If there is one thing I am certain of, then it is that Fosel’s release The Difference Engine, is perhaps the gloomiest album of 2009 on Petcord, albeit a special quality of gloom:
Darkness combined with a cold and chilly atmosphere which provides inspiration for my phantasy and usually generates images somewhere between the faint green curtains of an aurora rising on the sky and the deep blue glow of Cherenkov radiation inside a nuclear reactor. This may had a significant impact on the cover art Marco and I were preparing for the release. Like our previous work, the cover comes along with a rather early nineties retro style, though the text alignment was partly inspired by covers that even go back several decades before that (hint: the late sixties ;-)).

Speaking of the music for a change, I feel the first impression of The Difference Engine may deceive. Granted, the lack of familiar parameters serving as orientation points is perhaps irritating at first glance. However the perception of micro-details comes with repeated listening and co-incides with a certain degree of addiction to recreating the imaginary scenery. Imagine this process as one’s eyes adjusting to the darkness after having been exposed to a bright light source and close your eyes. Each of the four songs provide a different quality of darkness, and they do not wear thin even after having been added to a playlist for weeks.

In the past, I wrote about how Marco and I opted to use the moniker “Synflict” for creating cover artwork. As of today, we officially added another dimension to our work and released our first common album Prismatine on Petcord – of course as Synflict. How could this happen? It started with some audio leftovers Marco had and experimented with. He sent me the files, I added some stuff to it and eventually it developed to something that seems superior to what we did in our solo projects. Does this sound familiar? It seems, the same synergetic effects were responsible for this as they were for the cover artwork, adding a real life dimension to the phrase “never change a winning team”.

The cover makes use of an unusual amount of red. The colour even dominates the entire canvas, which has more similarity to a pattern than a composition. If red translates to dissonance and the pattern with the degree of abstraction, it may even seem a plausible explanation. Since I’m only reflecting by the time the work has already been completed, not whilst creating it, I cannot really claim there was a master plan. Rarely is there such a thing as strategic calculation, it just happens and if the draft matches the music, it will be used. It might have looked differently on another day, with another mood or under different circumstances. Adjust your interpretation as you see fit for it.

A new release by a new artist on Petcord whilst retaining a general electroacoustic direction: 39 68 99 09 by Stig Inge Oy is a both intriguing and intense work, because it exposes the listener to emotions for which there don’t seem to be much room in today’s golden age of political correctness and triviality. This is even more interesting because the work isn’t overly dissonant by itself, but yet its way of “saying it” is hard to ignore. The creator of this work is Maciej Miskiewicz from Kraków in Poland and equipped with a love for acoustic intruments, which often form the base of his electroacoustic compositions.

The cover art was another cooperation with Marco Cervellin: As so often, Marco came up with a draft he didn’t mean to use ;-) and I was more convinced of than the actual main drafts he prepared. After having worked this version out the remaining things came up pretty fast. Maciej’s photo suggestions for the cover were gladly accepted by us because they fit the mood we had in mind.

Yesterday, the Petcord netlabel released Resonant, the second album of Austrian artist Fabio Keiner. Lasting almost 78 minutes (which makes it the longest Petcord release ever), it presents a collection of electroacoustic works with a rather dark timbre and cinematic qualities. I’m not going too much into an analysis or review here, because most of it has already been written down in the official liner notes (leaving little to add). The cover art is another Synflict branded co-operation between Marco and me, a creation that did not came into being easily. The idea of using a Möbius band like form dates back well into June, but we couldn’t turn it into a meaningful artwork at first. When we picked up the idea again, we still weren’t satisfied with our drafts, because they somehow put too much bloat around the form. We then gradually reduced the drafts and eventually wound up with a minimal, but effective formula. I particularly like the composition’s clarity and how the word “resonant” neatly interacts with the fading shapes, somehow illustrating the title’s meaning.

Yesterday, the Petcord netlabel released Solid State, a collection of pieces by US-based composer Greg Surges, ranging from electroacoustic to contemporary chamber music for both laptop and traditional ensembles. Having received a Bachelor of Fine Arts with honours in composition and music technology, his extensive formal education enables him to pursue a great variety of strategies. As a constant factor, an open form with variable elements prevails, leading to markedly different interpretations of the same work, as demonstrated by the two versions of “153 x 56″. Due to time constraints, the cover art was a solo work of mine (the first one since November last year – all others were co-operations with Marco Cervellin). It incorporated scores and screenshots of Greg’s works and reflects pretty well the music characteristics in my opinion.

Today, the Petcord netlabel released a work by Tim Salden, better known as Osoroshisa with the title Nanimo nai Wakusei. The music could be described as somehow related to drones, but incorporating quite a few influences, so that drone alone would be an inadequate description. Much of the music reflects subjects like loneliness and isolation and the empty planets it is referring to, may as well be synonymous for people in their own world.

The cover art was once again done by Synflict (aka. Marco and me) and required a lot of fine tuning with major changes even occuring in the final drafts. Though some ideas were present from the beginning, progress was rather slow and at some point, the front draft was even close to being abandoned altogether. This seems strange, because the artwork does not look like being the product of fierce struggling.

More releases are coming during the next weeks and I hope to be able to devote more time to updating my site, too.

Today, the latest work of Chilean composer René Muñoz Córdova, La arquitectura sónica de Amacelin & Luyelval (the sonic architecture of Amacelin & Luyelval), was released on Petcord. As part of the cover artwork, a poem by René was included:

Amacelin & Luyelval

Ellos se mueven al igual que los electrones
grabando los eternos caracteres
sobre los interminables muros invisibles.

Luego ellos me hablaron al oído
y me contaron acerca de todo lo que existe al otro lado de los muros
revelándome la existencia de los 9 portales de fuego
que nos conducen a los 4 mundos eternos.

Not everyone is fluent in Spanish (neither am I, mind you), so I thought it might be useful to add an inofficial English translation :

Amacelin & Luyelval

They are moving like electrons
writing down eternal characters
on endless invisible walls.

Then they whispered into my ear
and told me about everything there is on the other side of the walls
revealed the existence of nine gates of fire
which lead us to four eternal worlds.

I’m not sure whether this is an accurate translation, but if not, someone will eventually let me know ;-)

Just two weeks after the last release, another one went live on Petcord, this time featuring an artist that has been played on Leftob for a while and is an excellent match for the typical Petcord sound:

Chilean composer René Muñoz Córdova combines in electroacoustic abstraction with isolated elements from more conventional music genres: Field recordings, vocoder and speech synthesis voices, patches of strings, computer generated sounds, feedback or deconstructed samples of real instruments. In Obras Musicales an aural universe is created where dissonance and harmony can peacefully coexist.

source: petcord site

Apart from the music, Obras Musicales is also interesting, because it features Marco and me in our first appearance as Synflict, a project focusing on netlabel related design and artwork needs. Consequently, the artwork is more lavish than usual, featuring a folded front sheet that also contains lyrics and an inlet for the back of a CD case (requires disassembling of the latter, but is rewarded with a self made CD that can be found quickly on a shelf).

The liner notes already provide a summary of the music, so there is no need to add redundency in this post ;-)

Today, after having seen some rotation on Leftob, a new release on Petcord has finally seen the light of day: Slow Movements by the Austrian artist Fabio Keiner, a work that turns out to be difficult to classify:

It shares some characteristics with Drone, but clearly differs by its lack of inertia and repetition. An alternative approach may be to classify it as Dark Ambient, which again is conflicting with the abstract harmonies which rather bring up associations of crystalline space rather than misty vaults and feelings of distress. The treatment of space and dynamics in Slow Movements also hints at electroacoustic, as is the generative character of the music.

(Source: Release liner notes)

The work gains with repeated listening and interestingly even difficult to understand passages eventually resolve into more than listenable music. I suspect perhaps it is a bit like the eyes’ adjustment to darkness. In the beginning you do not see a lot but after a few minutes, a lot of contures and details start to turn up from the seemingly uniform mass.

There is an ambiguity concerning Slow Movements in that it both refers to interconnected units that define a whole (sometimes returning to previous patterns) and the infinity of variations that neither know a beginning nor an ending. And thus tracks are not remembered and recognised by phrases but instead by their character as a whole.

(Source: Release liner notes)

This is much like listening to a blackbird’s song: You cannot exactly determine a beginning or end, just a constant movement. However, you can immediately identify its characteristics, despite the fact that there is constant variation in its phrases.

The cover art was another cooperation between Marco Cervellin (of Wacky Southern Current fame) and me. The initial idea was a sequence of butterfly movements, which quickly inspired me to build the remaining scenery around it. Some time was spent on improving details and applying requested changes, until both we and Fabio Keiner were satisfied with the result.

One would think a search engine has a vital interest in not becoming a nuisance to webmasters if it tries to advertise paid listings for websites. In this case, any form of Black Hat SEO directed at potential webmasters should immediately backfire. And if someone does opt for Black Hat SEO, then one would probably do it right in order not to endanger one’s money backend. Neither can be said about an outfit calling themselves bigfinder.de, which were hitting my blog this morning from an ip range I must have overlooked (probably because no flavour of abuse had originated from there). Anyway, time to put up some evidence from the logfiles:

83.133.125.202 – - [16/Jan/2009:06:18:34 +0100] www.nodepet.com “GET / HTTP/1.0″ 200 42235 “-” “-”
83.133.125.202 – - [16/Jan/2009:06:18:35 +0100] www.nodepet.com “GET / HTTP/1.0″ 200 42235 “-” “-”
83.133.125.202 – - [16/Jan/2009:06:18:41 +0100] www.nodepet.com “GET / HTTP/1.1″ 200 42235 “http://www.BigFinder.de/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; de)”
83.133.125.202 – - [16/Jan/2009:06:18:41 +0100] www.nodepet.com “GET / HTTP/1.0″ 200 42235 “-” “-”
83.133.125.202 – - [16/Jan/2009:06:18:42 +0100] www.nodepet.com “GET / HTTP/1.0″ 200 17642 “-” “-”
83.133.125.202 – - [16/Jan/2009:07:00:39 +0100] www.nodepet.com “GET / HTTP/1.1″ 200 17642 “http://www.bigfinder.de/index.php” “T-Online Browser (Windows NT 5.1; U; de)”
83.133.125.202 – - [16/Jan/2009:08:04:08 +0100] www.nodepet.com “GET / HTTP/1.1″ 200 17642 “http://www.bigfinder.de/index.php” “Mozilla/3.01 (compatible;)”

As you can see, the bot does not look for robots.txt, constantly changes its user agent string and leaves fake referrers pointing at bigfinder.de. To me, this looks like referrer spam with badly falsified browser strings and the target sitting on the same address as the bot:

olliver@bunkiten:~$ host www.bigfinder.de
www.bigfinder.de has address 83.133.125.202

So who are bigfinder.de and what is their mission? According to http://www.bigfinder.de/ueber.php some firm called projectnet run by Gert Kambartel is behind this operation. Their goals look quite interesting (as in peculiar):

Vorbei sind die Zeiten der “Ranking-Olympiaden” !!!

Bei BigFinder.de gibt es kein Ranking mehr. Hier hat jeder Eintrag die gleiche Chance, gefunden zu werden. Die Einträge werden gemäß der eingegebenen Suchworte per Zufall ermittelt. Das heißt, daß keine Einträge mehr für “ewig” auf den vordersten Plätzen stehen. Jeder Eintrag wird statistisch gesehen genau so oft angezeigt, wie die anderen, egal, wie “groß” oder wie “bekannt” eine Seite ist.

(source: http://www.bigfinder.de/ueber.php)

This translates to:

Gone are the days of “ranking olympics” !!!
At Bigfinder.de a ranking no longer exists. Here, each entry has the same chance of being found. Entries are randomly determined according to the given keywords. That is, no longer are results on top positions “eternally”. Each entry is, statistically seen, displayed as often as any other, no matter how “large” or “known” a site is.

The notion I dislike is that there is some elite hogging up the search engines and this would be the only reason for some sites not to be found in search engines. Also this begs the notion of each site delivering the same degree of relevance for a search query, which is of course far from reality. Quite unsurprisingly, under http://www.bigfinder.de/mieten1.php you can find the bait for a guarantueed listing:

Können Sie sich vorstellen, in der größten und bekanntesten Suchmaschine auf Platz 1, 2 oder 3 zu stehen? Sie würden eine ungeahnte Menge an Besuchern auf Ihre Webseite bekommen. Davon träumen mit Sicherheit Millionen von Webseitenbetreibern, die alle etwas auf ihrer Webseite anzubieten haben.

(source: http://www.bigfinder.de/mieten1.php)

translation:

Could you imagine being listed at first, second or third position in the largest and best known search engines? You would get an inconceivable amount of visits to your website. Surely that is something millions of webmasters who offer something on their website are dreaming of.

Obviously, this is based on the notion that top ranking for any keyword results in a lot of traffic. High traffic only applies to top positions for highly competitive terms and even that does not automatically mean a high conversion rate for commercial websites. And there lies the core of the problem: ultimately it is the website and its content that matters.

And finally:

Und genau so funktioniert die Top-Positionierung bei BigFinder.de.
Sie mieten einen oder mehrere für Sie wichtige Suchbegriffe für je 10,00 EUR/Jahr (zuzgl. 19,00 % MwSt.)! Jedesmal, wenn dann ein User nach diesem Begriff sucht, erscheint Ihre Webseite auf einem der Plätze 1-3 in der Trefferliste.

(source: http://www.bigfinder.de/mieten1.php)

translation:

And this is how top-ranking at bigfinder.de works:
You rent one or several search terms that matter to you for Euro 10.00 per year (incl. 19.00 % VAT)! Each time a user is looking for this term your website will appear on one of the top three positions in the results returned.

So as a summary, bigfinder.de wants to make people believe that sponsored and organic search results are identical and top rankings in any search engine automatically result in lots of traffic. There is also the implication that each site is of the same quality and can convert traffic to sales equally. To me, this is clearly aiming at easily gullible folks with little knowledge about how the web actually works. Furthermore, there is a financial incentive for this “search engine” to leave phony marks in webmasters’ server logs.

Looking more closely, I wonder why the search engine has to prominently display the amount of domains and supposed number of concurrent visitors on its pages:

13.491.148 Domains, 169 Besucher online

(this is what it claimed at 10:38 h CET)

Combine this with the hourly fake visits and you cannot exclude the possibility that someone is trying to artificially inflate one’s relevance by means of fake numbers and visitors. This is something regulars of a major SEO forum in Germany have been wondering about for a while, too:

I once contacted this guy via email. This guy was snotty and proud of his peculiar site.

I sent him a list of prohibited sites. Since then, I no longer received “pseudo requests”.

translation by me, original source: BigFinder replaces OttoSuch (in German only)

Hello,
I own a homepage and noticed in my web statistics that some visitors originated from bigfinder.de. I then went to their site and rented several keywords for 10 Euros a year.

Now there are more “visitors” who reach my homepage via BigFinder. However, I suspect that BigFinder’s clicks on my site are automatically generated.

Not a single customer came to me this way. Via Google there are several regularly. I assume that this is technically feasible without any effort. But does anyone of you know more about that? Do other users suspect manipulation, too?

Does anyone know anything helpful about it?

translation by me, original source: Bigfinder Search Engine (in German only)

Like I wrote in my introduction: In case this is really a scam, it would be rather silly to have all requests originated from the same ip address as the official website and use badly faked browser strings. On the other hand, there is still a huge market of technically challenged and easily gullible webmasters who might end up paying the rent without getting anything in return. However, I don’t know whether it is a scam. There is merely some evidence suggesting that this search engine is intentionally planting fake referrers and there is a financial incentive for doing so. Additionally, there seems to be some kind of agreement that this engine does not result in real human visits, but even this might be the result of a biased sample.

What I do know, however, is that this bot exhibits an inacceptable behaviour and as it does not obey robots.txt there is no other way to opt out except of denying access to one’s website (or entire server).

Whois suggests the following about the ip range:

inetnum: 83.133.96.0 - 83.133.127.255
netname: LNCDE-GREATNET-NEWMEDIA
descr: Greatnet New Media.
country: DE
admin-c: FL1331-RIPE
tech-c: FL1331-RIPE
status: ASSIGNED PA
mnt-by: LNC-MNT
mnt-lower: LNC-MNT
source: RIPE # Filtered

person: Frazzetta Lindner
address: Greatnet New Media
address: Brentenstrasse 4a
address: D-83734 Hausham
address: Germany
phone: +49 1805 47328638
fax-no: +49 1805 444894696
nic-hdl: FL1331-RIPE
abuse-mailbox: abuse at greatnet.de
mnt-by: LNC-MNT
source: RIPE # Filtered

Greatnet is a German hosting outfit offering everything from websites to colocation, so they are safe to block without accidentally locking out human visitors. Plus you never know whether at some point in the future scrapers or web spammers will make this place their home and so the best prevention is to block first and make exceptions later.

Apache users on shared hosting may like to add

Deny from 83.133.96.0/19

to .htaccess or httpd.conf

Dedicated server owners may instead prefer to get rid of the noise altogether:

iptables -A INPUT -s 83.133.96.0/19 -i eth0 -p tcp -m tcp --syn -j REJECT

or the BOfH variant:

iptables -A INPUT -s 83.133.96.0/19 -i eth0 -j DROP