About

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If you're a turtle, it's where you wash up and bask with the other turtles.

If you're me, it's a website I built for my band Turtle Rock so I could get away from social media and still engage with the world beyond the city where I live. The power of the internet, unfettered.

It started as a place for the band—somewhere to put our music, art, projects, an EPK or whatever—but now I kind of treat it like a stage. Somewhere I can display my art. But I don't want to pretend it's something it isn't. Maybe it's more like a stage inside a pizza restaurant, and they only do shows on the weekends, and the guy who owns the joint is really nice, and his dog hangs around even though it isn't code, but all the regulars are cool with it.

What is The Shoal?

Somewhere in trying to sell out, I think I missed out on some community. And now that I'm disillusioned with trying to be famous, I've realized that art is just as much about community as it is about personal experience.

It started as a site for the band, but I feel pretty strongly that The Shoal wants to become a cool spot where friends and artists can put their projects online in the way they want to put them online. Not everybody makes the same stuff, so why should everybody have to present it the same way?

I already built the thing. Everyone should be able to enjoy it and benefit from it.

Hopefully you come looking for one thing and leave having found something else.

That's pretty much the idea.