A lord, not a king

This experiment did not start with music. It started with a visit to a medieval event in the Netherlands, and a simple question: how do you take part instead of only watching?

The first design decision was about rank. A king has instant status, but without a court, a territory or followers he quickly becomes a costume. A Viking-style warlord would have pulled the project into the wrong period and culture. The choice fell on an ambitious landed lord in the Burgundian Low Countries in the mid-fifteenth century. That rank was big enough to hold court, pass judgement and gather followers, and small enough to be believable at a public event.

He became Diederik van Cok, Lord of the Golden Rooster (formal Latin: Dominus Theodoricus de Cok), with the motto Veritate Vigilans. His coat of arms is a quartered shield with a golden rooster on blue, a sword and book, an eagle and a tree, topped by a rooster crest. Early on, this produced a two-level mark. The full arms stand for the house and belong on documents and seals. A single gold rooster on dark blue stands for the world and works on coins, banners and small screens.

A lord needs a rival. Reinout de Valse, Lord of Zwartebroek, takes tolls he is not entitled to, and the conflict over a bridge, a road and some watered-down wine is serious enough to carry a story and loose enough to stay funny.

The step that mattered most came next. If Diederik were real, people would tell stories about him, and they would exaggerate. So the world needed a troubadour, and the troubadour became Maerten Veelspraeck.

This reverses the usual order. Normally an artist project goes music → identity → visuals → marketing. Here it went character → world → stories → artist → songs → releases → images → live experiences. In theory, the world can outlive any single release. The risks are that every product ends up depending on the same small group of fans, and that each extra product adds cost instead of saving it.