In the morning of 2006-05-31 the Swedish National Criminal Police showed a search warrant to Rix|Port80 personnell. The warrant was valid for all datacentres of Rix|Port80 and was directed at The Pirate Bay. The allegation was breach of copy-right law, alternatively assisting breach of copy-right law.

“The necessity for securing technical evidence for the existance (sic) of a web-service which is fully official, the legality of which has been under public debate for years and whose principals are public persons giving regular press interviews, could not be explained,” said the statement.

“Asked for other reasoning behind the choice to take down a site, without knowing wether (sic) it is illegal or not, the officers explained that this is normal.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5036268.stm

…

Who is behind this? You can bet your last Krona that it isn’t Swedish police or the Swedish government directly. So that leaves external (and most probably) commercial interests directing the activity of a domestic justice system in the complete absence of any legally substantiated wrongdoing.

Sweden, I am ashamed of you.

…

Regarding the internet-savvyness of record labels, this interesting piece from the Grauniad sheds some light.

Session acoustique de Scritti PolittiGreen packed his guitar and trundled off to lovely Paris in summerlike spring to do an acoustic session at Radio Planet Claire. You can visit the, ehm, rather quaint website and listen to the live stream at the 57 minute mark. Or you can just listen here!

Songs played: Snow In Sun, Robin Hood, Road To No Regret.

green-songs_planet_claire.mp3

http://bibbly-o-tek.com/2006/05/11/session-acoustique-de-scritti-politti/

A Canadian scientist says teens who used to view CDs as superior to older vinyl records now consider vinyl superior to the newer format.

David Hayes of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto says the growing popularity of vinyl might be a form of resistance against the music industry’s corporate taste-makers. While conducting research for his Ph.D. dissertation, Hayes was surprised to discover the young music enthusiasts he was interviewing were fans of vinyl.”This made me wonder why they were interested in something that is, for all intents and purposes, a dead medium,” he said, noting the teenagers had switched from buying CDs to collecting LPs, often seeking obscure recordings.

Hayes research subjects said they liked the visual appeal of LP jackets and the challenge of seeking hard-to-find releases.

In yet another turnaround, teens overwhelmingly insisted the sound quality of LPs was superior to that of modern formats. They characterized LPs and the LP artists of the past as more authentic than the barrage of youth-oriented music being aggressively marketed to them today.

[…]

http://www.physorg.com/news64807495.html 

YOU SEE!!!

Maybe too these teens will get a taste for FREEDOM just like they are getting a taste for vinyl.

Perhaps the Eloi are waking up….if it happens, they will be the most unstoppaple generation ever, because they will have the network as their tool….!!!

Purely by chance, I bumped into a man who I have known for ages, known by ‘those in teh know’ as ‘Sparker’.

He reccomended that I tune into http://cbs.nu/ as a great place to hear great things.

See how I did that? Someone reccomends something to me, and on the same day, I post it so that you can go and try it!

That is what the internet is for!

Yay! 

http://www.thefireworkstore.co.uk/ 

This morning, I am listening to music on vinyl. Currently John Parish, How Animals Move. There has been Art Tatum, The Bible and others.

Some records seem to accumulate dust and fluff more than others. Kate Bush’s Ariel is one I have recently noticed gets particularly fluffy towards the end of each side.

Anyway, I just had a wonder… if I had kept all the fluff I have ever had to remove from my needles through the years, would I have enough for a pillow? A duvet? Or maybe just enough for a stuffed toy in the shape of a 7″ record?

Would the pillow be comfortable? Would I be able to sleep for all the musical memories stored so close to my ears?

It’s always raining over the border
there’s been a plane crash out there
in the wheatfields
they’re picking up the pieces
we could go and look
and stare

But they always seem to know
exactly what they’re talking about
now they’ve got you in a corner
you’ve got no room to move
you’ve got no room for doubt
that’s exactly what they’re talking about
now they’re got you in a corner
no room to move
no room for doubt

From Magizine’s ‘Secondhand Daylight‘.

A record whose atmosphere fits perfectly with this very odd, tightrope time that we are living in; prescient, fantastic, chilling work but somehow filled with hopeless beauty at its very heart.

Something is certainly up, both here and in the usa, where the Charlie Sheen event is causing a wildfire of alam clocks, waking up the slumbering sheeple in a totally unexpected way. David Letterman is becoming more overt and vicious in his attacks on Murder Inc; everyone has had enough it seems and its about fucking time.

I keep saying that anything is possible, and any future is possible. All it takes is the collective redirection of all the people , or at least, enough of the people on this planet to steer the mass towards a future that is not dystopian. Futurists got the future wrong before, there is no reason to believe that they will not be wrong now. There is no reason why the world should end up in a prison planet scenario, a THX-1138 hive society. We have to make the future. This means staying straight and true, never opting for convenience for illusory gains, like the giving up of liberty for security. What seems insurmountable today, will tomorrow be an incomprehensible past. Soviet Communism. The Berlin Wall. Every empire that ever existed. All of these seemingly ‘there forever’ things all dissapeared and we now wonder how on earth they ever were in the first place.

The bogus ‘War on Terror’. The Bush Regime (Murder Inc). ID cards. Pervasive CCTV. All of these things will cease to exist; it is only a question of when, and wether or not we will reap the benefit. There is no reason why for example, in a CCTV crystal nacht, all cameras in the UK  could not be taken down and destroyed. Is that more incomprehensible or unimaginable than the Berlin Wall falling at the heads of many hammers?

Because I say it can happen, it CAN happen.

I just got back from performing at the STRP Festival in Eindhoven; a new technology, music and arts event.

There were many superb performances. There were many fascinating installations and many sensor driven robots / things one of which was exceptional. Many runners ran on this one.

The staff were gracious and perfectly organized, the hospitality first class. The punters were of the highest intelligence and good taste.

The event took place in the former Phillips factory, Philips of course, being the inventors of the Compact Disc.

Many years ago, I wrote some essays on CD and digital audio which caused controversy and triggered accusations of ludditery against their noble author.

Now 14 years later, I perform a set of Fine Art Noise whose very nature is absolutely tied to and created from the specification of Compact Disc, in the very building that saw its initial development.

This was a great thrill for me; to enter this historic building, and to shock it from the inside with a mind destroying cascade of CD derived sound, in the place of CDs birth, the sound of the performance being a near echo of labor pangs that this factory felt as it unleahsed the idea and product that would totally change the way people consume music forever.

Another circle.

I have listened to more of the Mystery Jets since my last post, and some of it not unpleasant, and some of it sounds like there is something there. But….

It sounds terrible.

Now when I say it sounds terrible, I mean that the MP3s sound terrible complared to other MP3s, and I do not mean that the MP3s have damaged the sound more than normal, but that the sound of the recordings is bad. It’s clear, even through the fog of MP3 compression that these recordings are not open; they are stilted, closed, clostrophobic, undynamic…bad. Wether this was done in the mastering or the multi-track sessions I cannot tell, but it’s bad.
Whoever produced the ‘album’ Making Dens (a ‘james ford’ aparently) failed to do the job right. John Leckie; now he always does it right. Believe it or not, Paul Oakenfold could have done it better…there are so many, the point is, without the art of studio recording at your fingertips, the tracks will never cut it, you will be able to tell its all wrong if you have the ears, so, why bother?

Just to reality check, I wipped (yes, ‘wipped’) out some recordings that are around twenty plus years old (as you can see from the playlist below) and the difference, even in the steamed up mirror of MP3 sound, is astonishing.

Still, they are on to something; mentoring. Making sure that you don’t fall into the endless traps that strapping on an electric guitar immediately opens you up to.

The best track so far? ‘Little Bag of Hair’, and by ‘best’ I mean…well, you KNOW what I mean.

Yesterday, when I had a chance to read a free copy of The Independent newspaper I read about a new group called ‘The Mystery Jets’ whose catalogue I am sifting through right now.

I got down to ‘Ageless’ on the Eel Pie Island EP, when BANG: hey WAIT A MINUTE, I know that guitar intro….search search search…

Its LED ZEP, ‘The Rain Song’….. DIE DIE DIE!

The reason why I am mentioning this at all, is because this article said that the group is being mentored by an ‘old’ rockist. This is an interesting idea, get someone who should know better to control a young group, and maybe they wont be shitty. It looks like however, they are just plundering his knowledge and not using it as a ring fence to prevent them from stepping into and sining in the quicksand of pointles duplication.

That review, not that we needed to check at all, was totally innacurate….check it all out for yourself….

Jowell singsong
‘broke licensing laws’

Hélène Mulholland and agencies
Friday March 17, 2006

Tessa Jowell returned to the spotlight today for breaching a law she herself introduced as part of new legislation which MPs say was mishandled by her department.

The beleaguered culture secretary fell foul of regulations under the Licensing Act (2003) when she led an apparently innocent singsong to mark International Women’s Day on March 8.

The Licensing Act heralded a massive overhaul of the regulations for public entertainment and drinking, combining 10 separate licensing schemes into one regime.

Though the terms of the act require a licence for any musical performance in a Royal Park, Ms Jowell did not have one when she lead a rendition of The Truth Is Marching On in front of a statue of suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst in Victoria Tower Gardens Royal Park near the Houses of Parliament.

The council’s attention was drawn to the minister’s breach by musician Hamish Burchill, who has campaigned against the act’s provisions on public entertainment.

Westminster city council’s cabinet member for licensing, Audrey Lewis, confirmed that Ms Jowell and her fellow singers had breached the law, but said no prosecution was likely for this first offence.

She told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: “Technically, to have a performance which was advertised of singing in a Royal Park, which is a premise under the terms of the new Licensing Act, is an offence, because it is not licensed.

“We would not, however, expect to prosecute because nobody has complained about it. It wasn’t a question of disorder breaking out or indeed public nuisance. Having said that, they have had a first offence and if they wanted to do this quite regularly, they would have a warning.” […]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1733278,00.html

The fact is, she is not being prosecuted because she is a minister. That being said, there is something moreinteresing about this story.

I have written before about there being too many laws; we will eventually reach a tipping point where there are so many new and absurd laws that parliamentarians are directly or indirectly affected. When that happens, (in a perfect world) there would be an immediate push for mass reapeal of all bad law. This can only happen when, for example, a ministers daughter cannot have music at her wedding because of some stupid statute.

As for tessa jowel, since we are commenting on a Guardian story, lets put the knife in, in a way that would be guaranteed to be erased from comment is free: What a stupid fucking bitch!

I was looking around for some equipment and stumbled upon this artist, and his performances. And another.

Have you ever logged into a remote iTunes share to find a whole bunch of sloppy, mistagged files, and wished that you could right click on them and correct them, or even >>gasp<< amend the image file associated with them? Even if you have access rights machine where the files are hosted, there is no way to do this with vanilla iTunes. Until now that is. With this new plugin for iTunes, you can authenticate yourself to the hosting machine, and edit the entries on the hosting system. Its about time; now I can edit all my bad entries, and whats more, all the trusted users on my network can do the same, meaning that I have many hands on the task, and my collection will be in perfect order in no time. I can specify groups of files that are unediable, by genre, artist album ets so that only the wrong or unsorted entries are open to be fixed. Its very good indeed.

…certainly if you are interested in guitar synths…which is probably only me, I know, but anyway, here it is

http://www.hagstrom.org.uk/Patch2000SS.htm

1977 guitar synth demo from a shop in sweden. My favourite bit is about 3.24 seconds in, not least as you can see his shoes quite clearly there.