DISQUS

That has got to be the WORST Adam & The Ants cover I have ever heard.

Now, if they removed the I'm-so-ironically-bored hipster vocals entirely, that track would be a bangin' little chunk of electrofunk.

Thanks so much for the encouragement! It's great to be onboard.

Oren:

Good luck with that, and please post any further weirdness. It seems to me as though no one has had a seamless experience with this service, and the problems always come from the Upline software itself. It's even worse than the Zune 1.0 software!

AWESOME! I will definitely be on the lookout for that guy, then....I love that kind of stuff.

I will gladly accept being a bore if it saves me from listening to dull, uninspired music. Luckily, Trent released The Slip, which is a far better and more cohesive album than Ghosts I-IV, which I believe to be nothing more than a collection of studio out-takes that he just wanted to release for the hell of it. NIN instrumentals never work.

Jim:

That is quite alarming. I read over the T&Cs; before I even considered signing up for the service and at the time that I read them there was no such mention of that particular clause in the document. Now, it's certainly possible that I could've overlooked it--my brain tends to be lulled into a trancelike state by legalese--but I'm fairly certain that I would've noticed a clause like that immediately.

It's also possible that they've revised their Terms & Conditions since I signed up (and subsequently closed the account). It seems nonsensical, though, to include wording like that in reference to a "secure" backup service, even one that gives users the ability to share backed-up materials. This is reminiscent, though, of the recent T&C; controversy concerning Adobe's online version of Photoshop, which contained terms rather similar that explicitly allowed Adobe the right to use any and all images processed by the service for their own use. Adobe was smart, though, and subsequently revised their docs after the blogosphere tore into them like a pack of furious hounds.

Perhaps HP will do the same. I will make sure that this "gets out" and the right people are allerted.

Kevin--

Make sure you snag a copy of their remix album, Other World. Usually, remix albums are nothing more than wanky excuses to offer up various terrible "dance" versions of songs that were perfectly good in the first place, but Other World is a fantastic collection of re-imagined songs from Country Falls. The remixes are actually re-mixes: completely different takes on the songs that create totally different vibes. It gets the Pegritz Stamp of Approval!

I'm gettin' there, son--I'm gettin' there! I got that album just the other week and haven't even gotten around to listening to it yet: my "listen to this, jackass" list is, like, seventy-five albums long. :) Don't worry, though, it'll make the next Friday Fivehead, definitely.

BTW: I'm now complete obsessed with Warhammer 40K. Between reading every damn book from Black Library that I can get my hands on and playing Dawn of War all damn day long, it's amazing I have time to listen to ANY new music, but, hey...the Galaxy needs to be made safe for the God-Emperor, damn it!

Michael--

We obviously share a common appreciation of music, as all of the tracks you've listed as favorites are the ones that earned five-star markings in my media player as well! I tend to listen to a lot of dark ambient music, including amorphous, almost featureless "depression ambience" works like Wilt's Radio 1940--which is literally two CDs of droning static and gently-mutilated radio broadcasts. I like that kind of music specifically because it makes for such great background noise: I can't even count the number of stories and/or monographs I've written to ambient soundtracks over the years.

On further thought, the reason I find Ghosts I-IV to be a little dull is that it doesn't always disappear into the background. Some of the higher-BPM, harder tracks obtrude upon my mind, but they don't bring with them any solid grooves or interesting sample-play or even lyrics...which is why they feel "half-baked" to me: they're too strong to be entirely ambient, yet still too minimal and, well, ghostly to be rockin' jams. They exist in the album cover's strange, blurry grey space of indecisiveness.

That could be either and good thing or a bad thing, depending on tastes. I really don't find it to be either: I just find it a little tedious after, say, listening to eighteen tracks in a row.

Speaking of harder music, if you've never listened to a group called Downliners Sekt,definitely check them out. Their music is an exquisite combination of soft ambient sounds and slammin', gangsta-industrial beats that scratch and scrape and skip like the world's most wounded CD--yet are still regular enough, and melodic enough, to get your head bobbing along. In a way, you might think of them as what Ghosts I-IV could've been had Trent placed a little more emphasis on beats and thrown some chopped-up vocal samples into the mix to catch the listener's ear.

Sho' nuff. I'll supply you with Most Excellent New Jams. I think the last time you heard something I've done was...probably 1992. Believe me, I've improved a LOT since then. :)

Oh, dear. Perhaps I should've read that article a little more closely! However, thank you for noting that Christian Voice is a collection (perhaps of one) of rabid, insane, most-certainly-not-mainstream Christians. It would seem that the majority of Muslims in First World countries (that is, the EU and the US, along with the various small Muslim states that were once part of the USSR) are taking this controversy with a grain of salt--expressing their opinions, sure, but in a measured, dare I say appropriate manner. Only the insane ultra-right-wind nationalists and Muslim evangelicals are flipping their wigs over this.

It's just unfortunate that, in certain parts of the world, they are the majority.

I know quite a few people whom I could refer to you as clients. I'm rather big in the local and Washington DC steampunk/neoVictorian circles (which just means I know a lot of people). I can't wait to see that pic, though: you remember how much I loved pointillist illustration!

But can you believe that I have not drawn a single thing in close to seven years now? I doodle occasionally, but I have not produced a serious work of pen-and-ink artwork in nearly a decade. I do a lot of simple work in Photoshop these days, simply because it's not so time-consuming. Making all those little dots and lines....God, I have no idea how Gustave Dore ever did it.

BTW, someday I shall have to commission an album cover from you.

Hhhhahahahahhahhaa. I used to know a Diaper-Man, Julie. I went to a few fetish shows in Pittsburgh years ago just to see what the whole fetish scene was all about, and there was this old guy--and I mean old, in his seventies--who used to come dressed in a beautiful three-piece suit and would change into a bib and a diaper and make leather-clad ladies spank him and give him a bottle.

One word for that: CREEPY.

Summarizing/paraphrasing/quoting without any form of attribution can be viewed as a copyright/licensing violation, yes--but then the act goes from being an ethical issue to a legal issue. A Blogger's Code must only restrict itself to ethical concerns...and reprinting material sans attribution is a clear violation of ethics--in fact, it gets students in trouble every year on college and highschool campuses the world wide. Regardless of copyright issues, plagiarism issues are definitely within the scope of a Code of Conduct; but they must be addressed as issues of plagiarism in such a code, and not as issues of copyright, lest an ethical issue suddenly morph into a hotpoint legal issue.

See, that's what I get for writing an article on an old Mac OS 9.x beast at work and not spending the time to fully check out my source material!