Music

Remember the Invitation, the new wave festival in Ghent some months ago ? Julie Haelemeersch wrote some nice reviews of the event, as pointed out in the comments of that article. Now she has created Ad Mortem Festinamus, a goth site about all new wave events and gigs, a bit like the Kagan Calendar in blog format. Quite a change from crappy sites like SlashGoth.be.

Oh, and Dave's back too !

'What is this shit?
'That stuff makes pure mescaline seem like... ginger bear, man.'

-- Sample from Victim of the 60's, by Implant

Sloth.org has compiled a list of 1045 bands and identified the samples in their music, and where they come from. Check out your favourite band, it may give you some surprising results.

your beauty strikes like a punch out of nowhere
your passion bites and i''m willing to get there

take your place behind the wheel
you're in command, take me where you want to
i'm a passenger waiting for departure

-- Rotersand, Almost Violent

Music time ! All of the last CDs I''ve bought recently were pure new wave related stuff :

• And One - Spot
• And One - IST
• And One - Aggressor
• Covenant - Northern Light
• FischerSpooner - Nr.1
• Front 242 - Backcatalogue
• Front 242 - Geography (2CD limited edition)
• Rotersand - Electronic World Transmission (Remix album)
• Wolfsheim - Popkiller

This is moon music.

-- Coil, Are You Shivering ?

I decided to follow Jef's advice and make myself a VIP member of AllOfMP3. I never liked online music shops in the past, because I find 1$ for a song ridiculously expensive. One euro for a full CD is more like my taste, and that's exactly the regular price on AllOfMP3. What's even more exciting, is that you can choose between different encoding formats (Ogg Vorbis !) and even encoding bitrates. Higher bitrates give you almost CD quality, but increase the size of the file to download, which increases your bandwidth usage.

What better way to celebrate this than with some news songs on my radio blog ? Click on the icon above, and a new pop-up will appear with this new playlist :

• Wild Pain - And One (from ''Spot''). Since I have seen these guys on stage last weekend, I''m really excited about this band.
• Fractalize - Clock DVA
• Are you shivering - Coil (from the album 'Musick to Play in the Dark')

The Invitation New-wave/Gothic event yesterday was lovely : great music, and I must admit, 'Het Kuipke' is a great location for such a festival. Unfortunately, I lost half an hour looking for a suitable parking spot, as the Sint-Pieters Square in Ghent is still a construction place, which meant that I missed the Qntal gig. Luckily, Kirlian Camera made a lot good. And God, the KC female lead singer has the longest pair of legs I've ever seen. Covenant and Clan Of Xymox were great, but the biggest surprise was And-One, which really blasted me off my socks. Great floorfiller music !

I forgot my camera, but some pictures can be found here. No pictures of the public, so you have to trust me on this : goth chicks are *sexy* ! If you don't believe me, take a look at OneTrueDave, which gathers pictures of goth events in the DC area. Unfortunately, the site is lately more down than up. But then, maybe down is exactly what a goth site is supposed to be...

My tickets are ordered, and the weekend is already planned : next Saturday, I can be found in Ghent at the Invitation''s Wave-Gothic-Electro Meeting 2004 with the following succulent line-up :

[12.15 - 13.15] SITD (D)

[13.45 - 14.45] VIOLET STIGMATA (F)

[15.15 - 16.15] PRIDE AND FALL (NOR)

[16.45 - 17.45] QNTAL (D)

[18.15 - 19.25] KIRLIAN CAMERA (I)

[19.55 - 21.10] CLAN OF XYMOX (NL)

[21.40 - 23.00] COVENANT (S)

[23.30 - 01.00] AND ONE (D)

+ After Party

Groovy !

I have added some streaming Flash, thanx to a utility from the folks of Radio Blog. If you want to give Radio Blog a try on your website, all you have to do, is to put some webpages on your server, together with some SWF files which contain the audio. The zipfile from RadioBlog provides a utility to convert your music, but Linux folks can use cdda2wav and swftools to convert CD music to shockwave Flash audio.

If you click on the icon, it will open a popup window with a little flash applet, which will provide you with 3 to 5 songs I happen to listen to. I'll try to update the songs every week or so. Songs for this week are :

• Le Moulin by Yann Tiersen (from the soundtrack of 'Le fabuleux destin d'Amelie Poulain'). Great movie
• The Garden, by Einsturzende Neubauten (from 'Strategies 3')
• Wall Of Sound, by Covenant (from 'Europa')

Like diamonds in the ground
we're waiting to be found.

-- Wall of Sound, Covenant.

Even in the darkest of all hours, some lights apparently still keep shining.

The last 3 weeks have been very fruitfull in finding some very good CD''s; my last CDs are :

• Strategies III double CD, by Einsturzende Neubauten
• Le fabuleux destin d'Amelie Poulain Soundtrack by Yann Tierssen
• Collective Box Set (3 CD set) by Clock DVA
• Music for a Jilted Generation, the Prodigy
• Various MCD's of the Prodigy

I still don't get it why the online MP3 music shops are so successfull : people can download a song for 1$, so if you count an average of 10 to 15 songs per CD, that's 15$, what the exact price is of a CD ! So people buy online music, that is as expensive as music on a 'real' CD, *but* in a heavily compressed and therefore quite low-quality form. That's right, people, MP3 music is mutilated audio ! It doesn't even get near the quality of a CD, and is much more comparable with the quality of audio tapes/cassettes.

After a search of nearly 2 years, I finally found a rare and limited edition (250 copies throughout Europe) of Muslimgauze's Box of Silk and Dogs. Staggering and gorgeous (also heavy), this set of previously unreleased material from the (sadly missed) late Bryn Jones has been housed in a quad-fold package which contains a total of nine CDs. Yes, kids, you're reading it right : a box containing 9 (!) CDs.

The outside is heavy black pressboard with simply the title and "by Muslimgauze" in black/white print. Unfold the 4 flaps and you have a 24 inch wide display of 9 CDs and backing photo of 2 shrouded people with rifles (the artwork on the CDs help make up the picture). 3 of the 4 panels have foam knobs for 3 CDs apiece and the 2nd panel from the right is where a short biography, limited edition discography and subscription/future releases info resides. Underneath each CD is the CD title, track listing and various pictures of Middle Eastern females. As usual per Staalplaat release, the artwork/packaging is superb.

It's hard to decribe what kind of music Muslimgauze really is : kinda like western electronic music, with eastern samples layered on top of it. But why don't you check it out yourself : this site has a taste of (legally !) downloadable Muslimgauze music.