December 17th, 2023 The fourth Monarch Trail album, "Four Sides"…
December 17th, 2023
The fourth Monarch Trail album, “Four Sides” is released today!
Much later than I would have hoped in the year, but at least we get to match up with a personal favourite album’s release date of mine, Genesis/”Wind and Wuthering”, released on December 17th of 1976!
Not that our album bears much resemblance to that famous album, but it is our longest album to date; effectively a “double album” of 74 minutes which fits onto one CD (but we hope to get it to LP one day where it will indeed be “Four Sides”)
The first three “sides” are all “side-long” epic-length tracks and the fourth side is split into two songs.
For now, we have it available for download or CD at bandcamp and will soon be available at Just for Kicks in Germany as well as other stores—we’ll try to keep a list of these stores here as they appear
Here’s the direct bandcamp link to Four Sides, we hope you like it!
Ken
https://monarchtrail.bandcamp.com/album/four-sides
November 7th, 2022
It’s been a long time since an update here, sorry!
Work progresses on the fourth Monarch Trail album, hopefully due some time later in 2023, but meanwhile I have added four of my old solo albums to the Monarch Trail Bandcamp page.
https://monarchtrail.bandcamp.com/
They are:
August, from 1996
Fields, from 1998
Orion, from 2000
Martin Road, from 2003
I’ll add the fifth one (Further Out from 2008) on December 2nd so it matches up with a “Bandcamp Friday”.
Some really good deals on the CD’s and the downloads are also a great deal at $7 Canadian dollars per album. For Monarch Trail albums, they’re all still up on Bandcamp but if you are looking for other buying options *especially in Europe it may be less expensive, please see the list of other stores in the December 18th 2021 update right below!
Cheers and thanks!
Ken
December 18th, 2021
Although we still have tons of work to do on the website, here at least are some links to purchase the new album, and our facebook page for news which we do keep updated every week.
We’ve done a lot of sales on bandcamp, and it is still the best place for downloads in WAV or MP3 for all three of our albums. For physical CD’s, we can happily ship through that site as well, but most of our fans are outside of Canada, so we have several other stores you may want to check out. It may end up being less expensive for you that way/save possible customs charges etc.
And of course, a link to our youtube page:
Our Bandcamp Page:
https://monarchtrail.bandcamp.com/album/wither-down
Our facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/monarchtrailmusic
Our main store we sell from in Germany is “Just for Kicks”, but there are several smaller ones as well which I will add soon:
https://justforkicks.de/en/shop/progressive/11657/wither-down
In the U.K. we are at Caerllysi music:
https://www.caerllysimusic.co.uk/contents/en-uk/p4425.html
Our main store we sell from in Japan is “Garden Shed”:
We’re available at “Synphonic” and “Laser’s Edge” in the USA:
http://synphonicmusic.com/country/canada.html
https://www.lasercd.com/search_results?fulltext=monarch%20trail
For downloading MP3 via itunes:
https://music.apple.com/us/artist/monarch-trail/874358492
For CD’s at Cosmos Music in France:
MONARCH TRAIL – Wither Down
October 15th, 2021
The new album is finally here! So far, it’s available at bandcamp https://monarchtrail.bandcamp.com/album/wither-down and the videos are now on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in9fNyDEtcY
We have to make some updates to this website too, so we’ll be seeing to that in the next little while. For most recent updates you can visit our facebook page. Cheers, everyone!
https://www.facebook.com/monarchtrailmusic
November 22nd 2020
Finally a few updates around here!
At last we have high quality/flac downloads of both our albums available through our new bandcamp site since CDbaby closed its online store, so here they are! https://monarchtrail.bandcamp.com
Also, the third Monarch Trail album is mostly complete, but will be released some time in early 2021. Physical CD sales for all the albums will also resume at this point. But if you really need physical copies right now of either of our albums (“Skye” from 2014 or “Sand” from 2017), you can always send me (Ken) a personal message at augustfieldsorion@gmail.com and we’ll work something out.
More news to follow soon, but for now here’s the old news below:
November 20th 2019
oh no, our site seems to have been hacked, or some other kind of interference! We’ve lost the old theme and the links to various pages seem to be gone, but temporarily it works if you type what page you’re looking for after the website address.
For example, if you want to look at news, typing www.monarchtrail.com/news will take you to that page. We’ll try to get this sorted soon!
Ken
The new album is here! It’s the second album for Monarch Trail, released June 30th, 2017 called “Sand”. Here are the first singles/videos:
And if you want to hear the entire album, it’s now up at progstreaming too (note, I think it’s gone from progstreaming now, but the album is easily findable on youtube (without our permission, but if you need to hear the whole thing, it’s not hard to find)
*ok, new note, the albums are NOT on youtube any more. We may post them ourselves soon so that people can hear them before buying, but there are at least several tracks up there.
News flash! “Sand” is now available in the UK!–link or “button” coming soon but here’s the url:
http://www.caerllysimusic.co.uk/
We’ll put most of the updates on the “news” page and the “Store” page has most of the current buying options*. The easiest and most direct option is CDbaby (just press the button below) for download or CD. And if you’re in Germany, we just added a new store called Magic Dragon Music, see link below :) At the bottom of this page are links that lead to Monarch Trail albums at Amazon/itunes and other stores as well.
*Please note that if you live in Canada and you’d like to order some CD’s, send me a personal message at augustfieldsorion@gmail.com and we can work out a price. I’ve started doing this with some people to avoid larger postal costs. Soon, we’ll be starting up our own store here too, but for now I can cover Canadian orders.
The following text is the older promo story for the first Monarch Trail album: Skye. It’s still doing really well for us! :)
When keyboard player/vocalist Ken Baird had written some music which seemed to require more collaborative arrangements than usual, he asked drummer Chris Lamont and Bassist Dino Verginella if they’d be willing to be a part of “Monarch Trail”. Lamont had played on Baird’s previous three albums and Verginella on the previous two, so it was a natural thing that it could be called a group.
The first stage was to set up several rehearsals for the trio to work on arranging the new pieces. Important changes were made to the charts; an extra set of bars here, a new melody line there, a different tempo over there and so on. Even more importantly, these rehearsals also turned out to be a ton of fun with no lack of shenanigans!
They made the decision to start recording the music right away and add other musicians when needed. As it turned out, there was to be a fair bit of guitar on the record, so guitarist friends were brought in providing “the right part for the right track”. True to the spirit of the project, John Mamone, Kelly Kereliuk and Steve Cochrane all had major creative input on their solos and sections.
The recording was done by Ken Baird, but in the final months of the record, Cochrane also lent his studio and his recording and mastering abilities. Drawings by Annette Roche had initially helped inspire the lyrics, so these drawings ultimately became part of the album artwork.
And so here we have it, the first album from Monarch Trail: “Skye”!
Please scroll down and click “play” to enjoy the first track from the album called “Luminescence”. Also, a link to a mix featuring excerpts from all four songs on the album should “pop up” entitled “Skye collage mix”. Or just click where it says “Monarch Trail” near the top left of the box to go to our soundcloud page.
