cool new music nerd quarterly web journal outta Toronto.

more choice seasonal selections over at chromogenic.net

• Live and direct from Zürich, dj new.com's radio show from last Thursday, featuring a couple of de'fchild productions, is now online, check the love:

  dj new.com november-05-show with a detailed playlist [pdf].

  
  

• In other promotional news, Cyan, esteemed host of the weekly radio show, modular_systems, on CKUT will be spinning some of our music tomorrow 3-5pm EST.

  
  

• The Sony-BMG DRM saga continues to get more and more absurd every week. First you had the patch for the rootkit opening up larger security holes than the rootkit itself. Then there was the discovery that Sony's DRM software itself was violating the licensing agreement (LGPL) of a popular mp3 encoding library called LAME. This was especially odd since the LAME encoder had no business being linked with software that doesn't do mp3 encoding, not to talk of then violating the encoder's license agreement!!

  In the latest twists today, the Texas State Attorney General filed a suit against Sony (Go Texas!) and it has come to light that this whole Sony-BMG DRM enchilada can be defeated (kinda like previous DRM attempts) with just a piece of scotch tape!!

My good man Marius (aka dj new.com), curator of the the Zürich based cmfrt_ns_prdctns and the man in charge of p45 radio sent me a nice email day before yesterday:

“Thank you, that's great: today I received your promos!

the day after tomorrow, the “p45 radio november-05-show” will happen - and I will play & comment de'fchild: see the radio-section on www.p45.ch”

So tune to dj new.com today, Thursday Nov. 17th from 8 to 11 p.m (GMT + 1) over at the internet radiostation audioasyl.net

I finally received my Imogen Heap 7" Hide & Seek vinyl single in the mail this week. The disc, surprisingly made from a clear, transparent vinyl, sounds remarkably raw and intense, in a good way. Or maybe I just need to get some new needles for my decks. heh.

Now that I have the original source [acappella] material, stay tuned for a remix.

Randomly noodling around on flickr for vinyl jacket art ideas, stumbled on some delish old skool tape delay boxes from Echigoya music store in Shibuya, Japan. I can feel the *warmth* from here. haha.

For my most recent mastering job at AudibleOddities. Shawn filled me in on a lossless compressed format that strangely enough was completely off my radar. There are also lots of plugins for winamp and whatnot that allow you to decompress and playback flac directly. Awesome.

check flac

Following yesterday's rant about Sony-BMG, today they announced that they will stop making CDs that use the rootkit in question.

Good.

This follows mad pressure from just about everywhere including a direct rebuke by Stewart Baker, Department of Homeland Security's Assistant Secretary for policy:

“It's very important to remember that it's your intellectual property -- it's not your computer. And in the pursuit of protection of intellectual property, it's important not to defeat or undermine the security measures that people need to adopt in these days.

If we have an avian flu outbreak here and it is even half as bad as the 1918 flu, we will be enormously dependent on being able to get remote access for a large number of people, and keeping the infrastructure functioning is going to be a matter of life and death and we take it very seriously.”

Last week, there were reports circulating the blogosphere and news outlets about the Sony-BMG rootkits used in “anti-piracy” measures on all recent Sony-BMG audio CDs.

In a nutshell, when you pop a Sony audio CD into you computer, the rootkit software is secretly installed on your system inna cracker stylie and is deeply embedded on your computer. It then secretly monitors your computer for “rights violations”, taking up valuable computing resources while actively resisting attempts to detect it, disable or remove it. It can thus severely compromise the integrity of your computer, rendering it vulnerable to various kinds of trojans and malware. Sure enough, there are now some nasty viruses that have piggy-backed on the Sony-BMG rootkits.

Hopefully, Sony will have to deal with serious criminal liability under anti-computer hacking laws. Just yesterday, the residents of my adopted state have announced a large class action suit. Needless to say, boycottage is in order.