We’re making progress by the day on our Sundown CD!  Every day, a new track is recorded and new pieces come through for the Sundown Play!  We are so excited, not even Loki would joke about it.  We’re getting ready to launch our Kickstarter Campaign to raise money to help us cover costs for this and the play production, as well as our lyrics booklets for the CD, and authentic Norse costumes for the play!

Remember: Sassafrass will be the Featured Filkers and our composer, Ada Palmer, the Musical Guest of Honor at Balticon 2013, the Maryland Regional Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention, Memorial Day Weekend May 24-27.

We aim to release the finished Sundown: Whispers of Ragnarok CD at the same time, over Memorial Day weekend 2013.  Because the music is so complicated and its mythological references sometimes subtle, we want the CD to have a thorough lyrics booklet, with the complete lyrics for all the parts in all the songs along with notes explaining the mythology.  Because this will make the CD an expensive project, we are planning to use Kickstarter to raise money to help us cover costs for this and the play production.  We aim to launch the Kickstarter in a month or less, and will be very grateful for support from our friends to help us make this project a success.  If you want to be notified about the kickstarter, please subscribe to our updates here, or like us on Facebook.

This will be more than just another concert, however.  At Balticon we will perform on stage, for the first time, Sundown: Whispers of Ragnarok, a Norse Mythology story song-cycle, staged as a play with costumes and characters.  Here our completed set of Norse myth songs will be woven together into a narrative, tracing the rise and fall of the Norse cosmos, and focused on the death of Baldur and the strife between Odin and Loki which leads to Ragnarok.  The play will be narrated and the stories presented by cast members representing the two major authors of our surviving Icelandic myth primary sources: Snorri Sturlson, author of the Prose Edda, and the Seeress who narrates the Völuspá or Seeress’s Prophecy, one of the core sections of the anonymous Poetic Edda.

Sassafrass is especially excited to debut our finished project at Balticon, since it was the enthusiasm and encouragement of the Balticon community which encouraged Sassafrass to start performing again when the group had effectively ceased to exist for a few years.  We are delighted for this opportunity to give back to the community which helped us get this far.

Sassafrass is honored and delighted to once again have work nominated for the Pegasus Awards for outstanding filk music, hosted every year at the Ohio Valley Filk Festival.

This year we have been nominated for Best Performer, for the second time.  In addition, our tribute to fandom and the space program “Somebody Will” has been nominated for Best Filk Song for the second year in a row.  It’s wonderful to have such clear confirmation that the filk community shares our enthusiasm for the messages of collaboration, progress, community building and hope which Somebody Will represents. It’s also a thrill to see our work nominated alongside that of so many excellent friends and fellow artists, like Ben Newman, S. J. Tucker and Talis Kimberley.

You can find the ballot here with all the nominees listed, and we also encourage you to check out the nominee song clips, with all the nominated songs and performance samples from all the nominated performers.  This year Sassafrass has submitted a new take of Ice & Fire as our performance sample, so we hope people will enjoy hearing the clip, and the full thing when it is shared on the radio.  Anyone who wants to hear the whole thing can contact us.

As usual, it will be impossible for all our scattered members to make it to OVFF October 26-28, but we will definitely have a few people there, and can’t wait to see old friends.  Ada in particular is excited to attend after being unable to last year.

Many thanks to everyone who nominated us!

Some pie at Pi-Con!

We have returned happily from Enfield, CT, where the Boston Contingent of Sassafrass performed at this year’s Pi-Con! The concert featured some of our newer Norse songs– Kara and Emily dueting on “Abandoned,” as well as our full-group Sundown finale, “Longer in Stories Than Stone.” We also brought back some very old favorites, like “For You Are the Wind,” and “All the Time in the World,” and closed with a full-group rendition of “Somebody Will,” dedicated to the Mars Rover Curiosity. Stay tuned– we hope to post videos from the concert to our YouTube channel by the end of the week!

We’d like to thank everyone who helped us this weekend, especially Peter Ellis for his splendid work in organizing and making everything happen, as well as our Stranger Ways colleague Nat Budin for all his technical help with the panel we presented on Sunday morning on audio recording and multi-tracking. And it was, as always, great to see so many new and familiar faces in the audience at our concert, and at the Filk 101 panel on Saturday morning. We’re looking forward to seeing you all again at Arisia, if not before!

To keep people up-to-date, we’re also happy to announce the rejuvenation of our Twitter account, @sassafrassmusic.  Please follow us there for all the latest news on concerts, recording, videos, new songs, and everything else you might want to know!

So a while ag o, we posted about Sassafrass giving a concert at Pi-Con, and asking you, our loyal followers, to watch this space for updates.  For all of you who have been patiently waiting, here you go!

YES, seven members of Sassafrass will be at Pi-Con from August 17-19.  We will be giving a concert on Saturday night, and will be debuting several Norse pieces and bringing back some older pieces that you may not have heard for a while or may even be new to you!

On Sunday at 11 AM, we will be giving a workshop on multi-tracking and using REAPER, an awesome, low-cost piece of recording software.  Come learn about REAPER and you will have a chance to get your voice on the final chorus of Somebody Will.

We look forward to seeing you, both at our concert and at our workshop!