Monday 23 November 2009
Trevor Brown's Black Eyed Madonna
As deaths in Afghanistan rise, so does the growth of opium
Irvine Welsh: ‘Let’s tackle Scotland’s cheap bevvy culture’
Sunday 22 November 2009
Foton's 'Instant Present' Mix
The last years saw the latter returning to production techniques of the first: the heavy usage of reverbs, echoes and phasers alongside four-on-the-floor beats even made a new sub-genre of techno, called dub techno, emerge.
The label pushing this sound the hardest probably is Thinner from Germany:
… select an available release from the extensive Thinner discography and there’s a very high probability that the sounds on that album can be broadly described as “dub-inspired” i.e. some permutation of a fusion of dub with house, techno, or even ambient music. it’s also quite possible that the album could be further redefined as belonging to the sound departments of either “dubby techhouse“ or “intelligent dub” …One of Thinner´s artists is Das Kraftfuttermischwerk. Recently, they posted a link to a dope mix from Foton
01. Basic Channel – Round Four
02. Chet – Urban Dharma
03. Maurizio – M5
04. Quantec – Hidden Persuasion
05. Basic Channel – Round Three w/ Paul st Hilaire
06. Fluxion – Inductance
07. Deadbeat – Abu Ghraib
08. Jorge Gebauhr – Strange Fruits
09. Mildiou – De Natura Rerum
10. Substance – Relish Shed remix
11. Marko Fuerstenberg – Far Out
12. Lowtec Sound System – Stella Polaris
13. Marko Fuerstenberg– Site 312
14. Basic Channel – Phylysptrakit
15. Luke Hess
16. Cv313 – Dimensional Space
Download Foton´s “Instant Present” mix
@'Seen'
???
ORNAMENTS SYMPHONY
mixed by youANDme
This CD contains all songs of ORNAMENTS 001 - ORNAMENTS 010.
Limited to 333.
PLAYLIST:
01. Intro - Peak: Darksuite (youANDme Remix) / ORN008
02. Peak: Darksuite / ORN008
03. Dubsuite: "Eigenleben" (Marko Fürstenberg's Eigendub) / ORN001
04. Sven Tasnadi: "Our Destiny" (Weisemann's Shuffle On Mix) remix by Sven Weisemann / ORN005
05. Sven Tasnadi: "Our Destiny" / ORN005
06. Thabo: "Downstream" / ORN006
07. Martin Schulte: "Cold Heart" (Marko Fürstenberg Remix) / ORN001
08. Rhauder feat. Paul St. Hilaire: "No News" (Marko Fürstenberg Remix) / ORN009
09. Rhauder feat. Paul St. Hilaire: "No News" (Daniel Stefanik Remix) / ORN009
10. Rhauder feat. Paul St. Hilaire: "No News" / ORN009
11. Thabo: "Berlin" / ORN006
12. Mod.Civil: "Einfachheit gewinnt" / ORN004
13. Mod.Civil: "Einfachheit gewinnt" (Marko Fürstenberg Remix) / ORN004
14. Frank Biedermann: "Warrior_wasp" (Marko Fürstenberg Remix) / ORN001
15. I-Robots: "Perfect Logic Circle" (G.Digger Edit) / ORN002
16. I-Robots: "Perfect Logic Circle" (Club Edit) / ORN002
17. youANDme: "Close to me" (Robert Hood Remix) / ORN010
18. Marko Fürstenberg: "Valentino" / ORN007
19. Peak: "Darksuite" (Soultourist Remix) / ORN008
20. Peak: "Darksuite" (youANDme Remix) / ORN008
21. Marko Fürstenberg: "Tiffany's Case" / ORN007
22. youANDme: "Close to me" / ORN010
23. Sascha Dive: “Deepest America” (Samuel Davis Dark Soul Mix) / ORN003
24. Sascha Dive: “Deepest America” (Moodymann Remix) / ORN003
Lou Reed: Photographer
Free The Forgotten Bird of Paradise by John Pilger
Spiritualized - Ladies & Gentlemen... preorder available now through ATP Records
Cat No: ATPRCD36
Format: Collectors Edition CD Box set
Pre Sale Date: Monday 23rd November 2009
Release Date: Wednesday 16th December 2009
Label: ATP Recordings / Spaceman
Catalogue No: ATPRCD36
Format: Collectors Box Set / Strictly Limited Edition of 1000
Boxset Contains:
. 12 x 3” Prescription Pack CD’s packaged in a foil tray
. 2 x 5” CD’s containing 35 unreleased versions & outtakes
. Digital Download Code for the original album
. Individual Prescription Cards signed by J.Spaceman
. Strictly Limited Edition of 1000
. Brand New Artwork by the original designers Farrow & Spaceman
ATP Recordings / Spaceman are pleased to be able to offer the very limited collectors edition. This includes 12 x 3” Mini CD’s of the complete album track-by-track, a homage to the original release. This will be accompanied by 2 bonus discs.
For those who don’t wish to open the blister pack, each unit will come with a code to download the original album in MP3 format._
Limited to just 1000 units, each collectors edition will come with a prescription numbered out of 1000 and signed by J Spaceman.
Anyone who pre-orders the collectors edition before November 30th can have their own name, or name of their choosing printed on the prescription.
The Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space Collectors edition, will be sent out from the UK on December 16th. If you do not wish to pay postage and handling, there will be an option to pick it up from the Barbican shows on December 16th or 17th.
Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space Collectors edition is available for £125 + postage and handling.
AVAILABLE FROM 3PM GMT MONDAY NOVEMBER 23RD AT
Can with Tim Hardin - Rare Rehearsal & Live Improvisation (1975)
UPDATED 2/16 with extra material HERE
Cranky croc finds new home in Texas
@'ABC'
(Thanx Reinhard!)
Faust and 'Krautrock' by Andy Gill (Mojo)
It's sometime in the bleak widwinter of 1973-4, and Faust are playing Sheffield City Hall. The occasion is one those early Virgin Records package tours which attempted to revive the collective spirit of the Motown and Beat-boom era revues within the context of that label's sternly uncompromising -- some would say largely unlistenable -- roster of avant-garde art-rock acts. Gong may have played, or perhaps Henry Cow or Hatfield & The North, and there may have been a film of label whizzkid Mike Oldfield performing his celebrated Tubular Bells at somewhere like the Albert Hall; it's hard to be precise, recollections growing mercifully more cloudy with the passing years.
Faust, though, remain clear in my mind to this day -- quite an achievement, since they played in near-total darkness, save for the illumination furnished by a couple of TV sets facing the band, and a pinball table positioned off to one side. In front of the TV sets are a couple of comfy, overstuffed armchairs, and behind them a drum kit. A block of concrete is dimly visible centre-stage.
Like virtually every other British 'head' of unquenchable curiosity but limited means, I'd recently invested in the copper-bottomed uncertainties of The Faust Tapes, 49 penn'orth of musical madness decked out in the deceptively calming waves of Bridget Riley's op-art painting Crest, and I was prepared for -- well, just about anything, really. Even so, I got more than I bargained for.
Five or 10 minutes into the piece, one of the musicians puts aside his instrument, levers himself out of the armchair, and sidles over to the pinball machine where he plays awhile, the bleeps and sproings of the leisure machine offering welcome detail over the riff which churns on, unstoppable, like a golem. His game over, he turns his attention to one of the TV's, changing channels randomly. Then, bored with that, he moves over to the concrete block, picking up something which had until then been hidden behind it. It's a tool of some form, either a hydraulic drill or, more likely, an electric-powered Kango hammer, which, without more ado, he sets to work on the block.
The noise is deafening -- and dangerous, with fragments of concrete spitting out into the front rows of the audience, who shield their eyes behind their arms. But the shock is utterly exhilarating, prompting the same thrill of modernist liberation that early 20th century audiences must have experienced at Dada or Surrealist exhibitions, or at the performances of Futurist Luigi Russolo's Intonarumori noise machine, or Stravinsky's Rite Of Spring -- the feeling that some Rubicon has been irrevocably crossed, that taboo boundaries have been sundered. Jaws drop all around the hall. Even those who had been getting restless about the relentlessly static music are won over, gleeful smiles creasing faces at this majestic bout of art-terrorism. If they could be heard over the din, they'd be cheering.
"That's quite enough of this!" he shouts at us. "This is not music!" It's the perfect complement to the performance -- so perfect that, for a moment, I suspect it's part of the act. It isn't, of course. It's some sad Horatio, left to vainly guard the bridge of musical politeness against these barbarian hordes. Or, more prosaically, trying to save the polished wood of his stage from getting scratched to buggery by the shifting concrete block.
It's an unequal contest. Immediately, even those who had been bored by Faust's performance are seething with indignation at this suit's attempt to control their taste. Boos resound around the hall, and a slow handclap sets up. The suit departs, but the power stays off. One of the musicians comes to the front of the stage and says, sans microphone: "Hey, it's your gig. Are you gonna let this guy tell you what you can listen to?" The clapping gets louder, and the drummer takes up the beat again, while his colleagues bang along on whatever comes to hand. It's no more complex a rhythm than before, but it's a great deal louder, and there's a euphoric, collective spirit to it that wasn't present earlier. The fourth wall of performance has been shattered, and nobody who was present will forget it, or listen to music in the same way again. Who would have thought that one chord and the simplest of beats could be a life-changing experience? And what more could you want from a gig?
There's a strange air of expectant, barely-suppressed violence quite at odds with the open-minded atmosphere of the Sheffield show two decades before. It's not like the audience doesn't know what to expect; on the contrary, for some in the audience, their expectations are every bit as pre-formed and rigidly demanding, in their own way, as those inflicted upon teen acts like Boyzone: if bourgeois conventions aren't given a damn good kicking tonight, well, they'll have something to say about it. No matter that such knee-jerk expectations are in themselves just as comfortable and bourgeois as those of more conservative types: in the '90s, even revolution has its own formal style.
A large curtain of scrim hides half the stage. In front of it, two men stand motionless, one a barefoot bassist, the other a balding drummer standing, Mo Tucker-style, behind a drum kit which, in the intervening 20 years, has shrunk to just one snare, one tom-tom and one cymbal. Behind the scrim, backlit so his shadow looms hugely, is Tony Conrad, the minimalist-violinist with whom Faust once recorded an album entitled Outside The Dream Syndicate. A cellist and another violinist sit alongside him, also motionless. Conrad plays a chord, then keeps on playing it, a piercing, mesmeric drone of immense, ear-endangering volume. Some time later -- about 10 minutes into the performance -- the other string players join in with similarly minimal intent, setting up a static harmonic drone which continues for another 10 or 15 minutes before the bassist and drummer suddenly launch into the kind of riff which Status Quo might have discarded as being too basic. The drummer bangs each drum alternately at regular tempo, looking for all the world as if he's jogging on the spot; the barefoot bassist, meanwhile, pummels his instrument with such single-minded fury that, shortly after he begins, one of the thick, well-wound strings has snapped. Have you ever tried to snap a bass string? It's not easy. Usually, you need pliers, but there are no tools available on-stage tonight.
The performance continues, with no discernible subsequent change, for another half-hour. But this time, no hall manager turns off the power or leaps on-stage to berate the audience's musical taste -- and the self-satisfied applause (not to mention a certain relief) which greets the piece's conclusion stands in stark, smug contrast to the sense of exhilaration felt two decades earlier. For an encore, the barefoot bassist gives the floor a desultory thump with a nearby hammer, almost like an abbreviated gestural signature, before the ensemble wade into another 10-minute piece. No-one, save maybe a few of the old-dear ushers, has been outraged, and it's my guess that no-one has been liberated, either. We all got exactly what we expected.
At one end, Faust would be deconstructing the nuts, bolts and griders of rock music through relentlessly monotonous pieces like 'It's A Rainy Day Sunshine Girl', and laying the groundwork for today's sampler-collagists through the intricate cut-ups and splices of their astonishing debut, Faust Clear, which, as its name suggests, was released on clear vinyl in a clear plastic sleeve imprinted with an X-ray of a hand and sleevenotes in German by producer Uwe Nettelbeck. (The follow-up Faust So Far would be in contrastingly sombre none-more-black, packaged with a set of tasteful prints illustrating each of the song titles.) At the other end, Kraftwerk would labour over exquisite melodies and metronomically precise rhythms, taking the concept of machine-music to its logical conclusion, and ironically, providing the groundwork for the future development of black American music.
In between, all manner of musical endeavour was encouraged, from the trance-scapes of Tangerine Dream and the space-rock of Amon Düül II to the psychedelic proto-punk grooves of Neu! and the Eastern-tinged mysticism of Popol Vuh. What's extraordinary about virtually all these bands -- apart from the music itself, which was rarely less than that -- is that despite severely limited commercial returns, their influence was so wide-reaching that most are still working today; or if, like Can, they're no longer together as a band, the various members are still engaged on projects every bit as bonkers. Most Anglo-American bands of equivalent age and popularity, by contrast, have long since succumbed to the reaper, or totter as sad parodies of their former selves.
The difference is cultural, of course. For British and American bands, the hippy era represented mainly freedom from the utilitarian chains which post-war redevelopment had placed upon their parents. The '50s, the era of Ike and Mac, had been a time of parsimony perpetually passed off as a great bounty -- "You've never had it so good! -- and by the allegedly Swinging '60s the younger generation was determined that its surroundings and activities should reflect that supposed bounty. Despite the undercurrents of political unrest, the gaiety of the hippy era was primarily, for Brits and Yanks, a guilt-free indulgence in the wealth of new possibilities.
While German youth of the same era shared similar hopes and desires, there were other, much darker influences at work on their world view. As Can's Irmin Schmidt explains, "All the young revolutionaries of 1968 had parents who were either Nazis or had suffered under the Nazis, and the relationship of the parents to the Nazis, and of their children to them, was a special German thing, and had a big influence on the '68 troubles. And for 20 years, we had got rid of culture. It wasn't just towns that were bombed, culture was bombed too, and you can't rebuild culture."
Consequently, the iconoclasm of the times cut that much deeper with these German bands, and provided them with a more enduring cast of mind. When Faust took up their road-drills and attacked concrete blocks on-stage, it was with the same order of symbolic destruction that would fire the original punks a few years later: tear down the walls, cut out the cancer. Except that in their case, the cancer in question was more than just a vague feeling of generalised boredom or, as the Germans have it, Weltschmerz. And as with German performance artists of the '60s -- such as Otto Muehl, who would climb inside freshly-slaughtered animal carcasses, or the self-mutilator Rudolf Schwarzkogler, who eventually bled to death after severing his own penis (ExileEd - This is not true - see here) German musicians of the period applied fearsome standards to their work: it wasn't just a brief diversion, it was a whole-hearted attempt to find a new route to the future, by exorcising the past.
In doing so, they rediscovered their own national identity. As Kraftwerk's Ralf Hutter explained to Lester Bangs in 1975, "After the war, German entertainment was destroyed. The German people were robbed of their culture, putting an American head on it. I think we are the first generation born after the war to shake this off, and know where to feel American music and where to feel ourselves. We cannot deny we are from Germany."
TO THE BRITISH AUDIENCE STUMBLING UPON KRAUTROCK ALBUMS, they were like the proverbial mystery surrounded by an enigma.
The minimal cover designs of early Faust, Neu! and Kraftwerk albums promised something completely self-contained compared to the psychedelic fantasies of Roger Dean which dominated the home market's 'progressive' iconography. The brave mix of art, noise and strange beauty present in most Krautrock was also somewhat at odds with the lumbering traditionalism of Yes, Genesis and ELP, whose work always seemed to be apologising for not being classical music.
Just as revolutionary was the discomfiting blend of deep seriousness and mad humour that most Krautrock bands displayed as they pirouetted at the interface of new technology and new consciousness -- who else but a Krautrocker would dare pass off the same piece of music at different speeds as separate tracks, as Neu! did on their second album? Not least among Krautrock's attractions was the thrilling notion that somebody had entrusted all this expensive new machinery to such obvious headcases.
Aficionados sought out anything recorded at Conny Plank's legendary studio, where many of the great Krautrock epics were recorded. Meanwhile, alerted by the strange, exotic soundtracks to Werner Herzog's idiosyncratic films, the curious unearthed the mystical, mantra-like music of Florian Fricke's Popol Vuh, the most overtly religious of the Krautrock groups (Fricke himself appeared in some of the films, most notably as the deaf pianist in The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser). Others were more extreme in their interest: David Bowie, ever the intrepid explorer, went the whole hog and actually moved to Berlin, where he and Brian Eno would fashion two of pop's great leaps forward (Low and Heroes under the influence of Krautrock).
"I was a big fan of Kraftwerk, Cluster and Harmonia, and I thought the first Neu! album, in particular, was just gigantically wonderful," admits Bowie. "Looking at that against punk, I had absolutely no doubts where the future of music was going, and for me it was coming out Germany at that time. I also liked some of the later Can things, and there was an album that I loved by Edgar Froese, Epsilon In Malaysian Pale; it's the most beautiful, enchanting, poignant work, quite lovely. That used to be the background music to my life when I was living in Berlin. In a way, it was great that I found those bands, because I didn't feel any of the essence of punk at all in that period, I just totally by-passed it."
Bands proliferated in the wake of the pioneers featured here. Names like Guru Guru, Ash Ra Temple, Between, Agitation Free, Cosmic Jokers, Embryo, Wallenstein, Brainticket, Triumvirat, Novalis, Ramses, Kraan, Jane, Hoelderlin, Grobschnitt, Floh De Cologne and Achim Reichel fought for space in the limited Krautrock market. Meanwhile, older bands like Neu! split into their separate elements, adding names like La Düsseldorf and Harmonia to the fray. Before too long, the Krautrock section of the record racks was bulging with synth-twiddling weirdos and space-rock cadets, many of whom seemed to have little grasp of quality control. People like Klaus Schulze and Conrad Schnitzler released vast quantities of electronica, while the borders between true Krautrock and the more mundane German heavy rock bands started to blur as the '70s wore on.
Eventually, interest inevitably waned in the genre as a whole, save for the occasional boost such as that given when Johnny Rotten owned up to liking Can, or the ripple effect caused by Kraftwerk's hit singles. Through the '80's and '90's, the Krautrock light was kept aflame by such as the Freeman brothers, Steven and Alan, via their Audion magazine and Ultima Thule record shop; and, more recently, Julian Cope published his Krautrocksampler guide to the genre, re-igniting wider interest in the form.
As for the bands themselves, there are fresh stirrings from various quarters: Popol Vuh last year released City Raga, Florian Fricke's attempt to come to terms with current technology and musical style, and Amon Düül II have likewise put out Nada Moonshine and hauled themselves back into live performance. Tangerine Dream have never cut back on their recording schedule, augmenting their own releases with a constant stream of soundtrack work. And Kraftwerk... well, Kraftwerk proceed at their own pace, with scant regard for fashion.
IT'S DECEMBER 2, 1996, AND Faust are playing The Garage, at London's Highbury Corner.
On-stage there is a vast array of percussion -- metal pipes, tin things, drums, cymbals -- alongside an adapted keyboard with wires bristling from its back and sundry boxes piled on top of it. A cement mixer grinds out a rhythm, while the bassist hammers away at a minimal beat. Out front, an enormous oil-drum on wheels stands ready to be pummelled, while fenced off for our protection, a sculptress grinds away at a metal construction, sending showers of sparks across audience and band alike.
At one point, the bassist tears off his clothes, jumps into the audience and makes his way to the side, where he starts flinging paint at hundreds of album sleeves stapled to a board, smearing it liberally across them. (The sleeves, when dry, are then used as personalised covers for a numbered limited-edition of 300 12-inch singles, costing ? each -- mine's number 155). Later on in the proceedings, he again jumps into the crowd and makes his way to a tarpaulin-covered machine in the centre of the room. It's that most invaluable of musical instruments, a threshing-machine. Straddlind it as the crowd cheers, he dumps into its funnel sack after sack of dead leaves, which come blasting out across the assembled masses.
Compared to the monotonous Queen Elizabeth Hall show a year and a half earlier, it's an all-action show: action-painting, action-sculpting, action-playing. When the lights go up, the scene is one of devastation, a cross between factory, forest and artist's studio. No-one turned the power off, though. It's almost like a continuation of their shows from 1973-74, a belated picking-up of the baton they so noisily dropped back then, and a resumption of the spirit of Krautrock.
"We should have communicated with Kraftwerk and all those others back then," acknowledges Jean-Hervé Peron before the show. "We should have invited them to Wümme, because all these groups, in their different styles, were creating a movement. We didn't realise that at the time. Now, that movement is accepted and appreciated, but we didn't know then. We were spread all over, and nobody felt the urge to bring all these people together. Now people are talking about putting on Krautrock festivals."
Tsugi Podcast 106 : The Black Dog
01. Scanner - Sharewear Introduction - DS93
02. Louderbach - Sunspots - M_nus
03. Pig & Dan - Cubes - Yoshitoshi Recordings
04. Oliver Huntemann - Rikarda - Ideal Audio
05. The Black Dog - Long Walk Home - Dust Science
06. N/A - Variance (CH-Signal Edit) - Sandwell District
07. Harald Bjˆrk - Skvaltan - Kranglan Broadcast
08. Samuli Kemppi - Orbiter - Komisch
09. OVR - Interior - Blueprint
10. PWOG - True - KK Records
11. Cheap And Deep Productions - Darkroom Beats - Cheap And Deep
12. Xhin - Fixing The Error - Stroboscopic Artefacts
*Fragment. The Black Dog - Skin Clock - Soma Recordings
13. Cluster - F¸r Die Katz - Brain
14. Jamie Anderson & Deep Groove - Juggernaut - Cocoon Recordings
15. The Black Dog - Floods (Live Re-edit) - Soma Recordings
@'New TechnoID'
The Black Dog also have a Krautrock mix available
HERE
Saturday 21 November 2009
Ancients - Paeans & Odes
very kindly supplied by
Michael Dustdevil (from the
excellent Young Moss Tongue blog)
You have to hear this album.
Get it
HERE
(dedicated to Paddy)
Friday 20 November 2009
Gang of Four VS...
-
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'
In search of Narod Niki...
HERE
Khamenei Will Be Iran's Last Supreme Leader
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...
An inconveniant truth: the Dutch smoke less pot
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.
Culture - Two Sevens Clash c/w Dub 7'' (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!
UK backbencher MP Tom Watson:
Mandelson seeks to amend UK copyright law in new crackdown on filesharing
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.
See also 'BoingBoing'
jonking
20 Nov 2009, 11:04AM