The Dubious Hat & Other Tales of Ineffable Horror

Nathaniel’s long-awaited solo acoustic album is finally upon us! Featuring songs about devils, monsters, witches, the end of the world, sinister hats… and cats.

The Mechanist & The Star Goddess: Begin Transmission

The Mechanist & The Star Goddess is a dynamic music & dance project with Tempest, Nathaniel Johnstone, and Davis Petterson.  The band combines electric violin, heavy percussion, and mesmerizing movement to create a profound sight-and-sound experience. The inspiration and title of the project evokes the exploration of the liminal space between the confines of the precise concrete world and the limitless divine. 

Tempest is a world-renown bellydance performer and instructor, focusing on sacred and darkly inspired fusions that pull from the traditions of North Africa, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean. She is also an artist, author, blogger, and designer.

Nathaniel Johnstone is a multi-instrumentalist virtuoso (violin, viola, guitar, banjo, mandolin) whose music pulls from myth, fantasy, and folklore with a vibrant sound crosses boundaries & borders, resulting in a blend of multicultural folk rock.

Davis Petterson is an Atlanta-based drummer who has performed and recorded with groups such as The Ghosts Project, Juliana Finch, The Sweet Meat Love And Holy Cult, and The Changelings.

Wunderkammer: A Collection of Fan Favorites

A collection of songs taken from our previous four albums: Any Moment Now, Narratives, The Antikythera Mechanism, and The Mother Matrix.

We took a turn on the Information Superhighway, stopping at various waypoints, and took a mostly ad-hoc and informal poll with the passersby. “What are your favorite songs from our back catalog?” we asked and they replied with a detailed list. Everyone had different opinions on their second, third, and fourth favorites but the top choices were near unanimous.

I threw in one or two of my own favorites for good measure. Enjoy!

The Mother Matrix

When Nathaniel was casting about for a theme to this new album Tempest showed him a new drawing she’d made that she’d entitled The Mother Matrix. It instantly fired up his imagination and he began to wonder what, or who the Mother Matrix was. As usual, once he shared his ideas with Alyssa, Dogwood, and the rest of the band, the songs pretty much wrote themselves. This album is an exploration of that thought process.

Reviews

The Antikythera Mechanism

This all started when I read an article about the sophisticated science and technology of Ancient Greece. Reportedly, they had death rays, steam technology, and were making clockwork devices that rival the elegance of modern Swiss watch makers. Our whole world is thick with the influence of Greek art, music, knowledge and philosophy.

The title of the album comes from an ancient artifact found in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera in 1900-1901. The corroded bronze object had obvious gear work and, after years of care and investigation was found to be a device used to predict the movements of the heavenly bodies – eclipses, the phase of the moon, the wanderings of Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, Venus, and Mercury through the heavens. Scholars and scientists today are still puzzling over the complexities that the mechanism has to offer. The sophistication required to make this was lost and didn’t reappear again until nearly 1500 years later.

Of course, seeing as we’re steampunks we knew that we had to add some science fiction to the project. So we’ve taken a few ‘liberties’ with the stories. If you’ve heard our previous album, Narratives, you’ll get what I mean.

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Narratives

This album started as a collaboration between me and Tempest. It grew out of a handful of musical performance pieces, blending music and dance with the purpose of telling a story. The collaboration expanded to include the word-smithing talents of Alyssa Rosenbloom. When I sent her the first draft lyrics for “Gepetto’s Lament,” she replied with a much better version, and was further motivated to write lyrics for several more songs!

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Any Moment Now

A Musical by Nathaniel Johnstone & Alyssa Rosenbloom

Meet Petra and Eden, two sisters who live underground with the remnants of humanity after a disastrous apocalypse, Maya, a genius inventor in a long past time of technological progress, Edward Norton Danforth III, a cyborg with dreams of world domination, and Jonathan, a guy just trying to find his place in the world. Together, theirs is a saga that spans the ages where if you change anything, you change everything.

Evidence of Past Misdeeds

Evidence of Past Misdeeds is a compilation of two albums:

The Heart Unwound
When Tempest asked if I would help her with a bellydance instructional DVD I jumped at the chance. I took a few of the tunes from the previous live EP, added a few new tunes and made this.

Live at the Columbia City Theater
We were performing a show with some friends and happened to capture this on tape. When we listened back to it we were all really happy with how it sounded: a solid live set with the odd wart or two but it definitely captures the energy and joy of the music.

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