As of 20th of July 2023 we can announce that some work is being done on Halotan Records’ revival. Scroll down past small announcement below or click here to skip to the main text.
We will publish small updates in this post as the work progresses, so you know what we are up to. There is no point creating a new post for every little step.
25/11/2024
Our new website and store have been launched and are now live, you are reading these words on our new website. All our releases had to be migrated almost manually to the new shop software.
10/11/2024
We began complete revamp of our website. Lots of work, but there is no way around it.
16/07/2024
Our first release after hiatus has been published – it is Halotan Sounds 3 compilation showcasing Polish dark independent scene.
11/09/2023
Some of our releases are now available to buy as physical CD again. We will add more physical CDs shortly, it is just a matter of bands giving us the green light. There may be some issues with order notifications but we decided not to postpone physical CD sales any further. We’ll fix these things as we go.
06/09/2023
We have recovered our Youtube channel, https://youtube.com/@halotanrecords
05/09/2023
Schema.org markup for releases is done – an important technical update for both existing and future releases.
30/08/2023
Work in progress on schema.org markup for our release pages. At the moment we do not rank in searches regarding our own releases, even though we are the original source of them and our descriptions are quoted everywhere else. We hope to change this by providing proper markup.
27/08/2023
Latest of the few new blog posts has been added. These posts show the direction we will be going in. This “ideological” work is neccessary to explain our way of doing things, expect more posts like these.
18/08/2023
Important but invisible conceptual work has been accomplished. At this point we have more or less figured out how we will release music going forward. Technicalities are being solved.
08/08/2023
Our Facebook page has been re-activated. A good friend took care of it during our absence. You can meet fine people in this scene, that’s for sure.
08/08/2023
Mobile and smaller screen display improvements in the store area.
07/08/2023
Major milestone reached: our store can now be displayed in three languages – English, Polish and German. Interface elements and release descriptions are translated. German translation will have to be looked at by someone with native German as it was autotranslated, but the technicalities are sorted.
06/08/2023
Our releases now can have descriptions in English, Polish and German. Tabs are introduced to make it easy to switch between languages.
05/08/2023
Further technical fixes. Our song sharing system got a bit of overhaul. It seems to be working fine on FB and Twitter. Mobile display issues remain to be fixed. Facebook like buttons and song share/like counters are back.
We had Polish versions of every release, this proved to be hard to maintain. Aslo, a single address fore each release makes way better impact. We got rid of the Polish versions and redirected them to their English counterparts.
There will be an option to switch the language, but on a single address.
28/07/2023
Lots of small technical fixes. We added FLAC download option to our compilations and those releases we know the authors are ok with this.
Nice URL-s like this:
https://halotan.net/music/va-halotan-records-sampler-09-compilation
…have been introduced for our releases instead of old ones that contained variables:
https://halotan.net/shop.php?view=full&id=116&lang=en
These addresses were one of the most visible shortcomings of our system, now fixed. Proper redirects are done so all the old links on blogs, websites and social media will still work.
26/07/2023
We have recovered our Twitter account.
Digging ourselves out of the grave…
20/07/2023
After years of inactivity we are doing some maintenance on our website and trying to make things work again.
Our main concern at the moment is our existing releases.
Releases hosted on this website constitute collective work of great many people. Fans, bands, people who wrote, those interviewed, graphic designers, sound engineers, models, photographers, technical/IT people and more.
Countless hours of work, memories and friendships. It would be pity to let all this go to waste.
This is the main reason behind this revival – to make this content available and future-proof, given how much effort it took to create.
During the years of inactivity our website incurred serious technical debt and around 2019 it went down as a result of no maintenance. Lack of time, other commitments – the usual story.
At the moment we are trying to get our site up to date software-wise so we have a blank slate for future improvements.
We are modifying out self-built store and music sharing system solution, as it turned out it gives us great flexibility to introduce new ideas.
We will also contact the bands to see if they are still around and want to work with us.
We are not selling anything at the moment. We need to be sure the bands are still on board with that.
We are not making any great plans now, just solving one problem at at time hoping something will come out of all this.
Our first move will be to invite bands to take part in Sampler 11 compilation. Style as usual – dark electro, harsh electro etc. Dancefloor oriented dark music.
From now on compilations will be our main effort. They tend to have the biggest impact in the scene and are most fun to make.
The scene has been dying since I remember, but somehow it is still alive and kicking.
So are we, even though it may make little sense if any at all. We will try to see what we can do.