news 2006

austere - happenings 2007

news 2008

23 Dec 2007 — Merry Festivus! A winter holiday solution. We will not make any promises about any releases by the group nor either side-project, unlike past years.

22 Dec 2007 — A track culled from the Freq. Magnet "Étoiles" sessions that did not fit on the final release due to time limitations has been released on the new Hypnos complication CD entitled "Sounds of a Universe Overheard" that has just been released.

13 Nov 2007 — Three years already passed since John Balance (nee Geoff Rush, aka Jhonn) himself passed.

15 Sep 2007 — Our track from The Ambient Collective's compilation called Ambient Collective: Space Collaboration (V1.0) has been reissued as part of a recent "best of": Ambient Collective: The Best Of: Volume One
Released: 15th September 2007. It can be downloaded for free here.

Although wethinks it not our best work by any means, but we were VERY happy with how it turned out, as we both felt it was the closest we could come to to making a track that actually sounded like "Big Bang Into Particle Acceleration" - you know, when the universe was born and all the constants and other physics stuff was defined... cheers to those who included us!

06 Aug 2007 — We've filled out and mailed the paperwork to officially trademark our catch-phrase "Thanks for Listening." We doubt it will pass muster, and it probably shouldn't, but given the way the U.S. intellectual property law system is completely failing, we may get it, and it's worth a try. Of course, we'll lose it if we don't defend it, which we don't plan on doing, but instead releasing it to the public via the Creative Common Licenses, in order to make sure that we can always use it lest someone else trademark it. A pre-emptive strike for freedom, as it were.

03 Aug 2007 — We've begun work on a special limited edition tenth anniversary release of compilation tracks, singles and rarities called "The Sound of Silence I: An 'Unnatural History' of Rare Austere Tracks." The release will be high definition MP3 tracks on a SanDisk flash card in an MP3 player, and each box will contain other goodies, including a uniquely recorded 78 RPM 5" lathe-cut record, each box containing a different part of the session involving an Arp 2600 and many analog chorus effects. More details as the project continues.

29 Jul 2007 — We're pleased, as always, to announce the release of a new CD, a project started in 2005 that has been slowly culminating to completion, as many of our releases have happened, such as fade. This release is called mirror, properly spelled "rirrom", since all the printing on the CD is reversed and has to be read in a mirror. The CD itself is made up of mirror-like reflective material, more or less a mirror itself, continuing the tradition both of lovingly hand-made releases as well as trying to push the limits of CD design & packaging, which has hit an all time low in the last decade in our opinions.

May we add a quick "holy schmoly" - who would have thought that 2007 would see us releasing musick on two, count 'em, two of the coolest ambient labels out there, as well as being featured in yet another movie? And to think we were close to calling it quits a couple of years ago? Oh, we still are, never mind.

16 Jul 2007 — We have been lucky enough to convince the owner of one of our CD labels, Sound-O-Mat Recordings to partake a new project with us. Look forward soon to the release of " Process Musick for The Buddha" and the vastly superior "Zen Machine" powered by the "Loop-O-Mat". More details as things emerge.

07 Jul 2007 — A simple updating to the Web site to make sure we're still Web 1.0 compliant.

12 May 2007 — Our latest CD and last in a series of three (we will avoid the "trilogy" word out of disdain for fantasy and sci-fi novels... and The Matrix for that matter) Process Musick pieces. This 60 minute piece is meant to promote creativity and active thinking, and has been released on the Hypnos Secret Sounds label. Available only from the Hypnos Online Store. Our upcoming Hypnos release "Solyaris" is on hold but hopefully will see the light of day before the end of 2007. In the meanwhile, we have other project and releases in store.

11 Apr 2007 — A new CD single on the Hypnos Secret Sounds label by Lena called "alchemy of fingers and dark" CDS has been released, and we have two demixes on it: one by Austere called "Alchemy (Gold Into Lead demix)" which is a demification of "alchemy of fingers and dark" track off her full-length Hypnos CD "Extended Gestures For Cello", and the other is a The Mystifying Oracle demixifunkation called "Mermers (Oh My! Oh Why? demix)" which takes wonderful solo cello and transmographies it into an odd, 5/16th time signnature glitchy-n-twitchy tongue-in-cheek track that does drop to 4/4 (four on the floor) about 33.33% of the way through the track. (P.S. To Critics and Reviewers: it's meant to be a joke, yeah? Sheesh.) Also has two great, lengthy remixes by M. Griffin himself. Highly recommended despite our two tracks.

01 Apr 2007 — It's official and no joke for April Fools: our next few CD releases will be on the Hypnos label: Pulse, our last "Process Musick" piece in a trio that are all Brainwave Encoded and meant for various mental states of mind (inducing or aiding-and-abetting them, due out in April 2007; and what we believe is one of our finest releases to date named Solarys, which consists of three complete improvised tracks taken from a weekend session which generated much great output, and are presented in their original forms, with very little editing or processing, but as close to us playing "live" as we're likely to ever do. It will be released likely late summer or autumn of 2007.

Great thanks go out to Mike & Lena at Hypnos not just for being such wonderful folks but for being willing to put out our material. We cannot thank them enough for their support and kindness.

28 Mar 2007 — We have released a new DVD for our collaboration with Stephen Phillips, of Dark Duck Records and the Drone Download Project fame, called "faded". The DVD contains the full hour-long piece (broken up into 10 DVD chapters based on changes in the music/graphics) and the computer-generated graphics are sync'ed to the musick, created by our good mate Wink at The Sound-O-Mat Studio.

This is an auto-play DVD without any menus, it simply starts with the opening credits, then plays the musick, and depending on your DVD player, should loop and start back at the credits and musick again, so it can be left on in the background. We have it available right now and it can also be purchased from Hypnos. The colours are based on the musick — who knew that drones were mostly deep blues and vibrant oranges? Reviews to date have been excellent and it is only US $9.99 and contains all the original musick from the CD of the same title.

10 Feb 2007 — The Austere side project known as Freq. Magnet ("freak magnet") is pleased to announce the release of a new CD, Étoiles du Couvercle. It is another all guitar-based CD, three tracks with the middle one being a very long, spacey ambient drone. A "tribute" of sorts to the always amazing Stars of the Lid, it has been receiving fantastic reviews since release.

It is currently available directly from us but better still is distributed and available from the Hypnos Online Store.

29 Jan 2007 — AMBiENT PiNG ALMOST LiVE Radio Show at 21:00 (9PM) EST.A live show of new, improvised material by Austere will be streamed on AMBiENT PiNG radio: AMBiENT PiNG Radio

The show will feature one long track which is in the process of post- production and will likely be available in a different form on our next CD release. The ALMOST LiVE MUSiC SERiES is an Internet radio show featuring exclusive, unreleased material by friends of Toronto's AMBiENT PiNG in the ambient, darkwave, chill and electronic communities. Information on the series can be found at their site.

The show initially will run on tonight Monday 29 Jan 2006 and be rebroadcast on Thursday 1 Feb. 2007 at 0:00 (12PM) EST and again on Saturday 3 Feb. 15:30 (3:30PM) EST.