reach with it. Not to mention the business-related opportunities we missed out on because PR agencies and labels were wary of being associated with the ‘djent’ fad! The name we chose over six years ago has become a hindrance for us on several levels, and with us branching out into other territories, it began to be confusing for our readers and ourselves alike.
In turn, this rift caused a dissonance between our team’s curious and open-minded attitude towards music and the more limited one we portrayed on our social media for a long time. And in all honesty, we got a little sick of the preconceived notions attached to us only by virtue of our name containing a certain genre denominator and of the lame ‘but does it djent’ jokes hurled at us every other day. They weren’t funny the first few times, and certainly not after the umpteenth time.
Bottom line is, we just sought to give ourselves more freedom to choose what content to deliver, what music to cover, and what topics to address. You have to acknowledge the fact that at the end of the day, we are all doing this voluntarily in our free time, without any remuneration, driven only by our undying love for exploring music and discovering new artists/genres. We’re not in it for the money, fame, or really anything other than doing what feels right for us and hopefully bringing joy to a like-minded audience with it.
The EIN Philosophy
That being said, what is it that we want to embody with Everything Is Noise from now on? What is our philosophy going forward? Well, it is based on a few core thoughts and observations. Firstly, the Internet age has made the process of music discovery much easier, and therefore facilitated the growth of musical tastes without the constraints of arbitrary factors like genre. The discussion about music should, in our opinion, therefore follow suit, moving away from being shackled to these denominators and striving to grasp the bigger picture. Secondly, we as lovers of music in all its forms and shapes have wanted to create an outlet that lets us take a more holistic approach to the topic at hand. That’s what we envision EIN to be: a platform for a collective of music enthusiasts, supporting, encouraging, and nurturing a liberated approach to music discovery, and straddling the whole of the musical spectrum. This is, after all, what our team has been about for a while now internally, and we seek to bring those inner dynamics to the forefront from here on out.
We view music as a multilayered social and cultural phenomenon, and thus we don’t want to confine ourselves and our community to only focusing on a few select aspects of it, both in the content we want to produce in the future and in the involvement of our audience. Our community should ideally be a safe place for people of all walks of life, coming together to peacefully and fruitfully discuss music in a beneficial way for all involved. A civil discourse is what enables this kind of positive interaction, and therefore we won’t tolerate any and all hateful/discriminatory language or actions within the community we are trying to build.
Being ourselves and pleasing no one but ourselves is the main focus of our brand philosophy. Of course we want to engage and entertain as many people as we can with our content, but at the end of the day, we simply want to be able to look upon the work we do and the music we promote with EIN and be satisfied with it. We won’t sacrifice this feeling in an attempt to gratify a need that goes against our own core principles; that’s not going to happen. This is not about us looking for relevance, but rather about us trying to create it, or highlight it where it is already existent.
What You Can Expect From Us In The Future
From that philosophy we formulate the overarching goals we strive to achieve in the future. Obviously, we want to ensure a more holistic approach to music discovery and discussion, not only for us as the writers, but also for the community we want to shape. We want to deliver an extensive dialogue on music in its various forms and its communities. In doing this, we also want to ensure our own freedom to cover whatever we may see fit. Lastly, we want to involve you, our readership, more. In what specific ways, shapes, or forms we do not know yet, but it’s definitely on our agenda to engage you beyond what we have offered in that regard before, i. e. our Facebook group, et cetera.
While this is all well and good, what really matters in terms of goals for the future is what exactly you as our audience can expect from us on this new platform; that’s the last big question we’d like to address in this piece by giving you an outlook on the future of our work as a music blog. The first thing to mention concerning this matter is that we want to expand the scope of our content beyond what you have experienced on It Djents – more features, but also more one-off columns and op-eds on various topics related to music and the scene(s) surrounding it. The news and review coverage will obviously continue, but we want to focus on bringing you a wider array of content and subject matter. That’s something we’re already working on internally, as it’s been a desire of ours for quite a long time now. With EIN, we finally feel like we’re in a position to make good on it.
Next off, you can expect us to move away from the genre/trope-focused commentary prevalent in online music journalism and towards a stronger inclusion of the music’s tonality, mood, emotion, and feel into our articles. This is in line with our observations on the lessened impact of genre tags in this day and age, both within the music community in general as well as within our staff. We want to be as informative and all-encompassing as humanly possible to bring you insight and meaningful content, and a continued focus on something as restrictive as genres would only hold us back from achieving that feat.
And finally, as mentioned above, we will try to find new and exciting ways to engage and interact with you, our readers, to shape a collective vision for our writers and our community as one big platform for music nerds and casual admirers alike. What these measures will look like exactly we do not know yet, but we’ll try our best to find out in the future.
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If you’ve made it this far, thank you for taking the time to read our statement. As you can see, the decision to move on from It Djents was not one we took lightly, but one we deliberated on over many months. For us, the new Everything Is Noise brand and identity reflects all our thoughts, hopes, and dreams stated above. It expresses our deepest beliefs and insights about the nature of music – namely that at the end of the day, every kind of music truly is noise and equally deserving of spotlight – genres and other artificial constructs notwithstanding – and everything we would like to stand and be remembered for from now on.
This shift marks the start of an intriguing new chapter for us, and we’d love to see y’all along for the ride, ideally just as excited as we are to forge ahead and breach new territories!
