News? No News.

This is not a post about the missing airship Jane Guy, I am sorry to say. Since I last wrote to you on the topic, leads have been followed and lost, sightings have been reported and debunked, and little if any actual progress has been made in the investigation. Some of these episodes might make interesting reading when the time comes to tell the full story, but they are not news.

The fact is, there is little enough news coming out of the Institute at all right now. Winter is the time when we settle down to the orderly, indoor task of transcribing and collating data accumulated in the more temperate seasons (for budgetary reasons, each department's yearly reports are due by the end of March). By Spring, some of this tedious industry will yield breakthroughs. Everything else will simply be absorbed into the cavernous Institute archives, to accumulate dust while it awaits the whims of a future researcher to bring it back into the light.

But a lack of anything interesting or relevant to write about has never yet been an impediment to blogging, so I shall forge ahead with this update undaunted.

Let's see, what's been happening... Well, my lab assistant-slash-webmaster (i.e. the Luddite) has been snatched away from me and reassigned to Central, after I let slip word of his coffee-making prowess. We have been forced to fall back on our own inferior brewing skills, which hurts, but on the plus side, the website might get updated a little more often. Oh, and speaking of the website, we are changing servers, so expect the site to be down for a while sometime in the next 24-48 (all music will still be available at archive.org).

I'll be honest, I'm making this post mostly because I'm bored and lonely. My staff has the afternoon off, and I'm just pottering around the lab tidying up loose ends on various projects and trying not to think too hard about tonight's presentation. Oh yeah, I'm speaking at a fundraising dinner tonight. I need to sell the idea of the Outreach program to some of our oldest and most secretive backers (it's a black mask affair, natch), and I don't expect to enjoy myself very much. These things are creepy enough when you're not the center of attention, and by now the prospective donors will have heard the tale of the Jane Guy. It's funny how some of the most eccentric and bizarre people can also be the most conservative and intolerant. Or maybe it's the money that does it. In any case, wish me luck.

=PD

New Release: Stuzha - Through the Snowfield

Stuzha - Through the Snowfield EP
[free download, 320kpbs mp3]

Four songs of frost, winds, snow and survival in the desolate Siberian winter.

1. Here is No Life Without a Fire 6:13
2. Lost in Catacombs 6:12
3. Through The Snowfield 6:13
4. Odinokaya Garmon' (Russian Folklore song) 2:13
Total: 20:51

Here is No Life Without a Fire was recorded in the taiga forest during the frosty winternight time, when temperature is below -25C. That piece shows that life of a man in the such a cold regions is absolutely depends from the fire. It gives to a man a hope & life, without it he's dead in few hours... It's a hymn to fire.

Lost in Catacombs was recorded during snowy december 2007. Most sounds are from enclosed big metallic tank which is used a long time ago for water keeping. This vessel is located pretty far away from civilization and in the nighttime an ambient atmosphere here is a magnificent!

Through The Snowfield is a track which is describing a blank feelings of a men, who is riding on a horse through endless snowy fields... The sound of the small bells is coming from a neck of a coachman's horse, and these bells are just like a lighthouse for a ship in the storm. They are only way to know where your horse are when a blizzard start to blow... That piece is about a solitude & loneliness of a soul. There is also a fragment of Russian folklore song in it.

Odinokaya Garmon' is a Russian folklore song.

_Algol_ - all instruments, field recordings, vocals.

Please check Stuzha's MySpace page and leave some comments, any feedback from YOU are very welcome!

[P.S. Stuzha is a brand new project of _Algol_, we are seeking a traditional label to release a full length album.]

Nagual Art @ NTNS / To Repel Ghosts @ Dark Winter

Nagual Art appears on Not The Normal Shit Radio's new compilation, The Best of NTNS Radio 2007.

The compilation is free to download, and features the Nagual Art track The Whisperbox, from their album A Landscape Built by Whispers.

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ALSO
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To Repel Ghosts is featured on this year's ambient holiday compilation from the excellent netlabel Dark Winter, available now for free download!

Dark Winter Holiday Compilation - A Candle's Golden Glow

"When the sky is dark and the temperature is low, comfort can be found in a candle's golden glow..."

TRG offered their arrangement of Silent Night from their 2005 album All Is Calm. Also featured are Last Nights of Paris, Ambage, Datua 1.0, Bunk Data, Larry Johnson, Mystified, Gothick, Ka-baalim, Jeffery Letterly, Zenith, Samsa, Mikrodepresja, Ryu, and Gurdonark.

New Release: Nagual Art - Adoria

Nagual Art - Adoria
[free download, 192kpbs mp3]

This is the Soundtrack of Adoria - the Lucid Winter Wonderland.

Winter reigns over the Northern Hemisphere, and Nagual Art celebrates in cold ambient beauty. Sound travels far in the frigid air, bringing wisps of voices and the woodsmoke scent of deep dreaming.

1. Fragments
2. Enter Adoria (I & II)
3. Leviath
4. Lisea
5. Mondwinter
6. Traumkristalle
7. Der freundliche Kleine
8. Schneezauber
9. Fatima
10. Theory of the Deep

Adoria - produced by Volador in 2006/07

Artwork by Dravidian A. Ageran (www.dasnachtmahrprojekt.de)

Guest: Hermann Voges, countertenor on "Schneezauber"

(Visit Nagual Art's MySpace page for an exclusive bonus track, Another Day in Adoria.)

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To Repel Ghosts' previously-announced album has been delayed, owing to mastering problems. The album is being re-mixed, and will be released as soon as possible.

Work continues, as usual

Winter - meteorologic, if not astronomic - has arrived at the Plaguedream compound, and most of us were relieved from our usual morning duties to chip ice off everything. The automatic de-icer on the auxiliary transmitter tower froze up (yeah...), so I spent the pre-dawn hours up in a lineman's harness with a blow-dryer and a really long extension cord, thawing out the delicate coils on low heat. Not how I planned to spend my Monday, but it did turn out, on balance, to be to our great benefit, since my unusual vantage point revealed a worn insulator that, left to itself, could have burned out the entire unit, at a cost far exceeding the minor annoyance and windburn it took to find it. That's how it goes around here (and good thing, too, despite any grumbling at the time).

(Apologies for the minutiae, but I still have my feet in a warm-water bath as I type, so it's on my mind.)

More relevant to you, dear reader, I am pleased to say that To Repel Ghosts are putting the finishing touches on Partisan Songs, to be released very soon (assuming that the server difficulties of our long-suffering file hosts, the Internet Archive, are resolved promptly - stay tuned). The engineering stage of the album proved trying for all of us at the Institute - TRG's methods are not without their hazards - but things have quieted down since they went to post-production, and what I've heard of the album sounds like it was worth the damage to the studio facilities (which was extensive but, fortunately, mostly cosmetic).

Lastly, I would like to reassure the many listeners who wrote to us concerning the Noel Towers album that what you are experiencing is perfectly natural, and that the psychosensory effects, though unsettling to some, are ultimately beneficial, and will become less noticeable over subsequent playings.

Watch for more news as the month progresses - we have some good things in store!

=PD