three years after releasing ghost reveries, opeth released their 9th observation, called watershed.
it is opened by the beautiful, instrumental coil, sung by mikael akerfeld and nathalie lorichs. this is followed by the intense, heavy tune heir apparent, which i already have been able to listen to live two times. after that, the lotus eater follows, another heavy track with lots of proggy interludes which was already available for download some time ago. track #4 is burden, a melodious, more mellow, proggy track, the first half of it being sung by mikael, the second part being instrumental, with an accoustic guitar finally shifting downwards, until an abrupt strange ending. then, porcelain heart, which was already released as a video before, starts. again, alternativing between loud and quiet, beauty and wildness. after that, hessian peel, starting mellow, beautiful. then, after a small piano solo phase, the brutality returns, in its beautiful complexity, and complex beauty, the end reminding me a bit of the end of sentenced‘s no one there. finally, hex omega launches, beginning heavy, though slow, turning more mellow, changing back to heavy, alternating. pure beauty, floating through the air, crawling down my ears.
i hate making such statements, but for me, this is the best release for this year. definitely. even though the year’s just half gone. watershed is simply ingenious, such a beautiful mix of death metal brutality, progressive rock; this is audible aesthetics. so damn beautiful.

recently, moonsorrow released an ep called tulimyrsky, featuring a 30 minute song called tulimyrsky, a metallica cover (for whom the bell tolls), two old demos (taistelu pohjolasta and hvergelmir) and a merciless cover (back to north). the main track tulimyrsky can be seen as a sequel to last year’s viides luku: hävitetty. again, it begins with a slow, melodious, mystic atmospheric part, lasting 3:45 minutes, until a scream fades in from far away, guitars and drums kicking in, finally launching a black metal thunderstorm after five minutes, evolving into a stream of brutality, speed, piercing melodies. then, later, the music gets slower, less brutal, still intense. a speaker telling a tale. then, the action returns, sounding heroic, somehow, until it fades out into a beautiful, orchestral and melodic piece of music. beautiful.
the two demos feature pretty black metallic sounds, still very good though. moonsorrow is really one of the bands which started as a success and continued to be a success over the years. finally, the two covers are pretty ok, too. and, tulimyrsky is the longest ep i ever saw, having 68 minutes of playing time, from which 30 minutes are the main song, tulimyrsky. again, probably one of the best releases this year.

after five (long) years of silence, tiamat released a new album, amanethes. when i listened to a few samples around one month ago, i didn’t like it too much. i still bought it (hey, it’s a tiamat album!) and, after listening to it a few times, the ice melted, turned into fire. this album is amazing. heavy, dark, gothic. probably one of the best releases this year.

i was staying in hannover this weekend, with some friends. we were staying in a kind of hostel there. as probably no one would be there to hand us the keys, we were instructed to check out safe number 3 in the entrance, having the code 3456. sounds really complicated, does it? well, everything worked good, we got our keys. later, someone was trying to open it again, but accidently shifted the code and typed in 2345 instead of 3456. it made “click” again but, surprisingly, door number 3 didn’t opened. after trying all the possibilities, we noticed that door 2 opened. well, we then tried combination 1234 to see that it opens door 1, and 4567 to see that it opens door 4. well, and now guess the combination for door 5 and 6 and 7 and …
do i have to comment on this any further?

today i visited the rock sound festival in huttwil, switzerland. just for one day though, with one specific aim: to see the second band, opeth. before opeth, black tide played, which was ok. after opeth, the headliner for this evening played, namely avantasia was playing, from which we basically just saw the beginning of the first song they played, when we decided to leave (so guess how much we liked it).
ok. having seen opeth just recently, i was in particular curious on what they would play this time. unfortunately, the set list was pretty similar to the last one: they started with demon of the fall, continued with master’s apprentice, then with baying of the hounds, then to rid the disease, wreath, heir apparent and the drappery falls. and again, the sound quality and in particular the mixing was pretty suboptimal. but, an important difference was the denseness of people. the hall in which the concerts took place was filled, but with enough gaps to be able to breathe without problems (and not even being touched most of the time). and, there was no mosh pit. so one could stand in peace, enjoy the music, and throw some hair around without having to fear to be stomped to death or getting injured otherwise.
though there was another bad thing. namely, the infantile behaviour of some people in the audience, most notably by whistling loudly (which is really nice if people do that next to your ear, big fuck you‘s to them) or start clapping rythmically to certain parts of the music (hey, is this musikantenstadl?!)… well, shame on you, guys.
anyway. this trip was definitely worth it. opeth rocked the house again, and even though i already heard that set list, i still enjoyed it a lot. probably in particular also because of the way nicer atmosphere. and, mikael promised that opeth will come back in the end of this year! :-) and, last not but least, i had really nice companions. not being alone at concerts rocks!

somehow, it’s funny that people don’t complain when planes get delayed for two hours, but almost start crying when a train is say 30 minutes late…

sometimes, i really hate computers. in particular, when wanting to hear music on my macbook, which runs osx. so far, i haven’t found any good music player.
the first thing i tried is itunes. it seems to be nice, but it’s support for an externally managed music library (i want to synchronize the library between several computers, whence i cannot let itunes organize the library) is sucking. there is a way to scan an existing directory with music, but it is incredibly slow. maybe one second per file? at least, this is not acceptable.
on linux, i’m using amarok, which has a lot of bugs, but runs pretty neat otherwise. (so far the best thing i found.) version 2.0 is supposed to be available on osx, too, but i’ve waiting for that one since more than a year, and it’s still not there. there’s a version which you can compile yourself, but it will compile for more than 24 hours, as it requires all the kde libraries. i don’t want to do that.
another choice is exaile, an amarok clone for gtk (gnome), which i have to try under linux. at least, under osx, i’ve not been able to run it, i have several python versions installed due to fink and darwinports, but it needs some more libraries and i don’t want to spend hours or days or weeks to find out which ones and how to install them.
well, and then, there’s xmms, a winamp 2.x clone, more or less dead for a long time. but i got it installed (via fink or darwinport, forgot which one), but my version features non-readable mp3 id3 tags and certain other quirks. but at least, it runs and plays music.
it really, really annoys me that it seems not to be able to install a decent player without spending lots of time. why on earth no one is able to provide a precompiled package for amarok? or make exaile run on osx? or any other more or less decent music player? why just itunes and xmms?!
i have even considered throwing osx away and installing something like ubuntu on my macbook, but that also sucks, as ubuntu might have problems with the wireless network, and then i have to find out how to set up an encrypted hard disk, which is possible but requires some more work than just five minutes.
when does the new age of computing begins, where one does not has so much trouble anymore?
i’m completely pissed of. seriously.

on the third day of the ants, we had half a day off. some of us took the chance to make a small hike to sundance canyon on that afternoon.

on the way to sundance canyon.

to reach the sundance canyon, one has to walk a bit through beautiful nature.

sundance canyon.

the first picture still belongs to the way to the canyon. the canyon itself is going upwards, a small river is floating downwards. it’s pretty steep, as you can see. when one reaches the top, one gets a pretty neat view.

on the way back.

the way back featured several other great views.

finally, we reached the banff hot springs, which are not in use anymore to ensure the living of the banff springs snail. this is a kind of snail which basically only lives at exactly this place.

the banff springs hotel.

after returning to the conference center (which involved a stop in banff and drinking some beer), we took a small walk to the bow river, from where one has a good view on the banff springs hotel.

the bow falls.

another thing one can see from there are the bow falls, a pretty low (just a few meters) waterfall.

well, last but not least, a really big thanks to all involved in making this trip possible!

this week, i was attending the ants. that’s not a conference on ant colony optimization and swarm intelligence, but the eighth instance of the algorithmic number theory symphosium, held in banff, canada.
banff is situated in the canadian part of the rocky mountains, whence one has a pretty neat sight:

here are some impressions from the conference center facilities. the first is a shortcut to the dining hall, the second the professional develop center, and the third one a pathway inbetween:

the next two photos show a view from inside the professional develop center, where we were housed, and me together with my poster:

this conference has been really great. i had lots of fun, learned a lot, met a lot of nice folks (again). and some more.