"Trieste" E.P. Free to 3-Way Singles Club Mega-Subscribers, Thanks to James Cameron!

In honor of filmmaker James Cameron's solo dive to the bottom of the Challenger Deep (the deepest spot on Earth -- about a mile deeper than Mt. Everest is tall!) this past week, ITAV is making Stargrazer's 2010 instrumental concept EP Trieste available for free to 3-Way Singles Club Mega-Subscribers!  Look for it with your subscription materials later today.

The Trieste EP, on release, received nice reviews from a couple blogs that we admire greatly, Oh Drat in the UK and Mostly Midwest over here in the USA!

Trieste describes the January 23, 1960 dive by Navy Lt. Don Walsh and Swiss scientist Jacques Piccard in 4 musical movements over 15 minutes.  Until now, this was the only manned dive to this depth (35,797 feet down) ever attempted -- not even robots or unmanned subs have returned to the deepest point since (though a couple ROVs have gotten close)!  The descent to the seafloor took place over 5 hours, most in complete darkness (sunlight only reaches down about 500 feet). The two men stayed for 20 minutes on the seafloor before beginning a 3-hour ascent back to the surface.  Cameron stayed at the bottom for nearly 3 hours, alone, in a claustrophobic-looking submersible shaped like a green bullet.

I was genuinely afraid for Cameron.  The Bathyscaphe Trieste was a one-of-a-kind submersible, basically a perfect sphere of steel slung under a giant float equipped with weights held in place by electromagnets.  A window cracked at about 30,000 feet down, sounding to Walsh and Piccard like a gunshot.  That had to have been a tense moment!  Cameron's descent in his submersible, Deepsea Challenger, sounds like it was a lot quicker; the sub is described as a "vertical torpedo."  The trip was not without mishap: a hydraulic leak rendered the robotic arms inoperable and obscured Cameron's viewport with grease.  Considering the crushing pressures that far down (about 1,500 times our atmospheric pressure), though, that's a small problem for the prototype Deepsea Challenger to encounter.  But from the accounts of a recovery helicopter spotting the resurfacing craft "bobbing in the open ocean," it sounds like Cameron, unlike Piccard and Walsh, made his dive without 7 miles of cable tying him to his support boat.  Gutsy, James, very gutsy.  Cameron has already stated he'd like to return to conduct more sample-gathering and scientific observation on what he described as the "almost lunar" hadal plain of the perpetually dark Challenger Deep.

For those of you not (yet?) part of the 3-Way Singles Club Mega-Subscription family, you can stream Trieste for free in its entirety here:  http://stargrazer.bandcamp.com/album/trieste-2