The Offline Diary

There are several things in life we tend to take for granted, in my case one of those things is being online. I am used to being online 24/7, here at home pretty much everything is connected to my wifi: my laptop, my computer, my phone, my Nexus, my Kindle, my Wii and my Playstation, my wife's computer and Kindle... I wouldn't be surprised if even our fridge would be connected to the internet in some weird way. Sending an e-mail? No problem. Quickly checking something online? Just a matter of seconds. Doing some interviews using Skype? Sure. World of warcraft? Any time... well, in theory.
Actually things are very different since some weeks: We are offline. After some problems with our old provider we decided to cancel the contract and look for a new one, and finding the "right one" was not difficult, the price was good, the offered conditions even better, so I signed the contract. And this is exactly where the problems started and our connection to the internet ended. It seems to be much more tricky to get the new line into our appartment than we expected (and than we were told...), before I signed the deal everything was supposed to be very simple and fast of course, but now, out of the blue, there are several things that have to be taken care of first, problems that have to be solved. As a result we don't have internet so far, and on top of this we also don't have a working telefone line either (both comes from the new provider), and this doesn't seem to change before the middle of January. A very unusual situation for somebody that is so used to being online, but since there is not much I can do about I guess I will just have to be patient.

Nominate Orphaned Land for the 2013 Nobel Peace Price

 

 

Sometimes peaceful change happens in the most unlikely ways, fostered by the most unlikely people. In the past few years, while Israel’s relationship with the Arab and Muslim world has drastically deteriorated, Orphaned Land, Israel’s biggest heavy metal band, has been uniting thousands of Jews and Muslims across the Middle East.

These fans come from Turkey, Syria, Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, Morocco, Dubai, Yemen and Israel.

Orphaned Land has been able to achieve this through their music (which fuses traditional Middle Eastern sounds and instruments with Western Heavy metal), vision of coexistence, collaborations with Arab and Muslim artists, and a vigorous and active community of fans.

While not overtly political, Orphaned Land are nevertheless proud of creating a reality of coexistence that has escaped politicians and peacemakers alike. They often speak of the power of music to turn purported enemies into friends; frequently pay homage and encourage collaborations with Arab and Muslim artists; and have made their latest album free to download for anyone in a number of Middle Eastern and North African countries.

Their endeavors to transform the region’s conflicts have not gone unnoticed.

• Reciprocating the band’s courageous efforts to cross religious and national boundaries, Divan, an Iranian rock magazine, featured Orphaned Land on their cover in an eight-page spread.
• In 2010, the band was awarded a peace prize by Istanbul Commerce University for their contribution to the friendship between Muslims and Jews in the Middle East.
• In February 2012, in a five-city tour of Turkey (in which proceeds from the Istanbul concert went to the victims of the Van earthquake), Orphaned Land was given The Friendship and Peace Award from Dr. Huseyin Tugcu, official advisor to Prime Minster Erdogan.
• In September 2012, Orphaned Land was bestowed another Peace and Friendship award by Bulent Tanik, Mayor of Cankaya (the main district of the capital Ankara).

Again, it should be emphasized that this all happening during a period in which relations between Israel and the Muslim world are at an all-time low. Orphaned Land has produced a social force that pushes against the direction of conflict, while at the same time creating space for the type of peaceful relations that are still possible within the region.

To nominate them for 2013 Nobel Peace Prize is therefore to make a bold statement: violent conflict is not the destiny of the region.

Please sign this petition if you agree that Norwegian Nobel Committee needs to seriously consider Orphaned Land as a nominee to the 2013 Nobel Peace prize.

 

To get to the petition, click HERE

Deja Vu

Exactly 10 years ago Blind Guardian played their first show in the USA at Prog Power festival in Atlanta. In two days Sinbreed will do the same, the only difference is that this time it will only be this one show, so there won't be a tour follwoing right after that event. Still I am really looking forward to this gig, I have great memories about that festival and I will meet some old friends again, this is for sure going to be a very cool weekend! See some of you guys there!

Songwriting started

After almost 2 years on the road we finally finished the "At the edge of time" world tour, and what a great tour this was! I want to thank everybody in our crew for being great guys, who sometimes make the impossible happen and for making this tour such a fun trip. A big hello goes out to all the bands that we toured with and that we met on the road (Van Canto, Steelwing, Holy Grail, Seven Kingdoms, Kreator, Sodom, Powerwolf, Hypocrisy, Judas Priest, Megadeth and all the others) and of course an extra special thanks goes out to you guys, the best fans in the world!!!
So what's up next on our schedule? For Blind Guardian the serious songwriting season has already started, for Fred and me there are a couple of Sinbreed shows coming up, the first one being our gig at the ProgPower Festival in Atlanta on September 14th, I hope to see some of you guys there.

Your romantic notion doesn’t pay my rent: David Lowery, Emily White and the future of music

 

A short while ago, Emily White, who is an intern at NPR, made a blog post in which she admitted that, despite having 11,000 songs on her iTunes, she had paid for a grand total of 15 CDs in her 21 years of existence. Is that statistic shocking? It certainly was to David Lowery, singer with Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker, who on Monday wrote a detailed, open-letter-style response to White.
This open-letter has been blowing up on social networks and music sites over the last few days, and I wanted to share it here as it’s pertinent to my own situation and I’m keen to see what other DM readers think. In the essay, Lowery asks White to think about how her actions and attitude has effected the music industry as a whole. He uses facts and figures to back up his assertions, and while not everyone is going to agree with what he writes, it’s an excellent essay that is well worth reading:

"I must disagree with the underlying premise of what you have written. Fairly compensating musicians is not a problem that is up to governments and large corporations to solve. It is not up to them to make it “convenient” so you don’t behave unethically. (Besides–is it really that inconvenient to download a song from iTunes into your iPhone? Is it that hard to type in your password? I think millions would disagree.)
Rather, fairness for musicians is a problem that requires each of us to individually look at our own actions, values and choices and try to anticipate the consequences of our choices. I would suggest to you that, like so many other policies in our society, it is up to us individually to put pressure on our governments and private corporations to act ethically and fairly when it comes to artists rights. Not the other way around. We cannot wait for these entities to act in the myriad little transactions that make up an ethical life. I’d suggest to you that, as a 21-year old adult who wants to work in the music business, it is especially important for you to come to grips with these very personal ethical issues.
...
What the corporate backed Free Culture movement is asking us to do is analogous to changing our morality and principles to allow the equivalent of looting. Say there is a neighborhood in your local big city. Let’s call it The ‘Net. In this neighborhood there are record stores. Because of some antiquated laws, The ‘Net was never assigned a police force. So in this neighborhood people simply loot all the products from the shelves of the record store. People know it’s wrong, but they do it because they know they will rarely be punished for doing so. What the commercial Free Culture movement (see the “hybrid economy”) is saying is that instead of putting a police force in this neighborhood we should simply change our values and morality to accept this behavior. We should change our morality and ethics to accept looting because it is simply possible to get away with it.  And nothing says freedom like getting away with it, right?"

This article presents (in a roundabout way) two things I have been brewing over for a long time, in regards to file sharing.
The first one is this: why does the onus always seem to be on the creator of art to accept that their product should be free, rather than on the consumer to analyze the impact of their actions on the quality of art?
It has happened here on DM in the past, especially in heated comments threads under posts about Pirate Bay, where the question that tended to get asked the most was “why should an artist expect to get paid money for what they do?”  (Unfortunately, since we switched over to the Disqus comment system last month, all our old comment threads have been wiped, but readers are more than welcome to keep the discourse going right here.)
Well, as an artist, the most immediate way to refute that question would be to ask “why should you expect to receive art for free?” But to take it further, here is another question that is never, ever asked, and to me taps into the root of the whole problem: “if you are not willing to pay for music, then why exactly do you collect music?”
Seriously, though. Why? Yes, music is lovely (I should know as I have dedicated my life to making, playing and writing about it) but then so is beer, and if I expected to get drunk every day without paying any money for the privilege, I would quickly get the reputation of being an unpopular scrounger. It’s basic economics, but it’s still a concept many fail to grasp, or would rather substitute with the victim-blaming that it’s the artist’s fault for expecting to get paid.
So, to put it more Marxist-friendly terms: “why does a person consume a form of art?”
I should make this clear at this point, I have been a very heavy collector and consumer of music myself in the past, my forte being rare disco and obscure deep house. So I get it! I get the buzz of obtaining new music (not to mention that, being a DJ, I need to have access to new music). But there came a point when I realized that NO, I couldn’t own every single disco record ever made—thank you, Daniel Wang—but also, why in the hell would I want to?!
As a musician I have found that I learn more about music by concentrating on a smaller group of records/artists and listening to them more intently than I do from consuming vast swathes of music and not really getting around to listening to much of it. While a lot of this has to do with my own route from consumer to creator, the thought still niggles at the back of my head: have music consumers been driven into such a blind state of consumption that they simply MUST have everything, regardless of the cost to the medium itself?
And I ask this because sometimes it feels like the artists, the people who make our society more tolerable, more beautiful and even more inspirational, have been thrown to the wolves. One of the most common “validations” for the file sharing of music among consumers and listeners is that the labels have been exploiting us for years, so fuck ‘em. While this may be true, it’s very short-sighted and supremely selfish, as it (deliberately?) disregards the damage caused to the artists and, in turn, the musical landscape by the devaluation of the actual product. And while their work has been deemed financially worthless by the people who consume it (people who, presumably, want to hear/read/see/feel more of what the artist has to offer), what opinion do artists most often hear coming from the public in relation to art? That the quality is getting worse and worse. Well, I’m afraid these two things are not unconnected.
And here’s the second point that really irks me.
First and foremost, beyond being a writer and a blogger, I consider myself a musician. I create music regularly, I work hard at it, and I try and funnel all my non-music-creating activities back into helping me make more music. One day I would dearly love to be able to live off the money generated by my music. So, am I somehow wrong (or perhaps even evil) because I want this?
Some would say that I am, that somehow I am not a “true” artist because I have brought money into the equation and have aspirations to become “professional.” (How exactly does being considered a professional in your field invalidate what you do?!) To these folks I must stay clean and unsullied by money at all times, lest I become some kind of artistic “whore.” (And I LOVE getting called a “whore,” especially by people who can’t stop themselves downloading music like a junkie can’t say no to a fix.)
Well, newsflash: your romantic notion doesn’t pay my rent.
I need money to go on creating my art. I need money to live, and to peruse that at which I am good at. I need money to invest in the equipment I need to make music. I need money so I can spend time learning how to use that equipment properly, not to mention spending time on that actual art of music itself i.e. writing and arranging melodies, rhythms and lyrics. I need money to finance distribution in all its forms and the production of physical media. If I am to progress and be the best artist I can possibly be, I need the time and money afforded by being a professional in my field. I could make some bucks out of t-shirts sales, I am told, but I am not in this to be a t-shirt designer. I am in this to be a musician.
And another point that I should clarify: I have been heavily involved in “free culture.” From 2007 till this year I ran a label that dealt primarily with free downloads. I have released music through other labels that work on a similar basis.  Simply put, I love giving people some of my music for free. But not all of it. If I have a potential Number One song in my brain, something I feel could give me an ongoing, long-term income, and thus the freedom to peruse my art to a higher level, why would should I give that away for free?
I will always go on making music, of course. I don’t think I will ever stop playing with my Ableton and my Akai controller (until something better comes along) and I know now that, even if I wanted to, I couldn’t stop my brain writing strange little melodies all on its own. But while I will go on making music, I will also keep feeling the frustration of not being able to reach my full potential, of not progressing and of missing opportunities of creating bigger, wilder, greater art. Of using 40-piece choirs and 24 track analog desks, of playing around with original Moogs and top of the range compressors. And where exactly would the incentive for me to share my music with the world be, if the world isn’t willing to share something in return?
As uncommercial or abrasive as my music sometimes is, I consider it to be worthy of as big a fucking audience as possible. I don’t want it to stay in a niche, preaching to the already converted, I want it to travel and affect as many people as it can. And that’s another thing that costs money. Simply “putting it out there” is NOT enough, artists are still reliant on proven methods of PR and old/new media communications to make people aware of their work.
Here’s a case in point. Last year I made an album, and after punting it around to various labels who turned it down, I decided just to put it out there for free. It’s called “AKA” and there are a lot of guests featured, many of them MCs and vocalists from underground gay and drag scenes, but they all have something unique, refreshing and different to say. I want to give them the biggest platform I possibly can to get their messages across. So go at it, get the album, (directly here, or listen first here) it won’t cost you a thing, and if you don’t like it, you can have your money back. But I will still have to invest money in this project to see that it goes beyond small niche markets and has a chance of being picked up in the mainstream. Because I believe it deserves to be in the mainstream.
“AKA” is my fourth free download album release, and I hope it is my last. Not because I dislike giving away my music for free, or because I want to start sucking corporate cock. But because free culture is not sustainable, not for me anyway. Or for artists who want to progress beyond the bedroom and take their work out to a mass audience. An audience that is constantly telling us it WANTS and NEEDS new and exciting music, maybe the very kind of music we are creating. For artists who want to kick it up a level and become *gasp* professional musicians. Not t-shirt designers, not concert promoters, not writers-who-make-music-on-the-side, but PROFESSIONAL MUSICIANS.
Asking for money for your output is NOT a crime. No-one is expecting to get rich off music, just to be paid our dues.
I may be wrong, but I believe that we’ll never see another David Bowie or another Prince or another Beatles again. Not because talents such as there’s aren’t out there, but because the financial system that allowed those talents to flourish, and that in turn made the consumers used to obtaining a high level of art on a regular basis, are gone. That is in no way an excuse for the almost-criminal activities of major labels, and smaller labels for that matter, rather it’s just a statement of fact. Without access to the high calibre musicians/producers/engineers/designers/promoters/managers/etc that was afforded these artists through the label network, none of them would have been able to create their most seminal works of art, works that defined eras, inspired movements, elevated art forms. And, lest we not forget, raised the expectations of listeners to such a level that all else pales.
The public WANTS another Beatles/Bowie/Prince, an iconic, genuinely brilliant artist or band, for and of our age, yet to me the public doesn’t seem willing to pay for that.
So where do we go from here?

Originally published in Dangerous Minds by Niall O'Conghaile

Just two days ago we played a very cool gig at the "Rock am Härtsfeldsee" festival in Dischingen. Everything was perfect, the festival was sold out, the weather was awesome (sun all day long, 30 degrees), everybody was in a great mood and we had a lot of fun with all the fans and really enjoyed the show. Now I am shocked to hear that on the second day everything changed completely when the festival area was hit by two serious thunderstorms, washing away the whole camping ground and leaving only destruction, with 10 people injured, 3 of them seriously. Our wishes go to all of you, get well soon and see you again at some other gig.

We just finished the 2012 South American tour and apart from the sad Sao Luis incident we had a lot of fun. In case you didn't have the chance to come to one of the shows check out the video to get an idea what you missed ;-) (By the way, I am still impressed by the sound quality of some of those mobile phone videos on youtube)
Next on the list is the Spanish tour with Judas Priest, something we are definitely looking forward to, so see you guys soon.

Soundcheck done

We just finished the soundcheck for the Sao Paulo show, the sound is perfect :-) Can't wait for the show, see you guys later tonight.

Today's show in Sao Luis cancelled!

Unfortunately I have very bad news for all our Brazilian fans, we just had to cancel today's show in Sao Luis, at the M.O.A. Festival. It seems that the local management was not able at all to provide the things needed to make this festival possible, so we had no choice but to cancel tonight's show. We are very sorry for this, in all our carreer we have always tried to play every gig, no matter how bad the circumstances might have been, but tonight it is just beyond our control. As far as we know the other Brazilian shows in Sao Paulo and Curitiba are not affected, so hope to see you guys there.

Next stop: Brazil

The 2012 festival season has started for us and two shows were played already, both were a lot of fun for us. Of course (as always on festivals) I missed all the bands that I wanted to see myself (Sodom on the Sweden Rock Cruise and Powerwolf & Freak Kitchen at the PPM Fest in Belgium), but since there are many more festivals to come I guess I will have some other chances to catch them, at least I am optimistic. Next stop for us is Brazil, where we will play a big festival and a couple of headlining shows, followed by a show in Montevideo and another festival in Chile. South America, be prepared, we'll be back soon!

Randy Rhoads

30 years ago we lost one of the best guitarists ever: Randy Rhoads. His work on Ozzy's first 2 albums (as well as his work on the first 2 Quiet Riot albums) was so outstanding, it still inspires and influences me today. Rest in peace Randy and thank you for your music!