Hakim by Secret Archives of the Vatican – video
Jewel of Denial – video
Jewel of Denial is a track from our Barsoom album, released in 2019. We’ve just started working with a new video editing package so this is us playing.
The original footage of the dervishes was taken many years ago on an old Nokia phone in Istanbul.
Moroccan Tapes
This is well worth a look. Moroccan Tapes is an ever growing database of cassette tapes made available for listening, downloading, and sharing. Most of the tapes are only available in Morocco. You can browse through the full catalog or a specific genre, or you can search for keywords such as artist names, album and track titles.
The catalog is comprised of both older tapes and more recent releases. Some of the more recent tapes have been remastered and released in CD and digital format, in which case links are provided.
In the Library of Ashurbanipal
Here’s another video for a track on Secret Archives of the Vatican‘s new album, East Meets East.
Uruk
Here’s a video for a tune on Secret Archives of the Vatican‘s new release, East Meets East.
East Meets East
What better way to start a new year than to release a new album? Here it is!
East Meets East is where we explore some ancient near and middle eastern history in our own unique style. It should be on all the usual streaming and download sites on 17 January 2020 but for now you can stream or download it from Bandcamp. As with all our music, it’s free but you can choose to pay a little. We appreciate it very much when you do.
If you’re not familiar with our music, don’t forget to check out our back catalogue too.
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Secret Archives of the Vatican – 2019 review
2019 was a good year in many ways for Secret Archives of the Vatican. We released two strong collections of tunes, the full length album, Barsoom, in April and Khorasan in September, four tracks of Orientalist drum and bass.
Barsoom in particular took our production and writing values to new levels and we’d consider it a career highlight. We also commissioned the cover artwork, a first for us, and had very positive responses to it. The awesomely talented artist is Ramaekers Matthias.
Barsoom has had a mere 130 downloads from Bandcamp (30 of whom were to people who chose to pay – thank you very much!) and probably a handful from other sites. We believe it deserves much more attention!
Streaming numbers also remain low despite our constant promotion on all of our social media. Spotify alone gets over 40,000 new tracks a day, so getting noticed among all that is ridiculously difficult for anyone, let alone people making weird genre-defying music like ours.
Social media
We’ve had an interesting and experimental year with social media. We’ve been watching and reading people like Damian Keyes and Burstimo who have a deep business-insider view of how the various socials work (they’re all quite different) and we’ve been trying out some of their ideas.
We now have two much improved YouTube channels for SAotV and TYP, and we finally found out how to use InstaGram properly. Both are going well but followers and subscribers remain low in numbers. Follower and subscriber numbers are much more important in one sense than streams or views because they drive how many people the sites share content with. They are an indicator than the listener is engaging with us.
The algorithms controlling how Facebook and other socials share content are changing all the time and are heading towards a time when things really only get shared widely if you pay to advertise. We’ve experimented a little with that to some small success and we’re doing it better each time. However, at this point, it still costs us considerably more than we make.
We still get excited, though, at the idea of making our own music and releasing it to the world without ever having to leave home. Modern technology is awesome!
2020
We have a new nine track album, East Meets East, uploaded and ready to release on Bandcamp on New Year’s Day, 1 January 2020. It’ll be on Spotify on 16 January and most other sites on 17 January.
