An opportunity available to all metalabels (and all artists generally) is to world-build. You get to define the universe you exist within. This includes everything from what your world looks like to the rules of your world to how time works in your world to what people believe in and stand for, and so on. As a metalabel or as an artist, your releases and work communicate from that place, and effectively serve to manifest a small pocket of that world in the wider world that immediately surrounds us.
World-building, in other words, is an opportunity to explicitly define the reality your project or work speaks from. The artist Laurel Schwulst has written elegantly on this opportunity:
“Artists excel at creating worlds. They do this first for themselves and then, when they share their work, for others. Of course, world-building means creating everything—not only making things inside the world but also the surrounding world itself—the language, style, rules, and architecture.” — Laurel Schwulst, “My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?”
For a lot of creative people who feel compelled to bring their vision or idea of the world into being, the physical world and social environment that surrounds them can feel alien, discouraging, and foreign to the way they think about their work. To stay sane, they must create their own world where they can comfortably and sensibly exist the way they wish.
As Laurel wrote last year in a post called “To write, I first must world”:
“For those of us who feel different, who don’t easily fit into structures of this society or this world, we have to make our own structures, definitions, and taxonomies to feel at home — that is, to build our own world. And while others might be confused why we spend so much energy inventing new names and containers seemingly constantly, it’s important to remember doing this helps us simply exist … so that we can connect in this one world we share.”
If we apply this same way of thinking to ourselves and our own projects, what comes up? How do we see the world we’re speaking from and in support of, and are trying to manifest in the world at large? I’ve always loved this simple world-building example of the Rules of the Bill Nye Show, which explains very simply how their universe works, and shows the power of defining the fundamentals of your world.
In this metablog, let’s try applying this same lens to Metalabel, and see how others could do the same.