We now have a Bandcamp, and soon (if not already now), the album will be ready for pre-order!
US/NA orders: thedevilsstaircase.bandcamp.com
Europe: https://roth-handle.bandcamp.com/album/the-devils-staircase
Later today, progrock.com is hosting a six-hour event featuring interviews with dozens of artists and producers. Luis will be on at 2 Central (GMT -6) to talk Devil's Staircase. I will join if possible. This 15 minute slot will be preceded by our drummer Mattias Olsson discussing his Döskalle project and followed by Luis, etc., discussing Sonus Umbra. FB event page.
And next: We have an album cover!
The art was put together by Henning Lindahl (Airwaves Design, Sweden), and in honor of the new cover, I've changed the blog coloring a bit to match.
The art shows a spiral staircase, and the reddish element is the Devil's Staircase function. The Devil's Staircase is connected to the Cantor set which I discussed a bit here, and you can go here for a Wikipedia animation of how this function is put together.
In brief summary: anywhere there's a space in the Cantor set, the Devil's Staircase is flat. Remember the Cantor set can be visualized by a line segment where we "take out" the middle third over an infinite number of steps. The parts taken out are the flat parts in the Staircase function. There are deep mathematical ideas in play here, but basically what you have is a function that's continuous everywhere and flat almost everywhere, and it takes every value from the minimum to the maximum. For those who've had calculus, it's weird in that the function is not the integral of its derivative (for most functions you've seen in math class, this holds up.)
To come in the future: more about the Morse sequence. Luis and Ricardo Gómez (his coauthor on the paper) are working more on this material, and we have a lot more to say mathematically about what is going on with the Morse song. The album divides Morse into pieces, and a future post will go into details and tie into my older post.
