LISTEN TO IT #76: SILENCE YRSELF

I don’t often get hot music tips from Amazon.com. Or at least not in terms of anything I’d actually want to listen to. Amazon’s recommendations can be way off base sometimes, though to be fair that’s partly because I use it as a research tool sometimes. 

Anyway, after I bought a copy of that new Thermals album, Amazon sent me an email saying, “Hey, if you liked that, maybe you’ll like this.”

Which was, in this case, the debut album from British band Savages, whom I’d never heard of.

It might have ended there, but then I was browsing in the local music store and cane across the same album. It wasn’t on a listening station, so I fired up the smartphone and went straight to YouTube to sample a couple of tracks.

The rest is history.

The comparison to The Thermals is a bit off – where that band goes for charging, power-pop, Savages deploy angular post-punk drenched in reverb and feedback, which puts them closer to the likes of A Place To Bury Strangers by way of Sleater-Kinney.

That said, like The Thermals, Savages have passion to spare, and have something to say. There’s something very kinetic and exciting and urgent about this album. It’s definitely one of the more unsettling albums I’ve heard this year.

Listen.

The sound of silence,

This is dF

IN A PERFECT COPYRIGHT WORLD, WE’RE ALL CONSUMERS AND SUSPECTS (2013 EDITION)

ITEM: The Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property submits a report to the US Congress summarizing the state of online piracy (essentially, it is horrible and costing the US economy "hundreds of billions of dollars per year") and recommending a solution: secretly use spyware and ransomware to catch infringers. 

Quote:

Additionally, software can be written that will allow only authorized users to open files containing valuable information. If an unauthorized person accesses the information, a range of actions might then occur. For example, the file could be rendered inaccessible and the unauthorized user’s computer could be locked down, with instructions on how to contact law enforcement to get the password needed to unlock the account. Such measures do not violate existing laws on the use of the Internet, yet they serve to blunt attacks and stabilize a cyber incident to provide both time and evidence for law enforcement to become involved.

While not currently permitted under US law, there are increasing calls for creating a more permissive environment for active network defence that allows companies not only to stabilise a situation, but to take further steps, including actively retrieving stolen information, altering it within the intruder's networks or even destroying the information within an unauthorised network. Additional measures go further, including photographing the hacker using his own system's camera, implanting malware in the hacker's network, or even physically disabling or destroying the hacker's own computer or network.

The best part is the bit that goes: “While not currently permitted under US law…”

That means they admit their suggestion is currently illegal, but it would be awesome if Congress could look into making it legal (pending “further work and research”, of course).

And as we’ve seen, Congress always seems up for cooking up a badly written Internet governance/copyright bill that will do more harm than good.

That said, they’ve generally failed at actually passing them. So the report’s recommendations may not go anywhere. 

Still it’s worth knowing that the RIAA and MPAA – who have been advocating a spyware option for several years now – still have managed to keep that option on the table.

Watch yr ass,

This is dF

IT’S A SHAME ABOUT RAY (DOORS EDITION)

I’ve been meaning to post something about Ray Manzarek, who is with Jim Morrison now.

It’s hard to say anything that hasn’t already been said about him, and if yr a fan of The Doors or X (whose album Los Angeles was produced by him), you pretty much know 99% of everything you need to know about him.

So I might as well point you to this nice post with Exene Cervenka and John Doe remembering Ray.

As for me … well, I’ve been a Doors fan since high school. Which is saying something, because at that time, The Doors were not a cool band to like in early 80s suburban Nashville. In the dawn of the Me Decade, The Doors were quaint relics from the Summer Of Love. My sister wrote them off as “keyboard music for hippies”.

So naturally, I liked them, and by the time I was in the military I had all their albums and had read No One Here Gets Out Alive. A lot of soldiers in my unit seemed to identify with The Doors (albeit mainly because they’d all seen Apocalypse Now), though I do remember one guy expressing disbelief that I could possibly listen to them at 0700 while we were getting ready for morning formation. “Dude, it’s too damn early to be digging on The Doors.”

A lot of the attraction for me was due to the charisma and legend of Morrison, of course, but Manzarek was easily just as responsible for defining the Doors sound (as well as preserving the legend/myth of Morrison).

Also, for some reason I always liked that Manzarek wore glasses on stage. It’s a minor thing, sure, but he embodied the intellectual side of The Doors more than Jim’s bad-boy poetmonger. I thought he looked cool. 

Also, those sideburns. 



It’s a hell of a legacy, even if maybe that legacy is a little muddied by Manzarek’s legal disputes with John Densmore and Morrison’s family over the right to use the Doors name on tour and licensing their music for TV ads (soon to be a book by Densmore, out next week).

Anyway. Respect.

And here’s one of my favorite Doors tracks that highlights Manzarek’s musical genius.

Run with me,

This is dF