As previously reported, STRATOVARIUS guitarist Timo Tolkki is currently working on material for the band's next album, with a late 2007/early 2008 release expected.

He has issued the following update:

"So I woke up at 4:30 on Saturday morning and started to pack :) Thanks ladies for offering to help me out in packing, but I guess is should already learn that myself after travelling around the world a hundred times.

Took a taxi and headed for the airport, checked in and went through the security control, which is much tighter here now as well. Flight was okay, small Embraer plane that FinnAir bought some time ago. No leg space, fair enough. I'm 192 cm, maybe they could think of "us" tall guys sometimes, those greedy fuckers.

Anyways at Dusseldorf I was picked by Jyrki Mikkola, ie Jörg, and we went to studio to check out things, but then he had to change winter tires and I thought I'd join him and we had a nice lunch in a Chinese restaurant, while the guys at the studio where putting the microphones to Jörg´s kit.

Then I checked into the hotel and Jörg had booked me a nice suite. The whole hotel, including the carpet in my room, was full of fleur de lys: ) Oh and the name of the hotel was Castlehotel Goldsmith. Cool!!

Then we headed for the studio and I adjusted the mics and the sounds and then we called it a day.

On Sunday we started to record and it went very smoothly, all was cool and there were no problems. I was happy to hear that the songs work very well with Jörg's drumming as well as opposed to my original demos that I always do with a drum machine.

Yeah, so the place was kind of a small demo studio, but it worked well for our purposes, just to test how the songs really work and how they sound.

I enjoyed the days very much and this morning took a flight back with the same goddamn small leg space plane with hard disc full of Jörg´s drums, which I will now edit and then we continue with bass etc... and as you can see from the pics, I won't unpack this time.

Cheers, Timo."