At midnight, on 18 Jan 2008, we will be "celebrating" our "10th" anniversary - ten years ago we both signed an agreement (aka the "Austere Manifesto") about how we'd work together, after over a decade and a half each of being in various punk, indie, alt, avant guarde and industreal bands for years before and having giving up on musick until we met and spent days talking to realize we were on the "same wavelength".

A "box set" will be released on this date and available for only one year.  It contains, amongst other things, an MP3 player with a SanDisk card with all our compilation, one-off, singles, and three unreleased tracks.  Basically an "Unnatural History of Rare and Unreleased Tracks" based very much on Coil's three "Unnatural History" CD releases of rare and a few unreleased tracks.  Plus our "manifesto" (yawn), four of a dozen photos, randomly selected, and all sorts of shite.

The box set comes in a 8x8" (200x200 mm) box, with an MP3 player, USB 2.0 cable, earbud headpheones (not audiophile but not complete shite either), a random selection of photos that we use currently plus others including a real photo of us circa 1996?, live photos, and in some cases, a photo taken at an All Hallows' Eve party where we first met in 1997.  There's also the long-winded "manifesto" which is probably the biggest reason we'll always be a "never been" "wannabe" band, and other bonus stuff.  Each box set cost us about $40 to put together, and so we'll probably be selling it for about that or less.

The upsides are you get a very small, cool MP3 player that uses SanDisk flash cards and so you can use it to play other stuff, our musick is on the SD card in 320Kbs MP3 CBR digital so you can download to play on your compter, other MP3 players, or even burn a CD, etc. Each box set also comes with an 80mm CDR with drivers for the USB setup, although we have never needed them, that support Windows 98/ME/2000/XP and MacOS and Linux.

Lastly, every box comes with a custom recorded, absolutely unique 78RPM disc made of various materials that was "recorded" (etched) with an Emily Berliner recorder.  Yes, we know that nobody will be able to play it, but should you get the chance, every disc in every box is a unique recording (trust us, we spent many hours over many weeks.)  For those who might have an old 78 RPM player, you will get to enjoy the extremely low fi sounds of a 2-ish minute absoultely unique analog synth track.

Oh, and it features the wonderful photography of Henk Zweering for the artwork, which he originally put together for his own compilation and inspired us to put together this one.

So if you're interested in, as usual, unique packaging, an artifact that is a curio to keep, a free MP3 player you can use to play anything you want (just get another SD card or erase ours and load your own tracks) - it even includes batteries, as we tested every player - and want to just get every track we've done that hasn't been on a full release as well as three bonus tracks, two of which are actually quite good and worthy of release... well, come the 18th, we'll decide the price... just looked up our cost and not counting the cost of hardware to dupe CDRs and the Emily Berliner etcher, we spend about $43 each on these, we will prolly be selling them for $40 shipped in the U.S. and Canada and Mexico (although we've *never* made a sale in Mexico) and prolly USD $50 for Europe, depends on how much the USD sinks as time goes on and shipping costs go up due to fuel prices... sorry Euros, it'll prolly be about USD $55 as the U.S. gov't makes the U.S. dollar worthless.

Please do contact us if you have any interest.  We've made far more copies than we think we'll ever sell, but that said, maybe we can get 10-20 copies out to people. 

Those who will receive custom copies dedicated to them have gotten them (except for Mat & Janine/ITN) and maybe Ben (AAS) so while we will not except orders until midnight 18 Jan 2008, if you've any interest, contact us as austere@austere.org.

Those who didn't receive a free copy - sorry, we made a list, limited it to 20, and had to pick from 50 people, so basically it came down to folks who we both know.  Some will receive the "regular edition" for free, but 20 folks did get a special, one of a kind, absolute unique in almost every way edition.  Consider yourselves... cursed?  blessed?  lucky?  random?  All of the former?

We will probably request that our next Hypnos release "Solyaris" is delayed further since this is coming out, although since a new CD of very different and more "mainstream" material is prolly not going to to interfere with sales of this box set.... our next Hypnos CD will be one of our "top three" but also the most "accessible" we think - rather brilliant at most if we do say so and all improvised.  One of our best CDs wethinks, if and when it comes out.

Regardless, if you're an Austere fan and would like to have all our rare tracks plus three new ones and a cool, mini-MP3 player (great for jogging/biking!) - come the 18th of the month, please do contact us.

We are terrible sales persons, are we not?  Truly awful.  Just pathetic.  Suggestions as to how to make this sales pitch actually work are more than welcome.  Thanks and cheers!

And as always and forever, even beyond the grave:

Thanks for Listening.