my first contact with moonsorrow was on the 9th of april this year, when they were playing at the z-7 in pratteln. i didn’t knew them before, but i was told that i might like them. well. i did. after the concert, i decided i had to buy one of their albums, namely viides luku: hävitetty, which is finnish and means chapter five: ravaged, being their fifth album, and i immediately listened to it when i came home after the concert. less than two weeks later i also had the rest of their albums lying on my desk.
simlarly to finntroll’s visor om slutet, v: hävitetty is a very special album. consisting of just two tracks, each having around 30 minutes of music, it builds up an intense atmosphere throwing you back into the old times, when vikings were sailing the northern seas. in contrast to visor om slutet, most of this album is heavy, very heavy, transporting a completely different mood. the first six minutes of the first track can be seen as a separate song, called jäästä syntynyt (born of ice), a very atmospheric, slow, dreamy piece, featuring a short poem:

“auringon kuoleman syntyäkseen
uusi maailma tarvitsee
vain pisaran vettä kylmyyteen
käsillä juoksemaan ihmisten”

which translates to:

“through the death of the sun
a new world is born
a drop of water in cold
to run on the hands of man”

other bands would let this be a whole song.
after this, a twenty-five minutes long heavy sound scape named varjojen virta (stream of shadows) breaks loose on the listener, never being boring, recurring motifs varied, always melodic, sometimes a bit slower, mostly fast, screaming. closing my eyes, i can see vast landscapes and seascapes, raging storms, ships fighting the rough sea, endless forests, fog, darkness, bleak lives, people dying, battles raging. the music makes me want to move, it’s so intense, so beautiful, intoxicating. the lyrics are in finnish, with an english translation being provided in the booklet, allowing to enrich the experience, putting more emotions and emphasis into the music. they transport dreary feelings, are depressing, make me shiver. beautiful, in some sense, sorrowful, in another.
the second song on this album, tuleen ajettu maa, which means a land driven into the fire, begins with shaman chants, quickly progressing to heavy riffs, screams. similarly to varjojen virta, this sound scape is intense, dense, heavy, varying between more silent, folkish parts, many heavy parts, black metal thunderstorms, forming a fascinating masterpiece.
this one feels similarly depressing, bleak, even more aggressive. i can see boats floating, shaking on rough water, the sea trying to swallow the boats, i can see battles, fights, man against man, dying and dead people, the distinction between victor and loser being that one is dead, whereas the other is dying. skimming through the lyrics, i read as the last verse:

“näin kaikki päättyy, näen sen nyt
tämä sivu on viimeinen
näin kaikki päättyy, tyhjään ja unohdukseen
eikä kukaan tänne palaa”

translating to:

“this is how it ends, i can see it now
this page will be the last
this is how it ends, to emptiness, to oblivion
and none will ever return”

this is what the music makes me feel. makes me see, makes me think about, when i listen to it.

leaving traces is easy. just think on how many fingerprints you leave outside your home every day.
and this does not only apply to your real life, but also to your online life. every little thing you do in the internet leaves traces at many different places. for example, think of typing in a url like spielwiese.fontein.de in your browser and pressing enter. first, your browser will put that address in its history (for the pedants out there: i’m fully aware that there are situations in which this does not happen. as i don’t want to blow up this article with technicalities, i’ll simply ignore that.), so days later you can still see that you visited that page. you’ll also find copies of the page in your browser cache. back to the incident itself. in order to access the site, your browser has to establish a connection with my web server and send a request for that site. this request is relayed though different places, every one able to see that you (identifyable by your ip number, which can be traced back to you by your internet provider) requested this specific site (except in case you’re accessing pages using https, in that case, the intermediate relays just know your ip address and the ip address of the destination server).
finally, in any case, my web server will receive your request to deliver the page / from my domain to you. and, as most web servers do, it will note that down into it’s logfile, so i can see that you accessed my site. in fact, i see a lot more. usually, in the request, your browser sends a lot of additional information: for example, a string identifying the user agent. for example, this could be

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070802 SeaMonkey/1.1.4

it usually also includes information on your operating system (in this case, linux) and the exact version of your browser. usually, the browser will also send on which site you were before (the so called referer). this information will be sent for any web page you click on, and for every image or other object contained in that page. hence, i am, without any tricks, able to track you on your way through my web page, and i can see where you’re coming from.
being a bit more clever, i can find out a lot more. for example, i could modify the urls of outgoing links on my page to go though some kind of `gate’, like the forward.php which you might have noticed. then, if you click any link on my site which leaves it, your browser will first contact my webserver to retrieve the forward.php output (which will tell your browser `go to that other site’) and, surprise!, it will leave an entry in the web server’s log that you clicked that link. so i also know where you’re going from my site. next, there’s a lot more information on you which one can find out using javascript, like your screen’s resolution. i’m including a little script on my site which tells the browser to include a little picture, simply consisting of one complete transparent pixel, on every page of my site. to the images url, it adds the screen resolution. so by looking into my server’s log, i can see your screen resolution—at least if you haven’t turned javascript off, but most people have it turned on anyway.
so, now i have a big log file containing a lot of information: which user came from where, looked at which sites, left where, used which browser, which operating system and which screen resolution, at which time. if i feed this log file into an analysis tool, it will gather the information and present them to me in a useable way—whatever that might mean.
are you surprised? some of you won’t be, i know. anyone interested in this subject can find out about this on lots of places on the web (for example, look here). and, in fact, one can do much better than me. first, by using cookies, i could identify you uniquely and connect your different sessions to see how your surfing behaviour varies over a larger time scale. then, i could combine the data from several servers. if i would have data from enough servers, i could throw together a very detailed survey on what you are doing on the web. in that case, i’m your big brother, watching (almost) every step you do online. luckily, for you, i’m not doing that. but other people do. for example, the big web advertisement companies, which have their advertisements on a huge amount of web servers, can see you everytime you view such a web page (if you’re not using an ad blocker). or assume that your web page is using the service of another server which tracks statistics for you. many people are using such services (may it be in the form of a simple counter), so the provider of the service knows when you are looking at which site. and now assume that some of these data collectors cooperate. sharing their huge amount of data. a creepy thought, isn’t it?

yesterday i was making a trip with a friend of mine to the rigi, a 1800 meter high mountain here in switzerland. the weather was great: the sun was shining, it was pretty warm, and the sight was very good. i really like the view of mountains, forests, water and mountains, and fortunately, this time, i had my camera with me, resulting in a lot of pictures. some good, some not so good, and some already deleted :-) this time, i also tried to create some panorama pictures. after lots of hours of trying to figure out how to do this using hugin and after learning a lot about creating panorama photographs (like, that one should not move the camera but simply rotate it) —though learning them a little too late—, i’m able to present some results, which still have some errors (some more and some less obvious). here they are:

during updating my music player, i had to think about which albums to put on it and which ones to delete. my previous playlist was really biased towards heavy and dark music, so i decided to lighten it a bit up. well, at least from the musical side. but nonetheless, i decided to add something more heavy, namely something from sentenced, which was my favorite band for a very long time. i was thinking hard about which album(s) to put on the player. maybe something oldskool from the north from here? it contains the beautiful song northern lights. or maybe the love and death ep, containing classics like love and death (go hand in hand once more) and the way i wanna go. then, there’s the down album, my favorite beauties from this one are bleed (to death), sun won’t shine (on me without your love) and the agressive i’ll throw the first rock. well, then there’s the frozen album, my first sentenced album after all, and in my opinion still the best one. it contains one of my all time favorite songs, dead leaves. besides that (and many other great songs), it contains the slow rainy ballad the rain comes falling down, grave sweet grave and the (almost) instrumental burn (the pain away). but then, there are also beautiful songs like fragile, dead moon rising and my slowing heart on the crimson album, in particular the latter being so expressive through its monotony. it’s a really sad song, only being topped by no one there, the last song on the cold white light. no one there is one of the saddest songs i know. (if you have never heard it, consider watching its video.) besides this song, the cold white light features some more songs i want to mention: namely cross my heart and hope to die (may my end come tonight), the self-ironic excuse me while i kill myself and the ballad guilt and regret. and, last but not least, there’s sentenced terminal album, fittingly entitled the funeral album, which ends the misery with the great, even though more aggressive and more hateful, songs may today become the day (as i plunge into the gray), ever-frost, vengeance is mine, drain me and end of the road. so, there’re a lot of albums to chose from. my final decision was to include exactly the songs mentioned here, instead of a whole album. i’m really looking forward to tomorrow, when i have plenty of time to listen to this great collection of misery. it’s really a tragedy that sentenced is no more. rest in peace.

while searching for bands making similar music to the israli progdeath band orphaned land, i recently stumbled across another isreali band named distorted. i would describe their style as very progressive melodic oriental death metal, featuring a female clean voice besides the usual (male) death voice.
when i first stumbled about their homepage and started reading their member profiles, i was stunned: many of them are inspired by and listen to music which i like a lot:

• guy, their bass player, lists for example orphaned land, opeth and porcupine tree as his influences, and his top album of all time is orphaned land’s mabool;
• benny, their guitar player, mentions nevermore as one of his musical influences, and also lists mabool as his top album of all time;
• miri, their (clean voice) singer, lists the gathering, nevermore and opeth in her musical influence list, and mentions nevermore’s ingenious dead heart in a dead world, opeth’s deliverence, the gathering’s mandolyion and nevermore’s dreaming neon black as her top albums of all time;
• raffy, their (death voice) singer and guitarist, names tool, nevermore and opeth as his influences and lists tool’s aenima, nevermore’s enemies of reality and opeth’s deliverance as his top albums of all time.

well, this is a > 100 % increase of people i know who like pretty much the same music than me :-)
after seeing this and listening to one of their tracks (redemption) from their debut album (memorial) which they put online, i decided that i have to order their album. and so i did. it took some time until it arrived, but then, listening to it at a whole, i was pretty much blown away. it is simply great! it combines the oriental influences form orphaned land with the progressive death metal from opeth, adding a female voice (i know some of you will be sceptical about the latter, but i’d say it fits well and i don’t want to miss it). for me, this is one of the best albums (or maybe even, the best?) i’ve heard this year.

here’s a list of concerts i’ve been at this year, for historical reasons. not taking in account some classic concerts.

• 07.02.2007: therion, grave digger and sabaton were playing at the z-7 in pratteln (symphonic orchestral metal, and some more thrashy/whatever metal);
• 21.02.2007: amplifier and cloudride were playing at abart in zürich (progressive art rock);
• 24.02.2007: blackfield and pure reason revolution were playing at the z-7 in pratteln (progressive rock, art rock);
• 04.03.2007: …and you will know us by the trail of dead and forget cassettes were playing at the rote fabrik in zürich (alternative rock);
• 29.03.2007: morgana lefay, sacred steel, serenity and bitterness were playing at rock city in uster (various kinds of metal: death, prog, power, true, …);
• 09.04.2007: moonsorrow, swallow the sun and some band whose name i forgot played at the z-7 in pratteln (pagan metal, doom metal, death metal);
• 10.04.2007: circle ii circle, savage circus, tomorrow’s eve and tempesta were playing at the z-7 in pratteln (metal);
• 13.04.2007: moonspell, napalm death, behemoth, gojira and dew scented were playing at the z-7 in pratteln (death and black metal, metalcore);
• 16.05.2007: spock’s beard was playing at the z-7 in pratteln (progressive rock);
• 27.05.2007: trivium, annihilator and some band which was playing before the official opening time were playing at the rohstofflager in zürich (thrash metal);
• 29.05.2007: arena was playing at the z-7 in pratteln (progressive rock);
• 31.05.2007: anathema and moondawn were playing at the z-7 in pratteln (atmospheric rock with metal influences);
• 01.06.2007: machine head, type o negative, cataract and zatokrev were playing at the volkshaus in zürich (thrash metal, doom metal, metalcore and death metal);
• 27.06.2007: dream theater and megadeth were playing at the volkshaus in zürich (progressive metal, thrash metal).

if i’ll find the motivation (and if anyone cares), i might write a few words about some of these.

sometimes i wonder why mathematics is working so smooth as it is. for me, this is one of the most intriguing things around, next to the questions on why do we live and on whats the question to the answer 42… based on a small set of axioms, nobody knowing whether they are free of contradiction, an enormous building of constructions and proofs has been built. so huge, that no one can learn about all of it in one lifetime. and inside this building, between lots of dirty corners with ugly computations and hard work, there sit so many beautiful small and big results, sometimes showing surprising connections to completely different parts of mathematics. this connectivity is what surprises me most. every time again. that’s what i like about mathematics, and that’s what’s keeping me doing math. and makes me even more curious about the question on why it is working so smooth.

here’s a list of concerts i plan to attend during the last four months of this year. if i put a link to a bands’ homepage, this means i’m going to that concert to see this band (and as a side effect, also the non-linked ones).

• 13.09.2007: threshold, communic, machine men and serenity are playing in the z-7 in pratteln (progressive metal);
• 22.09.2007: fjoergyn, wolfchant, nastrandir und nuclear winter are playing in the dynamo in zurich (symphonic black/pagan/viking/death metal);
• 27.10.2007: moonsorrow, korpiklaani, excelsis and battlelore are playing at the viking/pagan festival in the stadthalle dietikon (folk/pagan metal);
• 31.10.2007: dream theater and symphony x are playing in the eulachhallen in winterthur (progressive metal);
• 09.11.2007: apocalyptica (with special guest not announced yet) is playing in the volkshaus in zürich (violin metal);
• 12.11.2007: porcupine tree and anathema are playing in the volkshaus in zürich (prog, atmospheric rock with metal influences);
• 16.11.2007: orchester accento musicale zürich is playing in the st. peter in zürich (classic);
• 17.11.2007: boob is playing in the helsinki klub in zürich (alternative/punk rock);
• 18.11.2007: amorphis, swallow the sun and insomnium are playing in the z-7 in pratteln (prog metal, doom metal);
• 27.11.2007: fish is playing in the z-7 in pratteln (progressive rock);
• 29.11.2007: halloween, gamma ray and axxis are playing in the stadthalle dietikon (power metal); (skipping that one because of lack of time)
• 05.12.2007: die ärzte are playing in the hallenstadion in oerlikon/zürich (fun punk);
• 14.12.2007: ensiferum, turisas and insania are playing in the z-7 in pratteln (viking metal).

unfortunately, i will miss finntroll playing in the z-7 on 05.12.2007…

in 2003, the finnish humppa metal band finntroll released an accoustic album called visor om slutet (songs about the end). unfortunately (for me), it took me four years to find out about it. it features a variety of folk songs: some rythmic, intense and melodic themes, some sound scapes which, when i close my eyes and let my thoughts go, paint beautiful pictures inside my head. it feels like roaming through ancient finnish forests, as in a fairy tale… so beautiful… meeting tweeting birds, trees swaying in the wind, trolls, chanting shamans… so many different instruments… if you have never listened to this, you definitely should. in my opinion, it’s worth every minute of time spend hearing it (even if you don’t like metal).

obviously, it works.