Gang of Four VS...

• jonking

  20 Nov 2009, 11:04AM

  Yet again the Guardian attacks the interests of musicians, acting as neo-liberal apologists for illegal filesharing . As if this is either a victimless crime or that it's the fault of the victims , who had it coming, and only themselves to blame.

  Keegan writes" The music industry still complains of a billion illegal downloads every year, but has yet to prove that any significant economic damage is inflicted on it". This is prejudice masquerading as fact.

  Illegal filesharing causes me, Lilly Allen and every other recording musician I know , economic damage. Every single song I've written and recorded in Gang of Four is now available for free , illegally, online. So I'm not allowed to be paid for my work.

  As an illustration: illegal downloads of "Entertainment!" in the UK vs legit sales run at a minimum two to one at the moment. The album has sold more than 100, 000 legit units in the UK, 35,000 in the last 10 years. Illegal fileshares over the same period are estimated to be 70-100K albums . At a midline price of £6 per album , around £400K has been lost, 10% royalty on which would have gone to the band ; meaning each member has lost £10,000 plus lost publishing income , another £6000. And this is just the UK. There's a 360K loss to our record company . Gang of Four is only one band. To see the real damage , find out how many recording artists there are in the UK, the number of albums they've made. This is where the billion download number comes in. You do the math. You work out the damage to musicians livelihoods.

  The biggest victims are young bands, ambitious or non-pop musicians, the non-singles market , non X-Factor crews who don't get handsome concert fees and will never get paid for their recorded work .

  Keegan states elsewhere,another apology for theft: "... lots of those who have ? and will continue to ? illegally download wouldn't be buying them anyway and may not be listening to many of those they do download." Well, that's alright then! Apart from this being only an opinion unsupported by evidence, using the author's supermarket analogy, if shoplifers don't want to pay for stuff, let them carry on!. They wouldn't have paid for the stuff they stole anyway!

  Every recording musician I know, successful or otherwise, suffers these losses. This is a fact, not a point of view. It's happening now, despite there being easy ways to be honest.
  But Keegan doesn't think it's serious: "We are not a nation of thieves, but if a supermarket leaves its doors open and shuts down the tills, it should be unsurprised if people help themselves" .
  But, using his words, it is a nation of thieves. Taking things without the owners consent and without paying is theft, not a right. Musicians must get paid!

• 
  

• paulsandham

  20 Nov 2009, 11:48AM

  I bought Gang of Four's Entertainment and Songs of the free on vinyl a long, long time ago and it cost me at least £6 for each album (all those years ago) as well as a number of their 12"s and a couple of gigs in Sheffield.

  So Jonking, if i am to enjoy your music on my mp3 player or itunes library i have to pay another £6? to you and your record label? For what exactly? The cost of production? The incredibly dubious "remastered/reissued" versions (not sure if these exist for the Gang of Four - apologies if they don't - but for the rest of the music industry this has been proved to be a waste of time and money for the end consumer).

  Until you can justify why you have the right to rob me of £6 for content that i have already legally purchased and enjoyed so that i might enjoy this same music on an inferior but far more convenient digital format. A format that costs a tiny fraction of the original to produce and distribute.. your cries of unjust and robbery sound as meaningless and to be frank pathetic as the "home taping is killing music" crap that surrounded us in the 80s. Home taping was endemic and it didn't kill music.

  Instead of bitterly counting "lost sales" of decades old albums try reading Lessig's Remix - making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy.. and even more implausible what about writing and releasing an album of new material that is good enough to make me and others want to buy it?

Comment @'The Guardian'

1-0 to paulsandham

In search of Narod Niki...

While searching for a 2006 gig by Narod Niki, I came across this page with lots of live sets by various dub techno outfits as well as some other artists of interest.
HERE

Icon

Pete Doherty
Congrats for three albums in the NME top 50 albums of the decade!

Khamenei Will Be Iran's Last Supreme Leader

The clerical establishment has become so sick of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that they will not replace him when he dies.

Iranian reformists and liberals worldwide can be forgiven for thinking that the election and crackdown last summer strengthened the hardliners. In the short term, they're right: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is still president and his opposition has gone to ground. In the long run, though, they may have already won the battle: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is likely to be the last all-powerful Supreme Leader of the Islamic republic, even if the theocratic system manages to survive this tumult...

@'Newsweek'

An inconveniant truth: the Dutch smoke less pot

Government drug policy experts don’t like the numbers, which is one of the reasons why you probably haven’t seen them. Among the nations of Europe, the Netherlands is famous, or infamous, for its lenient policy toward cannabis use—so it may come as a surprise to discover that Dutch adults smoke considerably less cannabis, on average, than citizens of almost any other European country.

A recent report by Reed Stevenson for Reuters highlights figures from the annual report by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, which shows the Dutch to be at the low end for marijuana usage, compared to their European counterparts. The report pegs adult marijuana usage in the Netherlands at 5.4 %. Also at the low end of the scale, along with the Netherlands, were Romania, Greece, and Bulgaria.

Leading the pack was Italy, at 14.6 %, followed closely by Spain, the Czech Republic, and France.

While cannabis use rose steady in Europe throughout the 1990s, the survey this year says that the data “point to a stabilising or even decreasing situation.” The study by the European Monitoring Centre did not include figures for countries outside Europe...
@'Addiction Inbox'

Who's responsible when you've had too much?

So just when is it safe to blame someone else for what you do after you drink?

With new laws emerging to ensure parents' liability for giving alcohol to minors at private parties, the teenagers will have a sure target.

But we can thank the High Court for the latest bombshell for adults.

Now the pub is in the clear if you leave after a session and kill yourself on the road. What's the world coming to?

The decision arose from the case of Shane Scott, a 41-year-old backhoe operator who settled in for an evening at the Tandara Motor Inn on Tasmania's east coast in the summer of 2002.

He put his motorbike in the hotel's plant room and handed his keys across the bar because the word was that there was a police breathalyser about.

Scott drank eight cans of whisky and coke over three hours, swore at the publican for offering to ring his wife to pick him up, demanded the keys, mounted his bike with apparent control, and rode off.

Within minutes he crashed into a bridge and died, with a blood alcohol reading of .253.

The case taken by his widow, Sandra, and the Motor Accident Insurance Board of Tasmania, was that the publican, Michael Kirkpatrick, failed in his duty of care to Scott.

This was rejected by the Tasmanian Supreme Court, accepted on majority appeal to its Full Court, and finally knocked over last week by the High Court.

It decided publicans had no general duty to "monitor and minimise the service of alcohol, or to protect customers from the consequences of the alcohol they choose to consume".

Pubs were, and still are, bound by specific laws that demand licensees not serve liquor to people who are drunk, disorderly, or causing undue annoyance.

But how can someone serving alcohol really go that extra step beyond denying service, and accept a civil duty of care to a customer who's had too much?

Scott wasn't a pupil under the control of a teacher, a patient in hospital, or even a prisoner in jail. He was under his own steam. Introducing a civil duty of care test for such people wouldn't work, the court said.

"Expressions like 'intoxication', 'inebriation', and 'drunkenness' are difficult both to define and apply," the court's justices Gummow, Heydon and Crennan concluded.

Too much inquisition into how drinkers felt was impractical, impertinent and an intrusion.

"To ask how the drinker feels, and what the drinker's mental and physical capacity is, would tend to destroy peaceful relations, and would collide with the interests of drinkers in their personal privacy."

The judgment also got around to issues of individual responsibility in one telling sentence.

"Virtually all adults know that progressive drinking increasingly impairs on's judgment and capacity to take care of oneself."

But for those who would rather not cross that bridge, they did offer a glimmer of hope.

There may be "exceptional" cases where a publican has a duty of care. All you have to be is so blotto you're incapable of any rational judgment, intellectually impaired, obviously mentally ill, or unconscious.

@'The Age'

For Ings:

Culture - Two Sevens Clash c/w Dub 7'' (1977)

Remember buying this at Probe in Liverpool back in, yes you guessed 1977.
Was I served by Pete Burns for this particular purchase?
Quite probably!
PS: Just read that Burns has two Blue Peter badges for apearing on the show. Some bastard stole my BP badge back in about 82!

Head Full of Noise Trailer

Head Full Of Noise Trailer

On-U Sound | MySpace Music Videos

Adrian Sherwood - Boogaloo

N.A.S.A: Tom Waits + Kool Keith, Spacious Thoughts (BB Video)

PS:

How many trips to Corfu, paid for by David Geffen has Mandy taken?

UK backbencher MP Tom Watson:

It'll break the Internet. I will not support this and neither should you. http://bit.ly/Yarrrrr about 7 hours ago from Echofon Retweeted by 40 people

Mandelson seeks to amend UK copyright law in new crackdown on filesharing

Lord Mandelson is seeking to amend the laws on copyright to give the government sweeping new powers against people accused of illegal downloading.

But Labour colleagues are concerned that if he succeeds it could give a future Tory government the ability that Rupert Murdoch wants to quash Google.

In a letter to Harriet Harman, the leader of the house and head of the committee responsible for determining changes to such legislation, Mandelson says he is "writing to seek your urgent agreement" to changes to the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act "for the purposes of facilitating prevention or reduction of online copyright infringement".

By writing to Harman, the business secretary is seeking to get the change made through a "statutory instrument" – in effect, an update to the existing bill that the government can push through using its parliamentary majority.

That can be done with the minimum of parliamentary time, which is already at a premium.

The letter, which is circulating inside the government, comes as ministers prepare to publish the digital economy bill at 7.30am tomorrow. That is expected to set out a "three strikes" policy under which people who are found to be illicitly downloading copyrighted material have their internet connections withdrawn after three warnings.

Internet service providers have warned that the scheme is unworkable and unlawful.

The proposed alteration to the Copyright Act would create a new offence of downloading material that infringes copyright laws, as well as giving new powers or rights to "protect" rights holders such as record companies and movie studios – and, controversially, conferring powers on "any person as may be specified" to help cut down online infringement of copyright.

The changes proposed seem small – but are enormously wideranging, given both the breadth of even minor copyright infringement online, where photographs and text are copied with little regard to ownership, and the complexity of ownership.

Mandelson says in his letter that he is concerned about "cyberlockers" – websites that offer users private storage spaces whose contents can be shared by passing a web link via email.

"These can be used entirely legitimately, but recently rights holders have pointed to them as being used for illegal use," Mandelson writes in the letter.

But the proposal to alter the Copyright Act in this way has caused alarm within government, where some fear that an incoming Tory administration could use it to curry favour with Murdoch, head of the News International publishing group.

"They've seen that file-sharing is essentially unpoliceable, but the net effect is that a future secretary of state could change copyright law as they see fit," said one Labour insider.

In his letter, Mandelson sets out the expected reaction from the three groups who would be affected by the changes: rights holders such as record companies, internet service providers (ISPs), and consumers.

"I expect rights holders to welcome this and to support it. ISPs are likely to be neutral until it is clear what effect it will have on them in terms of costs." Consumer groups "are likely to oppose [the move] but will see it may lead to further unquantifiable measures against infringing consumers."

He also expects "a great deal of scrutiny" of the idea in parliament.

Murdoch has recently said that he believes that copyright is being abused, particularly by organisations such as Google, which uses short extracts from online newspapers to create its Google News page, and the BBC, which he has accused of "stealing from newspapers".

Earlier this month Murdoch was vituperative about how search engines have aggregated news. "The people who simply just pick up everything and run with it – steal our stories, we say they steal our stories – they just take them," he said. "That's Google, that's Microsoft, that's Ask.com, a whole lot of people ... They shouldn't have had it free all the time, and I think we've been asleep."

By giving the business secretary the power to amend the Copyright Act at will, Labour fears Mandelson could be creating a Trojan horse that under a Tory administration would allow Murdoch to be rewarded for his support for David Cameron over Gordon Brown, for example by making it illegal to use such extracts from a news site for profit.

A spokesperson for the Department for Business said the department could not comment on correspondence between ministers.

@'The Guardian'

See also 'BoingBoing'

Imelda May - Johnny Got A Boom Boom & Falling In Love With You Again

Imelda May - Johnny Got A Boom Boom

Three strikes and THEY are out!

Author and activist Cory Doctorow argues that the Internet is too central to our lives to be taken away for three accusations of copyright infringement. Along the way he proposes that turnabout is fair play, and thus Universal (for example) ought to have its access to the Net taken away if it issues three false accusations of infringement.

@'netzpolitik.org'

Immortal Technique -- The Poverty of Philosophy

Collaboration animation by Blu and David Ellis

Obama on terror trials: KSM will die

Americans who are troubled by the decision to send alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to New York for trial will feel better about it when he’s put to death, President Barack Obama said Tuesday.

During a round of network television interviews conducted during Obama’s visit to China, the president was asked about those who find it offensive that Mohammed will receive all the rights normally accorded to U.S. citizens when they are charged with a crime.

“I don't think it will be offensive at all when he's convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him,” Obama told NBC’s Chuck Todd.

When Todd asked Obama if he was interfering in the trial process by declaring that Mohammed will be executed, Obama, a former constitutional law professor, insisted that he wasn’t trying to dictate the result.

“What I said was, people will not be offended if that's the outcome. I'm not pre-judging, I'm not going to be in that courtroom, that's the job of prosecutors, the judge and the jury,” Obama said. “What I'm absolutely clear about is that I have complete confidence in the American people and our legal traditions and the prosecutors, the tough prosecutors from New York who specialize in terrorism.”

In another interview, Obama said he had not tried to tell Attorney General Eric Holder whether the case involving KSM and four other alleged 9/11 plotters should be heard in federal court or before a military tribunal.

“I said to the attorney general, make a decision based on the law,” the president told CNN’s Ed Henry. “We have set up now a military commission system that is greatly reformed and so we can try terrorists in the forum. But I also have great confidence in our Article 3 courts, the courts that have tried hundreds of terrorist suspects who are imprisoned right now in the United States.”

Obama also suggested that critics of the decision are unwisely building the alleged Al Qaeda operatives into larger-than-life figures who require the U.S. to abandon its usual legal processes.

“I think this notion that somehow we have to be fearful, that these terrorists are –possess some special powers that prevent us from presenting evidence against them, locking them up and, you know, exacting swift justice, I think that has been a fundamental mistake,” the president declared.

@'Politico'

Coming soon...?

It's been quite some time since we've heard any news about the Neuromancer, but director Joseph Kahn is apparently still working on it. He tweeted about it over the weekend — and William Gibson tweeted back.

Kahn wrote on his Twitter feed:

Epiphany. I finally figured out how to end the movie.

To which Gibson responded:

Scroll, or voiceover?

Kahn responded:

LOL. Freeze frame.

@'io9'

Immortal Technique on Obama, 9/11 truth & Corporate America

(Thanx Strangeboy)

Three early 7" from George Clinton's The Parliaments

Liberated from the now defunkt blog
'Found Sound'
(RIP)

Poor Willie c/w Party Boys

(1958)

Lonely Island c/w (You Make Me Wanna) Cry

(1959)

Heart Trouble c/w That Was My Girl

(1965)

A small offering in return for my friend Yotte
X
X
X

New interview with Gerald Casale of Devo

Via 'What a Wonderful Place to Be'

Neuromancer... with Porn Star Sasha Grey as Molly

It's a play... no it's a reading... no it's... hard to tell. But on November 22, from noon to 6 pm, the New Museum in NYC is doing some sort of cool six hour Neuromancer thing that they describe thusly:

"An ambitious new work by Brody Condon, Case is a contemporary adaptation of the classic cyberpunk novel Neuromancer by William Gibson. Combining Gibson’s 1980s dystopian techno-fetishism with early twentieth-century abstraction, faux 'virtual reality' scenes will unfold via moving Bauhaus-inspired sculptural props accompanied by the Gamelan ensemble Dharma Swara." Full post here

According to the io9 posting that first hipped me to the event: "Creator Brody Condon wrote to us, and said, 'The performance event... occurring at the new museum is a deadpan reading of Gibson's reading, not a theatre piece.'

The performance or reading or whatever it is also boasts Sasha Grey as Molly. Besides acting in various adult films, Grey crossed over to act in Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience and she is part of the music group ATelicine.

@'h+'

Derrick May @ Paradiso 24-10-2009 Amsterdam

Boy, do I miss that place!
The best place for bands and the list that I saw between 1883 & 86 there would just make you jealous...so I won't!

How Hitler and the Nazis tried to steal Christmas

Many of the changes made under Hitler, put in place to remove the influence of the Jewish-born baby Jesus, are still in use today, much to the alarm of modern Germans.

The swastika-shaped baking trays and wrapping paper adorned with Nazi symbols have long gone, but traces of the Third Reich Christmas can still be found in the subtly rewritten lyrics of favourite carols.

The discoveries have been highlighted by a new exhibition at the National Socialism Documentation Centre in Cologne.

“I always thought that Unto Us a Time Has Come was a song about wandering through winter snow,” said Heidi Bertelson, 42, a lawyer who visited the exhibit told Times. “I didn’t realise that Christ had been excised.”

The Nazi version, which removed the religious references and replaced them with images of snowy fields, remains in some song books and is sung in many households.

The same goes for carols referring to Virgin Birth and lullabies that invoke the Baby Jesus.

The rewriting was supervised by the chief Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg and Heinrich Himmler led the way in de-Christing Christmas.

Their plan was to remove the emotional ties of the Church and merge Christmas into a Julfest, a celebration of winter and light which drew on pagan traditions.

“The most important celebration in the calendar did not match their racist credo so they had to push out the Christian elements,” said Judith Breuer, who helped her mother, Rita, pull together the exhibition.

Rita started trawling flea markets in the 1970s in search of her childhood Christmas and turned up boxes of Nazi-era Christmas decorations complete with swastikas and grenades.

“After the Nazis had gone you could still find textbooks on Christmas that use exactly the same phrasing,” she told The Times.

@'Telegraph'

Christmas wrapping paper covered in swastikas not so long gone actually!

Non violent struggle

(Thanx Carolyn)

Sly Nein - Exhibit #1

DJ T-1000 Will Destroy You II: Return of the Track Machine

Tom Waits' Orphans Gets Expanded Vinyl Release With Bonus Tracks

If you bought Tom Waits' 2006 odds 'n' ends collection Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards

when it first dropped, then you got yourself three CDs' worth of Tom Waits. That's a lot of Tom Waits! But if you decided to wait for the vinyl, then you've got an even more humongous Waits onslaught coming your way.

On December 8, Anti- will release Orphans as a limited vinyl set. You'll get all of the tracks contained on the CDs, plus six bonus tracks. That's 62 songs spread over seven LPs, all of which will be pressed on 180 gram vinyl. You'll probably want to limber up and do some stretches before you even attempt to lift this thing.

The bonus tracks include covers of Fats Waller's "Crazy 'Bout My Baby” and the Brecht/Weill song "Canon Song", as well as "Diamond in Your Mind", a track written by Waits and his wife Kathleen Brennan for Solomon Burke, and the originals "No One Can Forgive Me" and "Mathie Grove".
@'Pitchfork'

Free TC Electronic M30 Reverb

Free TC Electronic M30 Reverb
This really is an offer you can't refuse. Now you can have a great sounding and very easy to use TC Electronic reverb plug-in (VST and AU) for free! (value $79.) Read more about the M30 Reverb

Featuring a superb Hall algorithm, the M30 Reverb is perfectly suited to vocals but can also be used with a wide variety of instruments and audio material. It features a superb Hall algorithm which is fully editable and is a plug-in that you can use in all sorts of music production and on all types of instruments and vocals.

HERE

(Tip o'the hat to Mark S)

The knowledge: London's unlikely punk heart (podcast)

London Calling: The Guardian's Tim Jonze meets Don Letts, Jon Savage and Geoff Travis (Rough Trade) to talk about Notting Hill's punk heritage...
HERE

Sweet Billy Pilgrim - Kalypso

(For Dray & Tim)

Mickey Hart: How can we record the cosmos?

Grateful Dead fans may remember the lyrics, "Dark star crashes, pouring its light into ashes." Mickey Hart, a drummer for the Dead, is still thinking about the cosmos, and he recently contacted Smithsonian Under Secretary Richard Kurin to arrange a discussion with distinguished astrophysicist Margaret Geller of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, science historian David DeVorkin and ethnomusicologist Atesh Sonneborn; I also participated. Our question: How might Hart perceive and record the "music" of the universe? Can lightwaves reaching Earth after traveling hundreds of millions of light-years speak to our creative, as well as our scientific, selves? Geller answered yes, and offered ideas for how Hart might translate what we observe into music. She suggested that a musician she knows—a person who also has superb computer skills—could help Hart convert strings of numbers representing star formation, gamma ray bursts, black hole binaries and other astrophysical phenomena into music. In an e-mail, Hart reacted to his Smithsonian visit: "Exciting....As Soupy Sales would say, 'My brains are falling out.'"

Such intersections of science and the arts occur frequently at the Smithsonian. At a recent materials science workshop, Julian Raby, the director of our Freer and Sackler Galleries, described the ongoing collaborative research being conducted on ancient Chinese metalwork and ceramics by the Freer and Sackler with Chicago's Field Museum and China's Shaanxi Research Institute for Archaeology. And at the National Museum of Cambodia in Phnom Penh, Freer and Sackler conservators have created a lab to treat the museum's collection of bronzes; a U.S. exhibition of some of them is being planned. The Freer and Sackler Galleries have also partnered with our Museum Conservation Institute (MCI) to analyze the paint on sixth-century Buddhist sculptures. Currently Freer and Sackler staff are using radiography to study Japanese writing boxes. Used by aristocrats between 1392 and 1868, these intricately decorated lacquer boxes all stored calligraphy tools, but they vary in construction. Is it because of their function or their date? Radiography may help answer the question.

With the National Museum of Natural History, the Conservation Institute is also helping preserve, in their natural settings, Mongolia's deer stones—3,000-year-old plinths carved with elaborate flying "spirit deer." MCI specialists are also capturing pictorial information about these monuments with 3-D laser scanning. And Conservation Institute director Robert Koestler is helping investigate rapidly growing soil mold that threatens one of the world's great treasures—the Paleolithic cave at Lascaux, France, and its nearly 2,000 animal images painted 16,000 years ago. Science and the arts are unusual partners at most places, but not at the Smithsonian.

@'Smithsonian'

(Thanx BillT)

Animal Collective sample Grateful Dead on new single

Animal Collective have confirmed details of a new EP, 'Fall Be Kind' which will be released digitally on November 23.

The five track EP will also be available on 12" vinyl and CD from December 14 and is the band's first new material since releasing the highly acclaimed
album 'Merriwether Post Pavilion' in January.

The track "What Would I Want? Sky" features a sample from The Grateful Dead's "Unbroken Chain" - it is the first time the 'Dead have officially licensed a sample to anothert artist.
The 'Fall Be Kind' track list is:

"Graze"
"What Would I Want? Sky"
"Bleed"
"On A Highway"
"I Think I Can"

Download new Carbon/Silicon album

Mick Jones has made the fourth album from Carbon/Silicon available as a free download via the band's website this week (November 14).

The band, whom the former Clash man formed with Sigue Sigue Sputnik's Tony James are renowned for publishing their material online for free, and latest album 'The Carbon Bubble'

Download your copy of the album here:
CarbonSiliconInc.com

Tracklisting:

'Fresh Start'
'What's Up Doc?'
'Reach For The Sky'
'The Best Man'
'Unbeliebable Pain'
'Make It Alright'
'PartyWorld'
'Shadow'
'Don't Taser Me Bro!'
'That's As Good As It Gets'
'DisUnited Kingdom'
'Believe Or Leave'

Is there anyone out there with copies of the three previous albums "A.T.O.M", "Western Front" and "The Crackup Suite"? I did have them but cannot find them at present and they have been removed from the band's site. If you can help please get in contact. Thanx

What I will be reading...

Willy Vlautin: Lean On Pete

(Due in February)

...tap, tap, tap, TING!

Music has become impatient.
Musicians want yesterday's sound now not tomorrow.
@'Woebot'