Goth Chick News: New Haunted Tunes and Something Cool to Read While You Listen to Them
Question: If grungy rock musicians from Seattle get all the Barbie-doll girls, then who gets the Goth Chicks?
Answer: Moody dudes in top hats and capes playing disturbing, dark dirges, that’s who.
Cue the organ music and pull back the black velvet curtains to reveal the boys of Midnight Syndicate and their newest title Carnival Arcane; just in time for your Ray-Bradbury-inspired, Something Wicked This Way Comes themed cocktail party.
You all have one of those, right? Or is it just me…?
The Bradbury reference is inevitable as a haunted, night circus is what immediately came to mind when I listened to this CD. And if clowns are your nightmare, I wouldn’t fall asleep with the track “Sea of Laughter” playing in the background.
The narrative of the disc surrounds the Lancaster-Rigby Carnival, a turn-of-the-century traveling circus with more than a few skeletons in its closet.
Inspired by historical research into carnivals of that time period, Carnival Arcane co-creator (and my musician-groupie crush) Ed Douglas describes the music this way:
We wanted to push the boundaries on this disc. For a band that’s made a career of making “soundtracks to imaginary” films, I think this one feels more like a movie than anything we’ve done to date.
And co-creator Gavin Goszka says:
It’s definitely the most complete and intricate soundscape we’ve ever produced. You can practically smell the popcorn and Fairy Floss (cotton candy). “There’s also a tremendous amount of variety. There are moments where I think the listener will find themselves caught up in this strange sense of wonder and macabre fascination, and others that will leave them shaking in their boots. We were able to expand our instrument roster on this disc in ways that we’d only touched on before.
Each one of the twenty-five tracks is a self-contained gem of a storyline that will strike a nerve with anyone who believes there’s something more disturbing at traveling carnivals than employees without good dental plans.
And now, months later, our collaboration is taking shape. I’ve produced three designs, a pendant that I released at the same time that Kat, Incorrigible hit bookstores, a pair of earrings that debuted at the launch party for the second book, A Tangle of Magicks (this will be released as Renegade Magic in the US next year), and a charm bracelet that just went on the market about an hour before I sat down to write this post. One might ask, how big is the market for book tie-in jewelry like this? I have no idea. Ask me in a year or two. What I can talk about, though, is how we started this venture. 
I love Edgar Rice Burroughs. His novels have had an enormous influence on me as a writer and as a pulp fan. But, I must admit, sometimes he wrote … this kind of thing….
Orbit Books just did a cover launch for SEVEN PRINCES on their official site today: 
By way of beginning a discussion about Romanticism and fantasy, I’d like to take a quick look at where the Romantics came from. If Romanticism was a revolt against Reason, what was Reason understood to be? If Romanticism, as I feel, is essentially fantastic, is Reason opposed to fantasy? To know Romanticism is to know the Enlightenment which it was reacting against, so in this post I’ll try to describe some characteristics of the 18th-century Enlightenment in England that seem relevant to the development of fantasy. I’ll go up to about 1760, and then in my next post point out some of the counter-currents and proto-Romantic elements that were developing at the time and after. 
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