Back when I worked for I-Net Bridge/Johnnic e-Ventures before the dot-com bubble I had a little Sun IPC SPARCStation at my disposal. It was one of the first machines that ran SparcLinux in South Africa, since I pretty much did a lot of the porting work for the peripherals myself.
I felt that music and audio streaming was the NEXT BIG THING, because I was also a partner in TheFridge (a nightclub). I researched audio streaming technologies. I pimped the little IPC with extra hardrives, and ran Apache, and a selection of seriously nasty perl scripts that could stream music. This little box was called http://beer.inet.co.za/ and it served for many years as the development team’s general testgrounds and the company’s internal fungrounds. We even ran an internal mailing list, and nntp server on the thing.
Of course, after management discovered the thing I was forced to shut it down, due to it’s popularity, and supposedly dubious content. I guess they didn’t appreciate me recreating a bad.attitude newsgroup ala JWZ.
I had to move my fungrounds to the interwebs. I started a series of “musical education” pages on an external webserver, and tried to replicate the fun that was had on beer.inet.co.za but it was just never the same. In fact, my https://rodent.za.net/me/ pages got me more takedown notices in a month than a badger sheds hair in a day.
So, in the spirit of something I did years ago, and with the “litigation free” hosting services of youtube.com, I present some more awesome music, and “musical education” albeit 8 years later.
With the advent of Youtube, I can now simply rescind all responsibility for content since I’m not hosting any of this… Haha!
I link largely for the music, not the videos. Hence the small video format. I’m sure you know how to make it bigger. Clicky Clicky, Hacky Hack. It’s not rocket science.
Covenant
Covenant is easily one of the most underrated electro bands. I’ve been a fan since I ran TheFridge. Covenant’s lyrics are appealling, thoughtful, and (most) of their music is the angry kind of calm that can only be compared to Depeche Mode.
“Bullet” had one of the best videos for it’s age. The Anton Corbijn style shots and matrix-like effects were simply awesome. Bullet is a thoughtful ballad executed with skill and balance.
“Go Film” was simply a clone of the beats and ideas behind Depeche Mode’s “Photographic” but it was certainly executed in style as only Covenant can do. “Go Film” was a dance floor hit at the club for many months. I remember girls coming up to me in the DJ booth asking for more of that “dancy depeche mode”.
| Bullet | Go Film |
|---|---|
Carter – The Unstoppable Sex Machine
Welcome to Punk, Brixton, and the great british cockup. Punk. Punk was the eighties, the tailend of the nineties and overall just great. Rebellion, reality, guitaring, anger and great lyrics all rolled into one. Carter “The Unstoppable Sex Machine” was one of the great theatrical punk-brit bands that ended the final season of punkhood.
The first video “Surfin USM” will put everything about Carter USM into perspective. It is from their live concert in Brixton. If you think you’ve seen people mosh about to pedestrian songs such as “Nelly the Elephant” and thought it wild, then you have not seen how insane “Surfin USM” becomes on a dance floor.
The famous intro: “When you’re younger, you can eat what you like, drink what you like and still climb into your 26 inch waist trousers and zip them closed. When you reach that age, 24, 25, your muscles give up, they wave a little white flag and without any warning at all you’re suddenly a fat bastard”. You fat bastard! You fat bastard!
Here’s the song continuing from the video:
Inspiral Carpets
“This is how it feels” – was covered by Carter the Unstoppable Sex machine. The Inspiral Carpets version is the best though… Just imagine driving down a long dark dirt road whilst on holiday in Stilbaai and shouting the lyrics at the top of your lungs.
This was one of the songs that expressed 400% of how I felt at the time, right after writing matric examinations, and fluxing in that space of “what the hell am I going to do now ?