December is upon us! As most musicians know, it is the most busy time of year! I for one wouldn’t have it any other way! Interviews, music videos, new songs and albums… all these things have been brewing. Check it:

Wilson, Fifer, Rose:

Well, the final talley for our kickstarter campaign was:

$4,226!!!!

Not bad considering we only set out to get $2,500. Rest assured, all the money will be used to ensure that we get a better product.

Yes, that’s a lot more than we thought we’d get. Naturally, we’re absolutely exstatic. What next for the album? Well we are currently in the process of auditioning mixing engineers. Sounds exciting doesn’t it? Hopefully we’ll have that sorted out before Christmas. Then once the tracks are all mixed (ideally by January) we can send them off to be masted, and then comes production, album art and so forth.

Austin and Dustin and I will be meeting over break a few times to fulfill our promised incentives to our backers which include things like cover songs and so forth, not to mention tidying up a few tracks for the album that need some finishing touches. More on that soon!

Philhelmon:

The members of our little internet Prog-pop project have been very busy doing radio interviews and a few new recordings here and there. Here’s the latest review of our album from ProgRock Magazine’s IO pages – Can’t read Dutch? No Problem, we translated it for you (see below):

Philhelmon is kicking ass with Enjoy it while it lasts. What do you do when you become sixty years old? Maybe make a deposit for a shiny new walker? Start polishing the old walking stick for later use? Purchase a new pair of slippers for sitting in front of the fireplace? No, there’ll be none of this for six-decade-young Henk Bol who released this piece of homecraft to the world on the very day of his sixtieth birthday. Together with his righthand vocalist Ky Fifer, a crowd of musicians he met over the Internet and old friends like Cleem Determeijer (Finch, Ayreon), this album suprasses similar projects. Surfing the internet on websites like V-band, Henk searched for people who shared his musical ideas. Sending back and forth audio files over the internet can give awkward results – I know all about it, it’s a stumbling block – but the music that all these musicians created sounds like it was recorded simultaneously in one studio. Undoubtedly Henk’s productional background  played a role in this case. Henk himself, prefers to call this genre ”progressive pop,” maybe because the melody lines are accessible, there are uncomplicated drums, and an especially fine voice in Ky Fifer. A shortened version of ‘How Wrong’ once on the radio as a kind of alternative Time Bandits would be great. The next song ‘Dance The Night Away’ can be released as a single. The uptempo “You Never Look Over Your Shoulder” sounds like it might come from the Buggles repertoire, ‘How I Love My iPad “in which the song is sung thru a horn in pure Trevor Horn-style. Henk, if you read this review I have a point of criticism: the album is a little too long to hold our attention. You want as many songs as are months in a year? Try a year with the four seasons as Vivaldi did! You obviously thought it would be your last project, but it tastes like more are on the way. ‘Never change a winning team’, so I would most definitely maintain your musicians and especially Ky Fifer. On to more recognition … Grandpa!

Want more info on ProgRock Magazine? Check out this link: http://www.iopages.nl/indexnl.html

Redtop Medusa:

Greg and Tiger at Portly Pig Studios have finished a video combining stop motion and flash animation to one of our songs from the Redtop Medusa Project. Check it out:

RedTop Medusa – Nothing At All from Portly Pig Studios on Vimeo.

This is hopefully the first of many videos to come for the Redtop Medusa Project… I know of at least one other one in the works, so stay tuned!