pleasantly surprised to see that portishead (some of you kiddies may not remember them, as their last album came out 11 years ago) released a new album. i bought it without having heard a note and was so not disappointed! brilliant stuff: sounds that by all means should be wrong so deftly squeezed into exactly the right places...and of course, beth's haunting vocals acting as the glue that holds it all together. if you like the occasional trip along the bleeding edge of electronica, you should look into it...

enjoy the summer!

-j

greetings, programs!

(the sci-fi geeks among you will appreciate the "tron" reference, ha ha!)

well, it took a while, but after much auditioning and considerable struggle, i am proud to announce a successor to nazimova, the dearly departed powerbook! i try to stay basically neutral on the whole never-ending mac vs. pc debate, but i gotta say that my brief experience with a pc laptop was not at all fun. basically, it was like trying to write music with a wet noodle. i got pro tools to run on the pc, the only problem was it wouldn't actually play back anything but lovely white noise - a bit too avant garde for the darkly dreaming project. many pc evangelists told me of the wonders of the new and exciting music creation software available for the windows platform, though it gave me pause to think that a couple were named after hallucinogenic hippy drugs and breakfast cereal. i found that just about every program i installed on the infernal pentium 4 was just not quite ready for prime time. to be fair, reason worked like a champ on the pc, but to be honest, i gotta have my logic pro to be a happy camper.

thank god for ebay! i finally managed to find a reasonably priced "pre-owned" g4 laptop, who i named "garbo", and she looks like she will fit the bill quite nicely. why a used computer, you say? not to burst any starry-eyed bubbles, but synthpop is not exactly the most lucrative genre to specialize in and to afford a brand-spankin' new mac would have required me to rob a bank, sell a kidney, and make about 100 trips to the plasma donation center. i like macs, but do they really have to cost more than a kia?

so, the point of all this rambling is that with garbo on the job, work has begun on the follow up to "the stuff of nightmares", tentatively titled "so beyond therapy". for those that follow my other band, neurepublik, this also means that brad & i can resume work on the "neu whirled order" album as well - finally! happy happy joy joy :)

and now, on to news item 2...

just got the word today that the modeified 7 depeche mode cover cd is now taking orders. darkly dreaming contributed a version of "love in itself". here's the track listing of the 2-cd release (from the modefied myspace page):

MODEified By 7 (disc one)

01 - Higher Love (Monastery Mix) - James D. Stark
02 - Two Minute Warning - A New January
03 - Television Set ('08) - love|less
04 - Here Is The House - The Echoing Green
05 - Enjoy The Silence - Kilna
06 - Love In Itself - Darkly Dreaming
07 - Things You Said - Endless Comes Later
08 - Nothing's Impossible - Lakeside X
09 - Lie To Me - Storybox
10 - But Not Tonight - Dossiers Secrets
11 - The Sun & The Rainfall - Blind Before Dawn
12 - World In My Eyes - Terminal Bliss
13 - Photographic - Louis Guidone
14 - Only When I Lose Myself - Jason Coy
15 - Suffer Well - Perihelion + Dasein
16 - Walking In My Shoes - Northern Mars
17 - Stripped (The Honeymoon Mix) - Tony Court
18 - Sweetest Perfection - Fuzzy Monsters

MODEified By 7 Again (disc two)

01 - Stripped (Intro) - CoveInsight
02 - Precious - Osc1
03 - Lie To Me - Polystar
04 - I Am You (MODEified Mix) - Color Theory
05 - Policy Of Truth - Phase Theory
06 - Sister Of Night - Opium
07 - Happiest Girl - Rafi Kharman
08 - New Dress - Interferencia
09 - A Question Of Time - Christian Dannie Storgaard
10 - But Not Tonight - Envy The Machine
11 - Here Is The House - Encomium Effect
12 - Blasphemous Rumors - Cliché
13 - Lillian - Solar Plexus
14 - Any Second Now - Synthetic FM featuring Purveyor
15 - Stories Of Old - Fuckware
16 - It Doesn't Matter Two - Das Overman Projekt
17 - It's No Good (Encore Mix) - love|less

so there you have it. all the news that's fit to print. thanks, as always, for your continued support, and you'll be hearing from me again soon.

-jeff

i have received no less than 20 requests this past week from people pretending to be the myspace tom dude. what's up with that? i mean, seriously - if you wanted to pretend to be someone, would you really pick tom?

greetings all!

allow me to welcome you all to 2008! this year is undoubtably on track to be the best ever...

in honor of the year gone by, here's some random tidbits from 2007 (& some just off the wall statements):

- a lot more people like synthpop than i would have ever imagined
- "the stuff of nightmares" is in the top 5 of eurodance albums at www.cdbaby.com
- ...also top five in synthpop at www.payplay.fm
- music videos take quite a lot of work
- the majority of sales of darkly dreaming cds are to fans outside the u.s.
- mustangs suck in the snow
- i really have no time for tv anymore - except "dexter"
- blue and purple drive me quite mad
- everyone should have at least one cat
- time has a way of filtering out the crap
- how i love text messaging...
- couldn't tell you who won the world series or superbowl (& frankly don't care)
- blaqk audio put out an incredible cd
- which came first: people with horrible musical taste or awful radio stations?
- surprises are wonderful
- black goes with everything
- are we done now with this rap thing? seriously...
- computers are not invincible
- there are some people who will just always be clueless
- three words: dark chocolate rocher
- hell is lurking under about 3 feet of ice these days
- go ahead, believe the hype (you know you want to)
- i was wrong: soulmates do exist
- i liked penguins before they were cool
- my mind goes peculiar when i'm tired
- sometimes you start a blog with a purpose, but find that by the time you get to the end, it's just a rambling unintelligible mass of words...

...& to all a good night!


-jeff

cut my hair about a week ago. i can see how one would think that this is really useless trivia, but i've been looking over other bands' message boards and have noticed that most people seem to care more about an artist's hairstyle than anything else.

so, there ya go: it's really short & i like it.

have a great weekend...


-jeff

found this out the other day...if you have a mac-formatted ipod, don't try to install a software update when attached to a windows pc. trust me.
doh!

-jeff

as you probably already know, darkly dreaming is a side project of my other band, neurepublik. it was inevitable that the side project would itself spawn another side project...



...enter the new darkly dreaming side project, hello pretty pretty. this new band is a long-distance collaboration between myself and robert johnson (aka stars and satellites). for those of you into trivia, robert is the brother of brad johnson, neurepublik guitarist.

feel free to check out the hello pretty pretty myspace page. there's a preview track up so that you can see what it's all about.

thanks for reading! party on dudes!

-jeff

so, im sitting in the theater on halloween waiting for nightmare before christmas in 3d to start and posting a blog with my phone. how cool is that ?