I’ve got both good and bad news for you. Both regard an artist which has been somewhat defining in the Electro/minimal genre, at least for me: paniq.

Offering a mix of various styles, ranging from hip-hop even Doctor Steel would be proud of to downright simple demoscene tracks, he released 7 albums over the last 7 years - all of which are available now as free download.

And now for the side of the coin: paniq does not exist anymore. Due to the release of an Apple™ iPod product of the same name he decided to put an end to the original music. Leonard Ritter, however is still producing music and art using different names. Some of his most recent artworks and pictures can be found on his deviantArt account, apart from that his blog seems to be updated on a regular basis.

Enjoy the music, however.

Some short notes on myself, my friends and other recent developments:

• my dear friend Jasiri/Benjamin is visiting the Cheetah Conservation Fund Namibia - keep track of his doings at his blog
• new domains have been bought (p.e. Fleckenfell.de)
• the blog software was updated yesterday
• Blood Red Sky obtained a new singer, Martzl, leaving the background vocals to me
• my graduation is around the corner, spring 2009
• the good olde Epiphone SG400 Vintage guitar I own will be refurbished and customised
• some t-shirt designs I made have gone into printing, namely the Duma design - drop me a line if you are interested
• the next month is full of class test, presentations and surgery, so I may be too stressed to release another update soon

That’s it for now, I guess.

So I decided to spend a weekend on the road. I use to do this from time to time, helps me to get new ideas and sort my life out. But - and here comes the pain - due to a certain lack of money I took the train. Now, I am not going to rant about the non-existing sense of time from which every single train driver suffers, no - this time it’s been my fellow passengers who made me do this.
First off - I am used to public transport. For years it has been my only option for travelling, and it is still my first choice for long-distance trips. Other passengers MAY be annoying, but there is close to nothing a good mp3-player, an interesting book and pepper spray can’t fix. Not this time. I have got all three basic necissities fulfilled - armed with Metallica’s Death Magnetic, Pullman’s The Subtle Knife and a small can of self-defense weaponry also known as mace. But Murphy’s always around as it seems, and so he turned up and decided for a Nazifest to take place.

This may sound a little harsh, but let me explain:

Friday, as I started my journey, I came across the beautiful town of Dortmund intending to spend awful lots of money in an Irish pub. But being able to spend money on Guinness, chips and cider somehow involves GETTING into the pub in the first place. The 45-minute train ride itself was pretty uneventful and time just flew by. Yet, the first thing I saw when getting off the train, were black-white-red flags, representing the remaining national movement of Germany - politically known as the Nationale Partei Deutschlands (NPD, National Party of Germany), which is famous for its infamous predecessors of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP, Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party). Those where carried by regular neo-fascists, obviously not intending to cause any harm, so I just kept on ignoring them. After all it is nothing more than a mere political opinion. That was before I eventually left the train station, where I was struck by a stunning view: The whole walkway to the city was blocked by young people dressed in black waving NPD-flags and banners bearing “nationalistic” symbols. The whole scene was surrounded by about 50 officers of the local police force kindly asking pedestrians to avoid the whole “demonstration” and just take another route into the city. So the national movement is on the rise again and are granted the “right” to block the main access to one of Germany’s bigger cities. The actual countermarch of Greens and Liberals was but a joke, so I walked straight to the pub. Surprisingly enough nobody even cared - as opposed to the last time I encountered a white nationalist, who immediatly tried to cleanse his white country and beat up non-aryian scum like me. Needless to say he got his ass kicked and carried away by police. Maybe they were still trying to do things in a peaceful way, propagating “socialistic national” views and amusing people like me.

Yet it got worse on Saturday. I spent the night in Hagen, so I had the choice of either taking the train via Dortmund or Düsseldorf. I choose the latter to avoid further contact with the far-right wing. Far from it! The train was crowded with Nazis and Gabbers, shouting racist slogans at random people. They did not bug me, as before, but still emitted an awful lot of annoyment.
So now I am stuck with 14 year old wannabe-Nazis talking about World of Warcraft, how their Teamspeak server collapsed and their iPod battery does not last long enough for their crappy music, which has been hammering in my brain for about 30 minutes now. Cheers.

I think I am really taking the car next time. It might be expensive, but I am definitely willing to pay €10 for silence and my very own political view.

And excuse me if this rant appears a little bit obscure, but it has been written on-train and in a rush.

Just some advertising: Me and my band are playing a little concert at the Helvete Metal Club in Oberhausen, NRW. It’s 5 bands for 5€, so you’re paying but 1€ per band - I think we’re worth it. And if not you can still get drunk.

There’s also a flyer available for download here.

Life’s ups and downs..once you’ve convinced yourself everything’s just fine something pops up and changes every last inch of your known universe. And, as changes are utterly gregarious, more and more of those “somethings” will appear.

So here we are now: I’ve left my band just after having recorded a demo, found a new one within hours. Thus I’m playing the guitar for Blood Red Sky now, a fun-based death-metal crew.

I’ve picked up drawing again, this time using a Wacom Graphire 4.

And, albeit failing to order a ticket in time, I got my Wacken Open Air ticket by now and am going to be around Wacken for about 3 or 4 days before the festival starts. I’ve not yet decided what camp I’ll stay in, so I’m open for invitiations.

Last but not least I’m engaging myself in modding - I participate in a project to use an old radiator (diameter about 1m) for water-cooling. Photos will follow asap.

Just a short update. I’m currently busy writing my research paper on cheetahs, writing exams and recording an album.

So the next article here will appear somewhere around mid-March, maybe some weeks earlier.

I’ve really been thinking about the topic this time, and actually wrote a quite different review at first - but that’ll remain non-public till the height of the season when yuletide depressions pops up once again and everyone’s hitting hard rock bottom. So here’s something to entertain you along the way towards winter solstice: Webcomics. There a thousands of it, and I’m reading quite a bunch day by day. Thus I’m presenting you: My Top-7 of Webcomics (as by now).

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A new week, a new list of recommendations. This time I’m focusing on bands of different kind - some Funk, some Metal, some Ambient, but alltogether somewhat different, an their music is available for free.

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There are like 5 millions blogs out there about someones private lifes - everyone can write a diary. So I’ll just add a section called Recommendations, which will rate everything worthy, from plain Flash movies to sophisticated machinery such as guitars and amplifiers.

As I’m lazy tonight I will start off with something very simple: Websites. Following a digest of last week’s best offerings.

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Alright, I’ve finally managed to become a trendwhore. But as I dislike communities such as MySpace but nevertheless enjoy writing inane malarkey I think a blog will do better than my deviantArt Journal, which I used to abuse in the past.

So cheer up fellas, there’s no more ranting going on in my dA (or any other accounts the like)! Instead, it’s all going to be written here, on my private piece of virtual toilet paper waiting to be flushed down the drain.