Today I heard I have been nominated for an Interactive Music Award. I am among five acts nominated for this prize, which is awarded every year to an artist or band that has distinguished himself/itself by using new and innovative ways of music promotion and marketing. An 5-headed jury will decide on the winner this Friday 15th January after all acts have given a 3-minute presentation of their concept. The concept I’ll be bringing to the table is my Mystery Pop project: writing a song for a bestselling Author based on a bestselling book. If the author likes or even loves the song, they will actively promote it and introduce me to their reader audiences.

I could not illustrate how Mystery Pop works any better than by what happens today. Since 20% of the jury’s verdict will be made up by votes on the Interactive Awards website, ‘my’ Mystery authors today supported me by inviting their readers and fans to vote for me on their Facebook and Twitter accounts. The message was also put up on the website for the upcoming movie The Stone, in which I will be playing a part soon.

Kathleen, Philip, Patrice, Filip, Philippa, Andrew, Martin: thank you so much for your continued support of my work and mobilizing your friends and fans today. Thank you everybody who has already taken the trouble go to the website to vote for me. It’s special when you are prepared to do that for me and I do not take that lightly.

If you haven’t voted yet, you would really help me by casting your vote behind this link.
(pst….make sure you select all 5 stars as it will give me more votes..and don’t tell anyone…)

In the coming weeks, the 4th single will be released in the Mystery Pop series. The song was inspired by the book The Masonic Magician by the wonderful British authors Philippa Faulks and Robert L.D. Cooper. The book deals with the life and death of the 18th century adventurer Allessandro Cagliostro, cult figure of European society in the tumultuous years leading to the French Revolution. An alchemist, healer and Freemason, he inspired both wild devotion and savage ridicule as well as artists like Alexandre Dumas, Mozart and Goethe. Cagliostro was above all a Freemason, who introduced an Egyptian rite of immortality. He appears to have thought he was immortal himself. Sadly, he was proven wrong by the Holy Inquisition who condemned him to death for being a Mason.

The Masonic Magician tells Cagliostro’s extraordinary story, complete with the first English translation of the Egyptian Rite ever published. The authors examine the case made against him, that he was an impostor as well as a heretic and finds that the Roman Church, and history itself, have done him a terrible injustice.

I wrote this atmospheric uptempo song from Cagliostro’s perspective, overthinking his life in his cold stone prison cell. He is said to have been shouting his wife’s name at night, the same wife that probably betrayed him to the Church. He knew he would die and hoped he had achieved immortality through the rite.

My Mystery Pop project hasn’t gone completely unnoticed. The idea to make an album full of songs, endorsed by bestselling Mystery Authors has struck a chord somewhere.

The Video clip for the Patrice Chaplin song City of Secrets (the Grail in you) will be released as a bonustrack on the forthcoming DVD “The Initiation of Alice in Wonderland”. The distribution is in the hands of Warner Brothers Home Entertainment. The DVD will be in the shops around Christmas and deals with the life of Alice in Wonderland author Lewis Caroll. Carroll was the enigmatic man who created a magical and surreal reality populated by characters mined from the depths of his imagination. Were they simple tales of fantasy to entertain children or something considerably more profound?

Everyone knows that Johnny Depp plays the Mad Hatter in the Tim Burton film, Alice in Wonderland, but few know of the amazing man who first imagined the world of Alice in Wonderland. The film makers explore the wonderful world of Lewis Carroll and for the first time delve deep into the mind of the man to discover the hidden mysteries and meanings behind his incredible creations.

You can watch the trailer of the DVD on Youtube through this link.