1. Machine Head – None But My Own (#4, Burn My Eyes, 1994)
2. Enslaved – Ansuz Astral (#4, Blodhemn, 1998)
3. Linkin Park – By Myself (#7, Hybrid Theory, 2000)
4. Muddy Waters – I Can’t Be Satisfied (#5, Hard Again, 1977)
5. In Flames – Jotun (#3, The Tokyo Showdown, 2001)
6. Andrew Lloyd Webber – Overture (#1, Jesus Christ Superstar, 2000)
7. Bobby Prince – un42 (JunkHead) (#34, Doom OST, 1993)
8. Novembers Doom – Dreams To Follow (#9, To Welcome The Fade, 2005)
9. David Bowie – Cygnet Committee (#5, Space Oddity, 1969)
10. Suffocation – Prelude To Repulsion (#5, Breeding The Spawn, 1993)

There’s something for everyone in there, I daresay.

When I linked Jordan to my newest brainchild, he said:

“I don’t want to listen to your Mario paint bullshit.”

I hope that made you laugh as hard as it did me. And now the bullshit.

[audio:fool.mp3]

Pretty sweet, eh? I totally plan to go somewhere with this in mid- to late-January, when I should be studying for finals.

Deadlines are the mother of creativity of stuff that doesn’t help you meet deadlines.

On YouTube there’s a still-frame video posting of a song called “The Device Has Been Modified” by Victims Of Science. It’s a collection of samples from the game Portal, pitch-shifted for musical appropriateness, placed over a slick synth beat. The video description laments the practical nonexistence of the artist.

*Please note, this song ISN’T made by me (or anyone that claims to on YT), it’s by Victims of Science, who don’t seem to have a website.. if you find one, please let me know*

A song inspired by Portal using various sounds from GLaDOS.

The song is so absolutely hardcore, it’s difficult for me to contain myself.

[audio:thedevicehasbeenmodified.mp3]

I’ve wrought my Google Fu, and the oldest source I can come up with is a blog post by Jonathan Coulton dated October 23, 2007. The YouTube video linked to above was posted October 24, 2007, which says to me that the song couldn’t have hit the internet much earlier than the Coulton post.

I’ve looked up the track on Last.fm and the oldest wall shout is also dated October 24, 2007. I checked for diggs, and the oldest I found was posted 54 days ago, which, according to my calculations, means November 7, 2007.

I must find this artist so that I can PayPal him my life savings. And then give him something in addition to that 16MB 3dfx Voodoo3 card I never threw away. I’ve already listened to this song way more than is healthy.

OK, yeah, and I listened to a German version of “Silent Night” by Manowar. That’s definitely not healthy and I’m already seeking a therapist for help.

[audio:manowar-stille_nacht]

Download the MP3s directly here:

• Victims Of Science – The Device Has Been Modified
• Manowar – Stille Nacht

Über props to J for telling me about this. (I’m talking about the Portal song, not the Manowar one. Don’t want to shame him or anything.)

I’ve been through two iPods. Neither last a full year. The battery life rapidly deteriorated to an hour or less, and the hard drive in each failed around the 11-month mark. Bullshit, right? Well, about two years ago, a friend upgraded his iPod, and didn’t need his ancient 20GB iRiver anymore. Since I was at the time without a Pod, he gifted it to me, because he’s a bro.

This thing is a tank. I’ve dropped it dozens of times on asphalt, seen it get run over by a car, basically treated it like crap. The battery life is still around 10 hours, and all the buttons work and everything. The backlight is bright as ever.

My favorite thing about this thing, though, is that I’ve installed some open source firmware on it, which lets me do pretty much whatever I want with the thing. Check out the display skin I use with it.

Check out all that information! This is so freaking geeky. Just on the top half of the screen, it has the following details about the current track:

1. artist
2. album
3. track number
4. total number of tracks on album
5. track name
6. genre
7. time remaining in track
8. total time of track
9. track number in playlist
10. total number of tracks in playlist
11. format
12. bitrate

Then, below that, it has information about the next song which is already queued in the buffer. Additionally, it has basic info about current settings on the device. So add these items to the list:

13. artist of next track
14. track name of next track
15. track number of next track
16. total number of tracks on next track’s album
17. volume displayed numerically (so you know how loud it is without testing)
18. mode (“shuffle”)
19. battery life remaining in hours and minutes

Now, let’s compare this with the iPod-esque skin for Rockbox, which a user could of course pick if that suits him better.

Ton of wasted space, huh? This is all the information the user is greeted with:

1. track name
2. artist
3. album
4. track number in playlist
5. total number of tracks in playlist
6. time elapsed
7. time remaining
8. volume displayed numerically (again, so the user knows how loud it is without having to test)

Now, I know that such information overload isn’t necessarily for everyone, but it is for me. And I believe that the user should always opt for the choice between both options.

To this end, I should make it very clear that Rockbox does also run on most iPods, though not the very newest ones.

Rockbox is an open source firmware for mp3 players, written from scratch. It runs on a wide range of players:

• Apple: 1st through 5.5th generation iPod, iPod Mini and 1st generation iPod Nano
  (not the Shuffle, 2nd/3rd gen Nano, Classic or Touch)

Check it.

DIMMU BORGIR‘s latest album, “In Sorte Diaboli”, has been certified gold in the band’s home country of Norway for sales in excess of 15,000 copes. DIMMU BORGIR is said to be the first metal band in Norway to shift than 15,000 units of a single release.

“In Sorte Diaboli” has sold more than 50,000 copies in the United States since its April 2007 release, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Funny thing is, this is the first CD in their eight album discography that I haven’t bought. Oh, well. The kiddies love it.

\m/

]]> http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2007/11/13/become-your-own-congregation/feed/ 1 http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2007/11/11/jordan-rocks/ http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2007/11/11/jordan-rocks/#comments Sun, 11 Nov 2007 16:01:46 +0000 Conor http://www.conorschaefer.com/blog/index.php/2007/11/11/jordan-rocks/ Because this is the kind of thing I don’t see Jordan posting on his blog, I feel I must present it here. This is video from a videogames expo he attended a little while ago, where I think he meant to do some networking.

I wish I could say my CIRN 2007 conference was this rocking.

J’s on vocals, for those of you who don’t know him.

Like, there’s no other way to say it. Vikings are so freaking badass it makes me want to gut people with grossly oversized swords. I feel like the kid from Real Ultimate Power, but I’m actually serious. I fucking love Vikings with all of my being, and then even more. (I was gonna say that I love them more than I love breathing, but when you’re a Viking, you can’t always love breathing. So maybe I could have said that I loved them more than I love the prospect of drinking with Oden in Valhalla, but that’d be a lie.)

Seeing Amon Amarth live the other night (pics here) definitely made me consider running away to become a Viking. I would have a plundering ship and name it Flessskinnjoldrmangandrokthurkapjlodrojr. I’d have some Viking jawn pieces I’d roll around with and we’d point at people and call them Normans and then burn down their cities, wherever they may be.

What I don’t understand is why anyone ever opposed the Vikings. If anything that badass attacked me, I would take that as an obvious sign of my having failed at life, and I’d just flex my whole body and scream while waiting to be decapitated.

Now, just showing Amon Amarth lyrics without also showing the swords and tall dudes with long hair and insane drums and furious vocals is a bit half-assed, I realize. But bear with me, and check these out.

From “Cry Of The Black Birds”:

Charge your horses across the fields,
Together we ride into destiny!
Have no fear of death, when it’s your time:
Oden will bring us home when we die!

From “Runes To My Memory”:

When I am dead, lay me in a mound
Raise a stone for all to see: Runes carved to my memory!

From the timeless “Death In Fire”:

The wait is soon at end. Always charge, never bend!
Morning is here, make your stand
Live for honor, glory, DEATH IN FIRE!

Total war is here, face it without fear
Age of sword, age of spear
Fight for honor, glory, DEATH IN FIRE!

See the fire rise, flames are raging high
Soon all will burn and die
Burn for honor, glory, DEATH IN FIRE!

Storm of lethal flames, only death remains
Ragnarok is closing in
Die for honor, glory, DEATH IN FIRE!

The bridge from “The Pursuit Of Vikings” (see video below):

Oden! Guide our ships
Our axes, spears and swords
Guide us through storms that whip
And in brutal war!

From “Down The Slopes Of Death”:

Down the slopes of death he rides
The eight hooves pound like drums
Darkness reigns the crumbling sky:
Invasion has begun

From “Across The Rainbow Bridge”:

I dress myself in battle clothes
Alone I make the final ride
My sight is blurred by whipping snow
I seek to end my life.

I want to walk across the Rainbow Bridge,
And see my fathers in the golden hall!
They beckon me to join their feast
In my dreams I hear their call…

Hell, just read all their lyrics: Versus The World, Fate Of Norns, With Oden On Our Side.

At the show last night, I was fortunate enough to catch the first minute of “Death In Fire” on video. It’s pretty intense, because the crowd erupted in battle moshing when they announced the song, and so it took me a while to extract my camera from the depths of flesh below shoulder height. But that worked out well, because the camera bursts forth from the crowd right as the intro guitar riff comes in, like a a sword ripping out through a Norman’s back.

Check out the Death In Fire video. If this doesn’t make you bang your head, you need to see a doctor.

[qt:/blog/pics/video/aa-dif-intro-small.mp4 320 256]

And not as grand, as this was the closing song, and everyone was exhausted, here’s the bridge from The Pursuit Of Vikings.

[qt:/blog/pics/video/aa-tpov-bridge-small.mp4 320 256]

UNDERSTAND YE YET, OR WHAT?

DIMMU BORGIR Accuses German Rapper Of ‘Stealing’ Band’s Music 

Now that’s golden. The article even has embedded YouTube videos, so you can “decide for yourself” whether the infringement accusation has merit.

And since the headline itself isn’t enough material for a blogpost, I leave you with this:

The venue was a different one than I usually go to, and substantially larger, though still no seats or anything. (It’s called Georg Else Halle instead of Backstage, and is near the “other” very large train station in Munich, which means it’s farther away from my place than Backstage is.) Nonetheless, the place was pretty packed. In fact, on Thursday afternoon, after classes, I headed downtown to scoop up some tickets for the show that night, and called Sascha to see whether he’d bought his. “Dude. I was there this morning. They’re already sold out.”

This depressed me more than I can say, but fortunately Sascha had the bright idea of going anyway, to see whether there would still be tickets available at the window, and there were. Thirty bucks a pop, ouch, but still for sale, so no problem.

On the train, I met a 60-year-old Dimmu Borgir fan. How freaking cool is that? Here he is:

The best part is that later that night I saw him in the crowd. Actually, I kind of got thrown into him. He was right up on the front rail, headbanging with horns high, elbowing in the face every mosher who got near him. What a dude, man.

The opener of the night was a band called Engel, who were pretty OK. Did a great job working the crowd as an opener, but it wasn’t too difficult, as all the singer had to do was say, “So, who’s ready to see Amon Amarth?” and people were ripping out organs and hurling them at the stage. At least, I know I did.

When Amon Amarth stepped out, oh man, it was intense. They opened, of course, with “Valhall Awaits Me,” opening track on the newest CD. From there they went straight into “Death In Fire,” after making the crowd scream the name of the song and hurl more organs for a minute or two. Their set list was roughly so:

1. Valhall Awaits Me
2. Death In Fire
3. Cry Of The Black Birds
4. Runes To My Memory
5. Asator
6. Gods Of War Arise
7. Pursuit Of Vikings

They played another song or two, but I can’t really remember what they could have been. Maybe “Bloodshed,” maybe something else off The Fate Of Norns, I don’t remember. To be fair, it’s very hard to distinguish between a lot of their songs lyrically, especially when you’re totally drunk, both from beer and headbutts.

I know they didn’t play “Down The Slopes Of Death” and also not “The Dragons’ Flight Across The Waves,” which are probably my favorite songs of theirs next to “Death In Fire.”

But the songs they did play were definitely winners, and man did the crowd go nuts over their stuff. Every person there knew every word to every song, and the vocalist was loving it. The mic was over the crowd easily as much as it was in the hands of the vocalist. I made some videos of their set, mostly of the crowd, but it got me so pumped that I’m going to dedicate another post to discussing the Vikingage at that show. Just wow, man.

I leave you with a picture of horns and of Sascha headbanging like a pro.

That is all for now.

Deadlock, on the other hand, are straight up melodic death metal, though they do tend to lean on metalcore-inspired breakdowns and open string riffing. But whatever, they’re great, and it was nice to actually hear a vocalist yell “Danke schön!” to the crowd at the end of a song.

As good as the show was, it definitely had its downsides. The band is very young. They’ve only one CD to their name, meaning that their set consisted entirely of songs from a single album, just mixed up in order. Thank god for the fresh order, at least. But this is obviously their first major tour, as the band members were very visibly tired.

The female vocalist would waver out of tune every now and then, her voice at times noticeably ragged. I’m sure other than their studio time, she’s never sung this much in her life. She’s also sore from being on stage, as she kept favoring her neck, certainly from all the headbanging she’s been doing.

So as not to sound like I fell in love with the girl, I’ll now mention another band member: the lead guitarist. He played his sweaty heart out, but had to several times break away from a band-wide headbanging session in order to concentrate on his playing. Even then, he still messed up the descending pull-off riff in the solo to We All Shall Bleed, which I’m happy to say I got a video of.

Overall it was awesome to see some German bands kick ass in Germany, with German fans going nuts. The male vocalist even gave the mic to the crowd to let them open up We All Shall Bleed with the “Come on motherfuckers!” the song starts with.

[qt:/blog/pics/video/we_all_shall_bleed.mp4 320 256]

There are also a few pictures up from that night, but I didn’t take very many. I was pretty pleased with the video

External link to the video here.

On Saturday, I left the winetasting early in order to meet up with my pal Sascha and go scope out some guitars with him. (I didn’t buy one, so don’t skip to the end to find out!)

We were able to catch each other with enough time to hop on a train and head out to the closest thing Munich has to a mall, which was really just several stores in close proximity to one another. It’s called Olympiaeinkaufzentrum (Olympic Shopping Center). There is a McDonalds there.

The only dedicated guitar store there closed at 7pm instead of 8pm, so we didn’t have a chance to check that out. Fortunately, though, there was a decent electronics store that also sold low-end guitars and amps, and I definitely found an axe I fell in love with. Cheap as all hell, too. More about that later.

After shredding for about 45 minutes or so, it became clear that we should head out, as the store was getting ready to close. Where we were was actually north of home, even though we had had to travel to the central train station in Munich’s centercity in order to get up there. Since we had to overshoot home anyway to get back to the central station, we figured that once there, we would take a different train and head out west to a neighborhood called Pasing, where Sascha’s old apartment is.

He still has his old drumset out there, locked up in a cellar room, and he knows people in the neighborhood from whom we could borrow a guitar and an amp. So we did just that, and had a fantastic jam session together, drinking copious amounts of beer and riffing ourselves stupid. Sascha says he likes my lead runs, and he’s a much better drummer than I, so we’ve made a deal to teach each other what we know. He already had my up to snuff on several hard rock beats on the drums, for when he had to show off some rhythm guitar riffs he’d written.

After about an hour or two of that, we were sweaty and pretty drunk and hungering for a metal concert, though we didn’t know of any in Munich that night. So instead, on a recommendation from a friend of Sascha’s who’d come with us to attend the jam session, we decided to hit up a Munich club called Rockstudio, which I see posters for freaking everywhere.

It was great. For nine bucks, you get three beers and three shots of Jäger or tequila or vodka. Unfortunately the beer was Becks, but you can’t complain about the price. So in turn, each of us threw a ten euro bill at the bartender and treated the others. Oh man, what a blast.

Come see all the pics.

So, hang in there for stories. I gotta throw some clothes in a bag and get out the door now.

I just might stop and get some tasty Munich food on the way to the train station before heading off to experience god knows what.

Well, isn’t that depressing?

I’m off to pick up some drinks before the cornerstore closes, then it’s off to German Melodic Death Metal land, with long streaming blonde hair galore, chesty double bass punch, DDR-inspired electronica fills, open-string solo riffs, and even some female vocals thrown in the mix, in case the music wasn’t accessible enough. Although good ol’ metalcore Neaera will be closing, I should think.

I vow that my brain has a sufficiently fast connection to enjoy the concert.

I asked my bro Google about these Naerea chaps, and all it had to say was that it’s either this dude from Bremen, or a bizarre species of mollusk that for some reason is only evidenced in Switzerland of all places. Another possibility was a fan fiction fantasy world for D&D. None of these sound promising.

Buried all the way on page 2 of the Google results was a review of a concert from January 2007 where the author mentions a band by the name of “Naerea.” Ah-ha! He says they are pretty decent live, but that depends on whether one digs Thrash-Death metal. Either way, they know how to get a crowd moving it seems.

This investigation was launched because allegedly these dudes are headlining tonight at the Deadlock concert.

Obviously, by looking up the event on Last.fm I found out that I had been spelling the band’s name wrong. Thanks for nothing, Google.

How freaking cool are those song titles? I think song titles are easily half the reason I love metal so much. The other day Jordan wrote me an e-mail that for some reason contained the phrase “flesh hound.” I replied that Flesh Hound would be a freaking incredible song title, and he of course concurred.

So I’m sitting in my Operating Systems class right now, trying to grok this thread-interrupt stuff (it really isn’t that complicated, fortunately), and the professor just reviewed the concept of a death-of-child signal. That’s right. Death Of Child Signal would make a fantastic song title. Also, it’s nice to the candidates in their original context, which would make for nice song titles, as well:

Ein death-of-child-Signal wird an den Vaterprozess geschickt.

Dateien werden geschlossen und Ressourcen freigegeben.

Der Prozesszustand wird auf Zombie gesetzt.

Man, I love life so freaking much right now.

He wasn’t joking about that breakfast. It was phenomenal! Schnitzel, egg noodles (I don’t know how else to translate what they are), a kind of omelette, some toast, and a 1.5L bottle of Mezzo Mix, which is a very popular drink here, a mix of orange soda and cola. Nice.

So we talk about music, concerts—we’ve both decided not to go to the überexpensive Dream Theater and Symphony X concert, despite the throngs of girls that’d surely be there—and what we had planned for the day. I’m working on my laptop in the kitchen, with music playing softly while we breakfast and converse. An acoustic Opeth song comes on, and he immediately interrupts me, says, “You played that. You played that song on my guitar, didn’t you?” He was right, I did, several weeks ago when we were drunk and hanging out in his room. I couldn’t believe he recognized the song so quickly, especially given that he didn’t know it when I played it in his room the first time.

He compliments my acoustic prowess, saying most metalheads are all about heavy distortion and compression and can’t do shit without an amp. I agree that most are that way, at least the n00bz. We begin talking about how we should play more together, and how I need to pick up a guitar and all that, and how badly we each want to get good at drums.

Sascha offered to spend the day guitar shopping, so I can scope out how much it might cost to pick up an axe and amp. He said we could sometime soon pick up his drumset from his friend’s house and install it in the basement of our dorm building, so we could play with each other.

This is shaping up to be the greatest year in history.

I intended to do this same thing, but turns out good ol’ Carl bought the last router at the electronics store with flashable firmware that also cost only 20€. Can’t really beat that. I even trekked all the way across the city to another location of that store, a much bigger location, but it was sadly in an upscale neighborhood, and so it didn’t even carry the low-end brand I was looking for. Dagnabbit.

What I did manage to pick up, however, was a very nice set of speakers, which has me happier than I can explain. I had no idea that the quality of audio in my life so affected my moods! Just putting my music library on random and reading a Linux magazine in German is infinitely more pleasurable when it’s run through a decent 2.1 system rather than piping gratingly out of laptop speakers. I even took the time to set my speakers to different volumes and bass settings, then step outside and walk around the hallway and visit other people to see whether I could hear the music. Surprisingly, my room is pretty well insulated! And for late at night, I still have the marginally OK set of headphones I picked up earlier this week–which I’m wearing now, in fact!

Tomorrow I’m going to wake up early to knock out some work for Simone, then try to catch up on organizing on my whole room, from school stuff to play stuff to work stuff.

Thereafter there’s evidently a big wine festival in Munich, to be punctuated by “Night of the Museums,” where all the museums in the city are open till 3am or something ridiculous like that. Drunk and soaking in modern art exhibits sounds like a winning proposition.

More on that later, I’m sure.

I’d assumed doors were at 7pm and the show started at 8pm, but as I approached the venue around 7:30pm, I could hear there was a band on already. And it was very obviously Sonic Syndicate, as from a block away I could discern perfectly the burst-fire metalcore double bass stylings. I paid my 20€ and pushed my way through the hordes at the merch tables, made it onto the floor so I could watch Sonic Syndicate’s set. I was quite blown away by how well the crowd knew their material. I have both CDs, but I know that in the U.S. they’re a pretty obscure band still. Swedish metalcore isn’t taken very seriously in the States. (And yes, they’re metalcore. They might have melodeath influences, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re straight up metalcore. So no arguing in the comments, Jordan! <3)

After their set, the changing of the guard took place, with the metalcore kids receding to the merch tables, and all the melodeath fans lurching forward to fill the empty places on the floor. Dark Tranquillity came on next, and played a solid set. It was a bit short, and heavy on the new material, but they got the crowd moving and screaming along to the new songs. They even played a soft ballad from the new CD, called Misery’s Crown. One of my favorites! The setlist, near as I can remember, was so:

1. Terminus (Where Death Is Most Alive)
2. The Treason Wall
3. Focus Shift
4. The Lesser Faith
5. The Wonders At Your Feet
6. Misery’s Crown
7. Punish My Heaven
8. The New Build

Next was Soilwork. I had really thought that the crowd was into Sonic Syndicate, but then came Dark Tranquillity, and I realized people were probably here for them. But as soon as the setup was finished for Soilwork, the lights dimmed, fog machines clicked on, and the SOILWORK banner was illuminated, the place went nuts. They stepped out on stage and opened with Bastard Chain.

I’ve read many times that the A Predator’s Portrait CD sold like bratwurst in Germany, and that night proved it to me. Soilwork knows their fans, and they played the strongest set of back-to-back stunners I’ve ever seen. Even though they’re Swedish melodic death metal, whose fans are usually pretty chill, last night was by far the most violent concert I’ve ever been to. By the time Soilwork went on, I was pretty close to the front rail, and I still got sucked into the enormous pit that erupted when they announced they were about to play One With The Flies. Their set list was approximately so:

1. Bastard Chain
2. As We Speak
3. One With The Flies
4. Rejection Role
5. Exile
6. Distance
7. Follow The Hollow
8. Stabbing The Drama
9. Nerve

Never have I seen a band offer such a succession of massive hits live. Ten thousand thumbs up to these guys.

I don’t have any pictures from the night, because it was much too chaotic for that. I was headbutting people left and right just to stay sane. My watch was also ripped off my arm and thrown to the wolves, so I’ll have to replace that at some point. Though I do finally have a cell phone, so at least I have some form of time-keeping device.

I’ll say nothing about Caliban, the headliners. They were pretty lame, but they’re from Germany, so they got top spot. And I don’t think Soilwork liked supporting them, because Strid (the vocalist) kept making the crowd yell for “Swedish metal.” Burn.

This is going to be one crazy year of concerts, man.

Mad props to Will on this one.

Oh, and anyone not currently listening to DJ Nite – Durance of Hate on Uberguilds Radio, TUNE IN IMMEDIATELY.

Keep an eye on J’s blog till Thursday rolls around.

Congrats, man!

02:54:56 Jordan: didn’t you use to be able tos weep
02:54:58 I: buried.
02:55:15 I: sure man, I’m sure I still could if I were warmed up
02:55:27 Jordan: like that?
02:55:35 I: but the WM solo isn’t about the sweeps like the TGE one, it’s all horizontal runs
02:55:42 Jordan: i dont even know how to practice taht shit
02:55:42 I: I DEFINITELY never played Loomis
02:56:18 Jordan: loling
02:56:18 Jordan: this is retarded
02:56:26 Jordan: teach me how to do sweeps
02:56:33 Jordan: and i’ll teach you how to make a melody.
02:56:36 I: burn.
02:56:47 Jordan:

Ouch. The videos we were watching were of the solos from “Winter Madness” (WM) and “This Godless Endeavor” (TGE). Behold:

Wintersun – Winter Madness (solo), performed by Rasite

Nevermore – This Godless Endeavor (solo portion), performed by Rasite

I highly recommend any interested parties check out all videos by Rasite, the beast who recorded both of those. He’s got some killer performances up. (His rendition of Mourning Heart by Ensiferum is particularly choice.) If I can get ahold of a guitar over here, I’ll post videos of me playing those.

If I ever learn to sweep like that, of course.

Jukka, the resident Finn, was there, just finishing up preparing his breakfast. I set about to throwing together a quick omelette, and we chatted whilst readying our comestibles. I asked whether it’d be OK if I put on some music, knowing full well it would be, because he’s from Finland and listens to metal. Well, somehow this poor bastard hadn’t heard of Mors Principium Est, which blew my mind, but he knew all the other requisite names. We ate and talked over the following playlist:

1. Mors Principium Est – Parasites Of Paradise
2. Panic! At The Disco – The Only Difference Between Martyrdom And Suicide Is Press Coverage
3. Into Eternity – Beginning Of The End
4. Turisas – As Torches Rise
5. Novembers Doom – The Pale Haunt Departure
6. Insomnium – The Day It All Came Down

How fantastic is that? If you answered “very,” you are correct.

As usual, Jukka had made a small pot of coffee for the morning, and offered me the final cup. I gladly accepted, number one because I haven’t had coffee in ages, and number because I knew he was being especially gracious by offering. The other day he saw me in the hall and bade me enter his room, where he rummaged through the exposed entrails of a carepackage from back home to find a tiny green box, from which he extracted a tinier piece of chocolate-covered candy. “Finnish candy is the best,” he said. And indeed it was. He couldn’t have had many pieces in that box, so I was touched that he wanted to share it rather than hoard it.

So I try Jukka’s coffee, and it was just awesome. Before I could compliment him, though, he excused himself for the poor quality and explained that German coffee just isn’t as good as Finnish coffee I told him that the coffee I was tasting seemed much better than what I’m used to in America, and he raised his eyebrows. It’s at least nice when people are surprised when I tell them tales of inferior products and standard of living in America. That or they’re well mannered enough to feign surprise.

I’ve noticed that a lot of the people I meet here are very proud of what they’re used to back home, whether home for them is a town just outside of Munich or at the other end of the continent. I don’t often see this level of product patriotism from the Americans here, probably because they’re genuinely convinced that stuff over here is just better

I’ll have to try to pick up some Finnish coffee, if it beats the stuff I had this morning.

Oh, and Jukka also assured me it was cheaper in Finland than here in Germany, which doesn’t make any sense to me at all. Maybe they’re growing their own up there under the ice or something.

Also, I should say that I’m not at all certain he’s going with the handle “DJ Nite,” although it would be like him to do so. (Uberguilds, as the name suggests, is an MMO community, and Nite is Jordan’s most commonly and consistently used avatar name, much like my own RonocDH.) There were certainly other suggestions, like “Metal Member.” (I hope you just learned something new about Jordan.)

I do think he’s settled on the name Durance of Hate for the show, though the schedule page on Uberguilds clearly hasn’t been updated recently. Oh, how I hope he goes with that name.

Sorry this post is light on the details, but that’s all I got. Watch J’s blog for more info as the day progresses. I’m sure he’ll update with a solid post before going live.

UPDATE: Turns out this won’t be happening tonight, after all. The head DJ got sick and wasn’t able to set up the streaming connections, so some radio shows for today had to be cancelled. Here’s hoping for next week.

Here’s the hideous show page on the venue’s site, and here’s a much more aesthetically pleasing rendition on Last.fm.

Music streamable on the MySpace pages for Iced Earth, Annihilator, and Turisas.

There are certainly lots (103,000,00 hits on Google) of digital music storage websites out there. From my cursory research, it seems that most of these sites do offer streaming as a lure to users, but that this feature is almost always provided solely to the owner of the account. This means that the storage service is advertised as a way for the user to have constant access to his or her digital music collection; it does not ostensibly facilitate filesharing, as granting someone access to the files would mean turning over the login and password to the account, essentially giving full control of the data to another party. This of course is not the case with Anywhere.FM, where only read permissions are granted to “guests” who stream from a user’s page. Under no circumstances could such a guest delete, rename, or add files to a user’s account.

It’s often been the mere act of uploading which has incriminated otherwise promising music storage services in the past. The famous MP3.com tried to offer such a service, but was quickly shut down by the major labels, who cried foul at that augury of their failure and frailty. The same man responsible for MP3.com has since bounced back with a new project called MP3Tunes, which offers storage, streaming, syncing with a desktop collection, and even DRM-free tracks for 88 cents a piece.

But even keeping the service confined to one user doesn’t at all make it legal in the eyes of the major labels. Very recently, the head of litigation for Sony BMG was quoted as saying that even ripping a CD to your computer constituted copyright infringement:

Gabriel [lead counsel for the record labels] asked if it was wrong for consumers to make copies of music which they have purchased, even just one copy. Pariser replied, “When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.” Making “a copy” of a purchased song is just “a nice way of saying ‘steals just one copy’,” she said.

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This is of course madness, as there’s already a legal precedent delineating a user’s rights to fair use under copyright law. Included among these rights is the right of the user to make unlimited copies of purchased media, provided that the copies are for personal use only. To quote the a statement by the Electronic Frontier Foundation on what is thought to qualify as legal under fair use:

• Space-shifting or format-shifting – that is, taking content you own in one format and putting it into another format, for personal, non-commercial use. For instance, “ripping” an audio CD (that is, making an MP3-format version of an audio CD that you already own) is considered fair use by many lawyers, based on the 1984 Betamax decision and the 1999 Rio MP3 player decision (RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia, 180 F. 3d 1072, 1079, 9th Circ. 1999.)
• Making a personal back-up copy of content you own – for instance, burning a copy of an audio CD you own.

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I’ve referenced EFF before the the original wording of the law, because the text of the law was codified on April 15, 1976, I believe, and so is obviously a little outdated. All the same, here’s the fair use clause as it stands within the text of the law:

§ 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include —

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

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Thus it seems pretty freaking clear that digital copies for personal use is legal under present copyright law. Nonetheless, MP3.com’s locker feature never made it. The CEO of MP3.com, Michael Robertson, eventually sold the company and website to Vivendi Universal for around $400 million, netting a cool $100 million for himself. Of course, he practically had to abandoned the site under legal pressure. But as stated above, he’s launched a new project with the same goals, and by this point, he must have the friends to make it happen. I can’t imagine this character could ever again fly under the radar of the major labels.

Poking around on Robertson’s site, I came across a very recent article on his failure to launch another commercial-oriented MP3 distribution site. The name? AnywhereCD. Robertson admits he had misread the industry, and provided a service that no one really wanted–especially considering Apple had just announced DRM-free tracks from EMI. So it failed, but I can’t help but suspect that the Anywhere.FM team had been watching very closely, maybe even learning more from Robertson’s past experiences than he himself had.

I think the most valuable thing they’ve learned is that if you want to change a law, break it. That’s always the first step.

[audio:02Pestilence.mp3]

Find out more about The Faceless on MySpace, Last.fm, or Sumerian Records. Tour dates are listed on all three pages.