Jumping the gun...

As some of you may have noticed, the new Morpheus Rising Online Store is now available for your retail therapy pleasure!

Now, it may seem a little premature as we are still awaiting the T-Shirts and CDs to complete the stock.  We hope to have the T-Shirts in the middle of next week, and the CDs in time for the weekend, but we just couldn't resist showing off the new merchandise!



Although the colours appear to be solid dark blue or black in the photographs all the items actually sport the fading dark blue to black you can see on any of our logos, and they look great!

In our opinion the must have item is the Keyring Bottle Opener, it's the perfect size to stop you losing your keys, it's great for opening the next 'cool one' and... it's got your favourite band's logo on it! What more could you ask for?

We can't wait to see the T-Shirts! If the quality of the other merchandise produced by Awesome Badges is anything to go by then they'll be stunning!

We'd like to assure all our US/Canadian (and other international) listeners that we have NOT forgotten you and, once we receive our stock of CDs we'll be setting up a CD Baby outlet so that you can purchase the CD without incurring international shipping costs!

In the meantime why not pop over to Queensrÿche.com and check out the new American Soldier album... it sounds great, and it's definitely an interesting idea for a concept album!

All the best,

Grae, Pete, Daymo, Andy and Gibbo
Morpheus Rising
...resurrecting British Heavy Metal!

The rest, as they say, is history!

OK, after the enforced downtime over the last couple of months is now truly drawing to a close and we are now gearing up for a period of frantic activity, and we mean FRANTIC!

If you follow the band on Twitter you'll know that we are in the process of purchasing merchandise and CDs, we hope to have t-shirts, badges, stickers and keyrings available to purchase by the end of this month with physical CDs of 'The Original Demos 2008' available soon after.

In addition, once the band are all back home next week we have a photo shoot scheduled. We will once again be using the awesome skills of Anne-Marie Helder to capture our best sides and enable us to get some new images online.  We'll let you know as soon as we get our hands on them!

As if that's not enough we're currently in talks with a PR company in relation to our next release, this will include at least one all new track and may include a re-recording of one of our existing tracks, keep checking back for more!

And finally... you may have noticed that the weather is imrpoving, and that can only mean one thing!  The music festival season is fast approaching!  We have approached a number of these festivals with a view to appearing on the 'Unsigned Stages' and we'll keep you up to date with any news of success both here and on Twitter.

You will be able to help us with appearing on at least one of the festivals, the Road to V competition is now accepting submissions (which we have done) and we're currently updating our profile on thier site and deploying the widget they provide.  Once the registration period is over (it closes on the 12th of April) you will be able to vote for your favourite bands!!

We'll let you know once the voting period begins, we hope you'll help us open this great festival!

So, all in all, it's a busy period and we're only going to get busier! We'll be back in the recordng and rehearsal studios over the next few weeks and will be announcing gigs in the not too distant future!!

Rise with us...

All the best,

Grae, Pete, Daymo, Andy and Gibbo

Morpheus Rising

...resurrecting British Heavy Metal!

Are we there yet?

It's hard to believe but it's a year since Pete and Grae first got together to discuss what would become Morpheus Rising!

In that time we've written sufficient material for more than a standard album (and thrown most of it back into the melting pot!), released a charity single, been interviewed live and played on local, national and global radio stations, appeared in 'real' newspapers, we've been mentioned on Dave Gilmour's blog (yes, that Dave Gilmour!) and we've seen our first commercial release appear on iTunes, Rhapsody, Napster and IndieStore... not bad considering the limited esposure we've had and the fact that other commitments meant we had to turn down the gigs we got offered in support of the release!!

But all is definitely not lost!  We have made use of all the well known social networking tools to help us in our bid for global domination and more than a couple of not so well known ones... ReverbNation is akind of social networking site for independent musicians where you can build a fan base, show off your music, and generally pimp your wares.  There are also a number of charts on the site broken down into Local, National and Global charts by genre.  Morpheus Rising have fared consistently well in all of these charts but, until today, didn't really realise how well...

We are placed in the top 3 percent of ALL the charts in RverbNation where we appear!!  This includes the Global All Genres chart which has over 184,000 acts listed!  Our positions are as follows:

Global All Genre: 4473 out of 184,897 (Top 2.4%)

Global Metal: 136 out of 4781 (Top 2.8%)

National Metal: 10 out of 391 (Top 2.5%)

Local Metal: 1 out of 30 (Top... er, TOP!)

These positions have been fairly consistent over the last 3-4 months and we'd like to thank all of you for helping us achieve these great figures... how about we for a Top 5 National Metal placing now... or push into the Top 100 Global Metal?  To help us, just point your broweser at our ReverbNation page and click on the Widgets tab under our status and spread them on your sites... let your friends know, and we'll soon be there ;)

Or you could simply add this code to your email signature/blog/website to let people join our newsletter!!

<a href="http://www.reverbnation.com/morpheusrising?add_email=true"><img alt="Mylinks_join_mailing_list" src="http://cache.reverbnation.com/images/my_links_badges/mylinks_join_mailing_list.png" /></a>

The above code will produce the button below:



We look forward to seeing you soon...

All the best,

Grae, Pete, Daymo, Andy & Gibbo

Morpheus Rising

...resurrecting British Heavy Metal

Patience is a virtue

...I'm sure you know how the saying ends?!

Well, fortunately for us, we exercised a little patience and sat waiting quietly while our listeners increased, the 'scrobbles' racked up, and eventually it all paid off!!

What are we talking about so excitedly? Last.fm of course!!



Morpheus Rising now have our own Last.fm radio station!!  That's right, you can now tune in to our very own station and listen to our material alongside those other artists which our listeners deem to be 'Similar Artists'... so far we're in pretty distinguished company: Iron Maiden, Metallica, Whitesnake and Alter Bridge to name a few!!

Why not pop along to Last.fm and listen to us online (if you have an iPhone there's a free app here).

If you're in the dark about what Last.fm actually is then here's what Wikipedia has to say about it:

"Last.fm is a UK-based Internet radio and music community website, founded in 2002. It claims over 21 million active users based in more than 200 countries. On 30 May 2007, CBS Interactive acquired Last.fm for £140m ($280m USD). 

Using a music recommendation system called "Audioscrobbler", Last.fm builds a detailed profile of each user's musical taste by recording details of all the songs the user listens to, either on the streamed radio stations, the user's computer or some portable music devices. This information is transferred to Last.fm's database ("scrobbled") via a plugin installed into the user's music player. The profile data is then displayed on the user's profile page. The site offers numerous social networking features and can recommend and play artists similar to the user's favourites.

Users can create custom radio stations and playlists from any of the audio tracks in Last.fm's music library, and are able to listen to some individual tracks on demand, or download tracks if the rights holder has previously authorised it. Registration, which is free, is required to acquire a profile but is not necessary to view any part of the site or to listen to radio stations"

Rise with us...

All the best,

Grae, Pete, Daymo, Andy and Gibbo

Morpheus Rising

...resurrecting British Heavy Metal!