elegant simplicity

Ok, this is getting a bit silly now! I should have had the new CD delivered, shrink-wrapped and ready to sell well before now. However, complications at the pressing plant and artwork issues have continued to plague me. And now, address issues!

I recently moved house and, despite paying the Post Office much money to re-direct my mail, the artwork samples sent out for my approval have still not got to me. I am assured that copies should be with me tomorrow. Once I have sight of them and, barring further mishaps, the CDs will be delivered later this week. About time, too.

Some of you have asked if we will take pre-orders and the answer now, as it has always been, is a resounding no. Until I have the CDs I will not sell them. So, once again, I ask for your patience in this matter. I assure you it will be well worth the wait!

To celebrate the forthcoming arrival of our fabulous new album, we have just uploaded two new Desktop Wallpapers featuring variations on the CDs artwork. Available in two standard sizes, they look fantastic. You can download them here and you don't have to be logged in to get 'em!

The art photo that will accompany all on-lines sales of the CD arrived yesterday and it is truly as thing of beauty:

The design of this photo will be carried through, more or less, to the wallpaper version, which should be available fairly soon.

The September 2007 Newsletter has just been mailed out! The main news is that the new CD Too Many Goodbyes is now at the factory and the presses are rolling! The official release date to the general public will now be October 1st (sorry for the delay!), but it will be available within the next 10 days to website users . . . Stay tuned!!

Over the course of the weekend, I digitised 11 of our albums into 40 second MP3 clips at 128kbps. That's every track on the albums, totalling some 86 songs! It was a mammoth task, for sure! And there are still another 9 albums to go! Anyway, the purpose of the excercise was to standardise our mp3 offering into a unified whole. That unified whole is called the 40 Second Jukebox!

The old files were of varying lengths and varying bit rates and, because only a few tracks of an album were represented, I felt that it was time to fully show the range of our material: a process made super easy by the Jukebox I put in place last month. Clearly, 40 second clips cannot possibly do justice to our output, given the the complexity and interesting arrangements of our songs, but I do hope it will encourage more people to listen and hopefully buy a CD or two of something that takes their fancy ...

As of now, we have a new section on the site! This is called, simply, Links (located, for now, in the Flotsam section) and allows anyone to submit a link to the database for approval. All you have to do is click the Upload button, fill out the form and wait for approval, which should take less than 24 hours. All non-music related sites will be disallowed, so keep to the site requirements. I have kick started the process with a selection of links to demonstrate the categories and ranking system etc. Feel free to submit your own site or resource.