Hi! I work at a Chinese food restaurant that’s pretty relaxed with rules as for music we can play. Currently, me and my friend made a mostly Chinese citypop playlist, but I thought it would be super cool if I asked about any chinese artists anyone would recommend ^{_^} my only requirement for the music being played is that it’s in a Chinese language, and I’d love to see recommendations for goth around the world anyway. Please let me know about anything cool!!

Dark greetings of the damned morning,

Too Long; Please Stop Being So Verbose

In short, I'd like to host a goth event at my place around WGD (22nd May, a monday sadly so I'm thinking celebrating on the 20th instead). The event would entail introducing some of my closer friends to the general vibe of both the music and other famous media via a dinner, a movie and then dancing/listening to music.

The Victims:

My friends/closer acquaintances are typically involved in some proximity to the local poetry slam scene, and one even listens to The Cure already, so that's fun. We're all artists of some shade, so I don't think dedicating a night to appreciating this subculture would go to waste. Also helps that we are generally a queer bunch living in a rural locale so there's already that element of outsider-ness running through our daily lives. Most of us are bilingual (EN/FR).

The Scene:

As far as I'm aware, there is no scene around here (and "here" as in "middle of buttfuck nowhere, Quebec, Canada"). Maybe a few individual "alt" people here and there, but none that I've encountered using the goth label personally. Boo.

I'm hosting at my place. It's a standalone house, and I did a speaker test the other day and I don't think noise will be much of an issue… hopefully.

The Crimes:

As mentioned above, I'm thinking a meal/movie/dance. Contents of the meal would be potluck/my cooking (this cannot go wrong), and as for the movie I was thinking Dracula (1931) starring Bela Lugosi (for obvious reasons), but I'm open to changing this choice as I (regrettably) haven't watched it yet myself. A runner-up I considered was Metropolis (1927) but it has twice the runtime and is less directly relevant to the community.

I've begun a playlist some time ago of everything that might be interesting to play, and I'd like to put more thought into organising what goes in which order– by this I mean that I'm used to curating playlists of about an hour centred around a given thematic, and I was thinking of applying the same concept of thematic hours throughout the night, like subtly going through a musical odyssey of the goth subculture. I'd think we can organise this into roughly four thematics to start with, or each of the complete decades of music (80s, 90s, 00s, 10s). Open for recs of things to get people moving/chatting. Bonus points if there's franco-Canadian stuff in there (already love the 39 Steps, actually have them on vinyl) because my knowledge in this area is seriously lacking.

The Letter of Confession:

So my initial "in" to this group of friends was actually zine-making, then it spread to poetry, and the rest is history. As a result, I'd like to completely overextend myself and make a little invitation zine thing outlining the who/what/where/etc. Graphic design is my passion job, actually– for what little work it brings in, but that's a story for another day– so the actual layout of the thing is something I can handle, as well as maybe making a doodle or two to spice it up. I suppose I'm wondering if making a little physical invite to this damned thing is worth it or not, and why the answer is yes.

Just looking for validation in this section, don't mind me.

The Perpetrator:

Hi, I'm Mera. Baby bat of like 2-3 years by this point. My Spotify metrics are horrifying. They/she.

I have some experience in hosting events, but it's all pre-Plague so assume I know nothing. I've been reading what I can find on the Internet to help me out (see this series of articles which for now has a bigger net than what I'm trying to achieve), and since there's not really an established scene I'm essentially wondering if there's any best practices/things to watch out for when planning this sort of event.

Thanks for your input in advance!