We have now completed and launched the two digital teaching albums which were promised as Kickstarter stretch goals. These albums take the songs apart and present each voice and combination of voices individually, so you can hear them alone, making it easier to understand and, especially, to learn these complex pieces. You can stream the music online for free, but each $5 album also comes with downloadable PDFs of the sheet music, lyrics sheets, a MIDI file for computer playback, and a PDF of notes by the composer discussing the piece and its sources.

The Futhark Song Teaching Collection contains a whopping 32 tracks combining the different subsections of the harmony in all different combinations.  This makes it easier to understand the modal harmony, and the explanatory notes discuss not only the origins and meaning of the runes, but give a lay introduction to modal music and discuss how modal elements are used in this and other songs in the Sundown collection.  I heartily encourage you to listen to Longer in Stories than Stone again after reading the discussion of how its modal harmonics work.

The My Brother, My Enemy Teaching Collection features one track with Odin’s voice dominant and Loki’s soft, and one with Loki’s voice dominant and Odin’s soft so you can follow each character individually, as well as the combined final recording (the same version that is on the Sundown album).  Its notes discuss the historical sources, some of the nuances and references in the lyrics, and talk about how Loki and fire are connected, in the myths, and in the Sundown cycle.

Check out these streaming samples:

Sassafrass is delighted to announce that we have again been nominated for the Pegasus Awards for Excellence in Filking.  This year Sassafrass has again been nominated for Best Performer, and our composer, Ada Palmer, has, for the first time, been nominated for best Composer/Songwriter.

In celebration of the nomination, and to give people a better sample of the full on-stage performance experience of Sundown, we are temporarily releasing this preview of “Longer in Stories than Stone” from the Balticon debut performance.  This video uses the footage from our professional video cameras, and is close to a final cut, but still awaiting some final post-production fixes to details like color tinting and digital zoom.  We hope you all enjoy this sample of the performance, and the taste it gives of what we can look forward to when the DVD is finally finished:

The Pegasus awards are an exciting time, when new, exciting creations from around the filk community are gathered and shared.  We enourage all our friends to visit the Pegasus website to hear samples of all the other great songs, composers and performers who have also been nominated.

We are also happy to announce two upcoming TX performances:

Sassafrass is delighted to announce that we now have an online method set up for pre-ordering the CD and DVD of Sundown.

The Kickstarter has closed, but since we continue to receive frequent requests from people who want to order the discs in advance, we have set up our “merchandise” page on Bandcamp to offer the CD and DVD for physical pre-order.  Both are priced at $20, with $6 domestic shipping.

As of right now we do not have an option for combined shipping if you order both at once.  This is because we expect the DVD to be available several months before the CD, so, for those who pre-order both, we will ship each as it becomes available.

We do not yet have it set up to let you pre-order the digital download, but if you want the digital version you can request to be put on a mailing list and we will let you know as soon as is it available.  Meanwhile, our preview album contains three finished tracks from the final CD, the character themes and a bonus rough cut of the creation myth song “Ice and Fire”.

I am delighted to announce that our first performance of the full stage play Sundown: Whispers of Ragnarok was an enormous success.  Balticon was a fabulous host at every stage, from enthusiastic tech staff who were eager to help us develop exciting lighting effects, to enthusiastic friends new and old who helped with last-minute logistics, to the most enthusiastic audience we could have hoped for.  We especially want to thank several SCA Viking costuming and wireweaving experts who were at the convention, and helped us solve several last-minute costuming issues.  In the end, our historic costumes all came out delightfully, and we were able to display many signature elements of Viking clothing.  A huge thank-you to everyone who helped make this possible!

Below: the moment of Baldur’s murder, with Baldur collapsing on the left, and Hod and Loki on the right, still posed to fire the arrow:

Lauren, Ada and Kara as Odin, Loki and Hella.

Our DVD film director Dave Kowarsky reports that the video came out extremely well, and he has high hopes for the DVD.  We had four cameras going throughout the performance, to capture different angles, close-ups and distant shots, so over the next month he will work on cutting and splicing different shots to assemble the best possible video.  At the end of June our composer, Ada Palmer, will get together with Dave at his editing studio in New York to help finalize the cut, and work on DVD extras.

Now we want to do it again!

With the first performance behind us, we’re eagerly investigating venues for a second performance.  We have already received several invitations, but getting so many performers together  requires a lot of planning, so we don’t yet know where we will be able to next perform Sundown.

We are also concentrating on recording, and have a rigorous recording schedule planned for the summer, so we expect to make great progress toward the CD.

We also have great Kickstarter news!

The Kickstarter funding campaign we launched two weeks ago has been a staggering success.  We were staggered by the response, and met our $7,000 starting goal in only 48 hours!

We’re genuinely overwhelmed by the support we’ve received.   This guarantees that we can produce the CD and DVD, but now we are working on stretch goals, to raise more so we can help finance further performances, DVD extras and professional digital mastering for our audio CDs.  As of this morning we hit $11,000, which means composer Ada Palmer will write 24 pages of historical and mythological notes about the making of the play, to be printed in the libretto and shared in PDF with our backers, and Hugo- and Nebula- award-winning author Jo Walton has written two poems about Odin to share with readers and backers (read the first one here) and she has promised more as the campaign continues.  We still have 16 days to go, and we hope pledges will continue to climb, since every dollar increases the chances that we can afford to perform the play again soon.  We have exciting rewards planned if we hit $12,000 or more, including more poems by Jo, and more DVD extras, so for details please check the Kickstarter Updates, and please continue to share our Kickstarter link with friends and families – this Kickstarter is a great opportunity for us to reach new audiences, and share our music through pre-orders of the CD and digital downloads.

Once again, a huge thanks to all our supporters, at Balticon and around the world.  Sundown has been a greater success than any of us could have imagined, and we could never have done it without your support.  Thank you!

Alessandro, Alexa and Matt as our three narrators: Saemund, the Seeress and Snorri Sturlson