Books and Music in 2016

A new year starts, and with it my list of music and books for the previous year.

2016 was an interesting year musically. The year started with the release of Kokori's first album, Rootkit. Kokori, an industrial duo from which I am 1/2, had released several EPs and singles in the past, but Rootkit not only is our first album, but our best work so far, IMHO. Later in the year, "The Sky Is Concrete, The Stars Are Bullet Holes", one of the album's tracks, was also present on the "Passo A Passo" compilation, and Enough Records' CC Meeting mixtape. Also from my musical projects, Merankorii - my solo project - released the single "1666", 350 years after the Great Fire of London occurred, with a track that came from the 2014 album "Synthetic Works".

Matt Howden's projects "Sieben" and "7JK" had an excellent new album each. "The Old Magic", under the Sieben moniker, is available with the companion CD "The Other Side Of The River", which manages to be the highlighted disc from the bundle. While 7JK changed its formation slightly, the new album manages to be even more powerful than the first one, and from it I'd like to highlight the opening track "Liftoff For 7JK".

Sol Invictus is back, and will present us with a new album in 2017, one which I plan to get. For a band with such an huge discography and without a big sonority variation along the years, this is the kind of band one can easilly fall into skipping one or another release. However, in 2016 the single "The Last Man" was released, and boy - those are two strong and surprising tracks. I can't vouch for the album yet, but this single is a must-have.

The obscure and mystical project GVAR leaked again, this time the album "Mirroah". More mature than its debut "Vraii", the parallel-universe DVARish concept is kept strong, and GVAR stays as a must-follow project to every DVAR fan.

Luigi Rubino (probably best known as Ashram's pianist) released a new solo album, after its 2009 debut. The new album is not surprising - it packs what one would expect - but it is still a very pleasant album to listen again and again. Also unsurprising but excellent is the latest Ordo Rosarius Equilibrio album, "[Vision:Libertine] Part III - The Hangman's Triad". Conceptually and lyrically, they keep fresh and strong, as they keep being polishedly detailed sonoricly. While it would be hard for an ORE album to be surprising without them re-inventing themselves, this album is more cohese than their last few, almost competing with the genious "Make Love, And War" of 2001.

As far as books go, in 2016 I managed to read a bit more than in 2015, but still not enough. From those, I re-read the whole MegaTokyo series of Manga, and crossed it with the paralel series of books that are now being released as "Megatokyo: Endgames". Endgames is an MMORPG (some) Megatokyo characters play, and the events that happen in that virtual world obviously cross into their players' relationships... While the Endgames books can be read as fantasy novels, they wouldn't excel as such. But the fact that they're descriptions of what happens inside a virtual world - specially one that exists inside a fictional (Megatokyo) world entices me. With four volumes out there of the saga, I read three of them during 2016, and the fourth is alredy on my pile of books to read really soon.

Unsurprisingly, the rest of my list has Sci-Fi books. I've read and enjoyed Ernest Cline's two novels (Ready Player One and Armada), and picked up on a saga I was planning to read for a while now: the Enderverse. I read the Ender's Game a long time ago, but only in 2016 I decided to pick up the rest of the saga, reading the rest of Ender's Saga. It will be no surprise to have The Shadow Saga on my 2017 favorites list. Finally, I read "Altered Carbon", a book that was given to me. While this wouldn't probably be my kind of scifi, this futuristic crime novel was very enticing. You'll probably soon hear about it, despite it being from 2002, since Netflix is working on a TV series based on this saga.

If you want to read more stuff like this, check out my 2015 list. Otherwise... see you next year!

The End of Control

Last week I talked about Megatokyo [1] as an example of a "new era" book, a book which pages are released three times a week, for free, before the actual printed book is done and sent to the stores. I also did some kind of paralel between it and the music world, where bands are finding new ways of cutting off the middle man and interact directly with fans, making even more money and having their fans paying less. From getting paid to give music for free [2] to letting the fans decide the price of your album [3], the key in this new world is to know that you don't control your content, you just facilitate it to the former "consumers", now known as users.

Now, one of those know to advocate this new change of paradigm is Gerd Leonhard, that is now putting it into practice to the release of his new book "The End Of Control" [4]. The book, released as text (via mail, blog or RSS), PDF, mp3 or (real soon) video, will see a paper release, but only after the complete book is online, free. For now, you can read one chapter per week (to be released each monday), and I recommend you to do so, since the book seems to be a really good one... about this kind of things.

[1] - http://tinyurl.com/29fswb
[2] - http://tinyurl.com/2fvw2c
[3] - http://news.google.com/news?ncl=1121551540
[4] - http://www.endofcontrol.com

relax, we understand j00

Do you like music, movies and books, but you simply don't like to pay for them? Relax, we understand j00.

I've been advocating countless times that art should be free, but one of the most reactions I get is something like "oh, but artists should get money for their work". I try, in vain, to explain that giving the art for free doesn't mean that you'll get to money for it. Graphs and numbers show rising numbers on the money made by concerts and tours, but those cases are allways refuted with something like "what about the bands that don't act live?"... I also wrote about getting money from publicity, and was quite happy to see someone going in the right direction for it: two weeks ago I wrote about ReverbNation [1] giving 50% profit share for musicians registred there, which made musical projects as my own [2] start making profit while giving songs for free. But sometimes people just don't get it... They're too used to think of the industry that chokes art as if that industry was the only way to access to art.

So, today I'm going to talk about another example, and this time it's not music. Some of you just want to have access to everything, for free. Some of you prefer to buy the art, either because you prefer the physical item, or because you care about the artist and want to feed him, or both. Relax, we understand j00. As a matter of fact, understanding you is being able to satisfy both "markets": those who like to have free stuff and those you prefer the "classic way". MegaTokyo [3] is a webmanga and a manga. Well, it started as a webmanga, in 2000, started and continued free, and started gathering a legion of fans. (Almost) every monday, wednesday and friday you get one more page of story, and in the meantime you allways have a forum where fans discuss the story and try to predict where it is heading. Being free, in fact, was the factor that made it get its legion of fans, and, with it, and opportunity came for him to release those same strips (so, same story, just in paper) as books. From then until now already five numbers are out, and you can be sure than whenever there is enough strips to release a new one - oh - it will surely be released. See - despite all of the work being online, legal, for free, and despite that fact being announced everywhere in the books, MegaTokyo is the best selling original English-language manga, and the #3 graphical novel seller in USA. So, what to say about it? Is it being free hurting the sales, or - as a matter of fact - making it sell more? One thing is for sure: there are several books that have continuation, but if the next issue takes too long to be released, less people will buy it when it does. At least these cases are minimized by MegaTokyo, where you can allways keep reading, strip by strip, as the work is being done, three times a week...

I, for one, used to be a real fan of MegaTokyo, since 2001. I used to visit the website everyday, I would stay awake until way too late just to read a new strip, I was heavy involved in the forums and community around MT. Time passed and I started to have less time to check MegaTokyo, until the time I stopped being a regular reader. No problem - of course - I'm now a proud owner of the books, having a better way to read MegaTokyo. Oh, you prefer to save your money? No problem... relax, we understand j00.

[1] - http://tinyurl.com/2fvw2c
[2] - http://www.reverbnation.com/merankorii
[3] - http://www.megatokyo.com