One of the most annoying characteristics of referrer spam is the clutter it leaves in Apache’s access log files, making analysis of them nearly pointless. But Apache would not be Apache if there were not a work around for it. Thanks to Mod SetEnvIf we have the choice of looking at client headers with regular expressions and in the event of a match register an environmental variable. This sounds quite useless at first glance, because we would expect any sort of immediate action instead. But I can assure you it is not, because the same way we can write

Deny from 192.168.0.0/24

we can also check for the variable’s existence and regulate access depending on the outcome:

Deny from env=spam

or use it for creating special logfiles only for matches or the opposite:

CustomLog /var/log/httpd/test.example.com.access.log env=!spam

And based on this property we are now able to isolate unwanted referrer spam or autoposting spambots from our access.log and get a handy source for looking up bad behaving visitors to take appropriate action (like firewalling or merely denying access to them). In order to make everything work, we need root access to httpd.conf, so those without a dedicated server may not be able to organise their log entries like this.

Ok, ready? Fine, then let us get started. At first a summary of what we are trying to accomplish:
- Create a set of SetEnvIf rules that will be used to check incoming requests
- If a requests meets the criterion of being unwanted, write it into the block log
- In case it is a legitimate request write it into the access log

I skip the section about explaining what SetEnvIf is and what good it can do for you, so in case you lack the knowledge you may have to study the Apache manual first. But fear not, if you are familiar with regular expressions you surely will quickly get into it. What we now have to consider is the location of our rules: It could be either httpd.conf or .htaccess files and each decision can have its advantages:

Everything in httpd.conf is loaded once on start up (or each time you reload the server and force it to reread its configuration file) and then kept in memory as long as the server is running. Thus things that principally need to be done like some permanent redirects or search engine friendly links via mod rewrite rules are best kept here.

.htaccess however is read each time a directory is accessed. Therefore any changes made here are taken into effect immediately. But due to the way this file works, a huge load of rules can considerably slow down the server, so you only want to keep things that change very often and put as much as possible into your httpd.conf. To get back to the subject, our preferred location of the ruleset should be httpd.conf of course, since spammy keywords in referrer strings are very unlikely to change over time.

In case there is not already a section with SetEnvIf rules we create one now by adding the following scheme:

<IfModule mod_setenvif.c>
  SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent "Indy Library|OmniExplorer" spam
  SetEnvIfNoCase Referer "^http://([0-9a-z_.\-]*(poker|casino)\.)" spam
  SetEnvIf Remote_Addr "^69\.31\.(79|93|132)\.[0-9]{1,3}$" spam
</IfModule mod_setenvif.c>

Note that this is only an example, of course there is no limit to the level of complexity you want to apply to your regexp rules, and there are other environmental variables that can be used for filtering as well. Now each time one of our rules is triggered, the variable “spam” will be defined and a query for it will return true (boolean comparison).

Next location we are heading to is the virtual host section of our httpd.conf:

<virtualhost 192.168.0.1>
ServerAdmin webmaster@example.com
DocumentRoot /usr/local/www/test/
ServerName test.example.com
ErrorLog /var/log/httpd/test.example.com-error.log
CustomLog /var/log/httpd/test.example.com-spam.log combined env=spam
CustomLog /var/log/httpd/test.example.com-access.log combined env=!spam

Notable additions/changes are marked bold. The negation of a match is no typo, it is really written like this (those familiar with programming will be slightly irritated as most languages use != to mark a negative comparison).

Now there may be more complex comparisons that require the usuage of Rewrite rules and then an entry, although blocked, will remain in our access log. Luckily, Mod Rewrite even takes such situations into account and allows setting environmental variables by using the E flag. Which means we can continue using our “spam” variable, only that we have to assign “1″ as value for it in order to indicate that this variable has been set. An example as illustration:

# spambot detection
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ?lng= [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [E=spam:1,L]

The only thing we need to take care of with this combination of SetEnvIf and Rewrite rules is that we still have the final Deny from env=spam line, so that the detection of the variable actually results in denying access to our server (or whatever action seems appropriate).

And voila, now we have accomplished the following: Spam will be written to a separated logfile and no longer appears in access log itself, thus we will be able to analyse our traffic again.

En Fin Terrible could have been a breakthrough, but this route was cut off after my departure from TestTube, of whom I was even part of for a few weeks. It did not work out in the end and hardly a day went by without an argument, mainly because the label owner was constantly breaking the rules he had agreed upon and thus no organised work was possible. Letting things behind was no easy decision for me as my involvement came along with the convenience of being able to present my music to a sizable audience (whether they actually listen to what they download is a different story, but something you cannot verify anyway), but in the end leaving the golden cage was rewarded with the satisfying feeling of maintaining one’s independence. This notion of freedom probably was a key factor for En Fin Terrible’s complexity, as there was no longer a reason to care about “consumer friendliness” or increase the odds of getting accepted by a netlabel.

On a technical level there are irregular metrics built around a phrase. Perhaps the equivalent to writing down a thought in its full glory rather than turning it into a strictly formed poem. These phrases themselves, however, are embedded into a rather “traditional” framework, with transpositions, reversals, palindromes, contraction and expansion. Another idea I followed was constant variation and shifting of minor details with each iteration of a phrase: This is analoguous how humans memorise events in their life, the basic idea and its cornerstones are maintained, but details and emphasis is constantly changing, so that over time multiple facets of an event are unveiled. As a whole, events in En Fin Terrible are organised in a thesis – antithesis – synthesis scheme known from sonatas (I keep it at a simple level so laymen can catch a glimpse of my idea). Only that it is applied to any significant sonic event that contributes to the composition’s structure.

The music can be anything from soft and gentle up to harsh and abrasive, depending on the logic behind its progression. This is a parallel to my photography: everything that has a contrastive but somehow balanced structure is worth keeping. Whether a recognisable object is involved (or tonality is maintained) is entirely irrelevant as this is not what makes the difference, but the interaction and spread of contrasts. Dissolving the object may be irritating to those not familiar to this concept, but it happens all the time whenever you are drawing, painting or snapping pictures. You bypass the logical half of your brain to perceive things how they really are, as a undefined mass with endless shades, variations and degrees of events. Ideally this is a coordinated balance between rationality and irrationality, in that the former applies cosmetical corrections to the latter and puts it into a logical context of a whole.

And then, provided you have a sufficient level of imagination and talent, you accidentally produced an artwork of value. Art is the discovery of the unconscious and inexpressible and its transposition to an abstract language as communication offer. Whether the perception of the audience is the same as ours should not matter, because our artwork is what the individual recipient finds in it. We, as the creator of an artwork are not involved in this process, other than providing a vessel for other people’s associations, and thus cannot dictate how the audience has to feel about or judge our work.

Another release from Enough Records that could use some public exposure is Boiar – a Portuguese collective exploring experimental electro acoustic electronics – and their latest release Para Piratear in particular. The opener starts quite irritating with isolated beat fragments that saw more than one ring modulator during their processing lifetime and try to find themselves together for a mutant dub abstraction. Echo loops of glitchy and harsh sound patches provide convincing reasons for not touching funny looking pills from unknown strangers at the chill-out party.

Boiar have adapted both a mature, consistent and also confrontative style, that rejects consumer friendly elements that could broaden their base of listeners. Yet they also have almost lyrical moments like in rodeada por múmias amo-te where a sad theme is ghastly tortured by heavy filter processing and creates an authentic theatre of pain. Madeira vernelha even pays a visit to daemonic spoken word performance to a Goth inspired industrial sound (Einstürzende Neubauten?). A well placed contrast after the rather distressful, but amazing middle section of the release provides the final track with a more coherent go at the dubmatic genre and even features a subterranean low, stomach shaking bassline.

Boiar’s Para Piratear is a tough going for people who prefer lighter colours and broad daylight, but their blend of styles to an unique mixture of their own is surely worth listening and those familiar to the darker side of the moon probably take a liking for this six track release pretty soon.

Arciv ev Noise is a project from Poland that released their latest work maintenant (French for “now”) on the experimental Enough Records netlabel. Not much seems to be known about them on the Internet (or I was too silly to look at the right places), except that their music is described as dark ambient and experimental drone. But let’s quickly forget these superficial tags, as they omit a lot of individuality that shines through the entire release, like their lavish cover artwork, which exhibits a highly skilled level of typographic design and a fine sense for contrasts.

At first a view from 10′000 metres above: The work makes sense as a whole in its determined play order and is remarkable for not having any weak spots despite its length of nearly 60 minutes. There are no contradictions in style, and whilst arrangements remain lean they provide enough events to not become monotonous or even annoying. Although the dark and tragic character of the music is prevailing in all tracks, everything is well balanced here: Just as much hovering chords or noise trapped in echo loops as necessary to maintain the darkness but at the same time sufficient alterations and contrasting elements to avoid a repetitive liturgy. A lot of Power-/MacBook “it-is-art-because-I-said-so” lightshow improvisateurs could learn a lesson or two from Arciv ev Noise’s approach of describing a lively scenery without resorting to platitudes like ten boring minutes of footsteps walking down a museum hall recordings.

A view on details: There seem to be several references to contemporary Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki which become apparent in culmination points of dense tone clusters and slow motion like modulations. Even though musical structures are sometimes stretched close to the breaking point, they still remain recognisable as such. Of course, there are also attributes that can be associated with contemporary electro acoustics like field recordings drowning in echo, backwards running noise snippets and the obligatory vault sound, albeit a sophisticated variant that differentiates between fore- and background (varying degree of reverberation). There may not be an easy access to Arciv ev Noise’s music and it only reveals its full potential after having listened to it several times. But once caught in it, there are a lot of additional details to discover with each new turn.

If I were to assign a movie scene to maintenant then it would more or less read like: Abondonned ruins of a former civilisation. Someone in ragged clothes is creeping along the remnants of walls, seeking shelter from a cold, biting wind. A skeleton buried in snow, a washed out doll. And straight ahead a winding, snow covered road to an unknown destination. In other words, maintenant is a fantastic and inspiring release, which I can highly recommend for downloading to those who are neither afraid of experimentation nor complication and enjoy creating their own sceneries in their mind whilst listening to music.

Rain is a pretty music claims the French netlabel Rain Music (quel harsard) and tries to prove this assertion with three arguments from three different artists:

Menta by vector size starts quietly with clicks and crackles before chopped glitch samples in the tradition of Oval gather momentum. Ambiguous tone shifting with 9th, 11th and 13th chords and a nervously raving subsonic bassline are at pains of restoring the original look and feel of the post 94 Diskont phase, but one cannot ignore the limitations that come along with imitating misunderstood aesthetics, like predictability, contradictions and inconsistencies in the resulting music. Consequently the track wobbles along for another eight minutes before it escalates to a rather embarrassing final with a broad “orchestration”.

Gabriel Hernandez mourns over the rain of a sad summer – as the title pluie d’été triste goes in English – and manages to fill over nine minutes with the nerve-racking tension of falling raindrops. At times the monotony is interrupted by chirping insects, changes of sound characteristics as result of the rain’s intensity changes or water dripping from the roof top very close to the microphone. Certainly exciting minutes for ongoing meteorologists and entomologists, but from a musical perspective I miss the kind of structures that would turn this recording into the result of an intellectual abstraction process.

Finally Jez Riley investigates the question about a possible relationship between Zither & Rain and his findings seem quite promising at first glance: stripped down mystic chords embedded into bleeps and resonant sinus tones create a grave mood, a dead calm before something terrible is happening. But fear not, nothing of that kind will take place here. Instead, some percussive rattling is added and gradually silences the initial theme. And that was it: an ending before the track really got started and another missed opportunity to give this collection a more favourable ending.

To me rain is a pretty music does not live up my expectations from a label that tries to cover electro acoustic sound experimentation and has already released music from the likes of David Velez and Darren McClure. I cannot really say that someone is missing much by ignoring this release and saving one’s bandwidth and time for something more rewarding and exciting.

Darkness. Cold machinery. Walking down a steamy hall, indifferently, precise and predictable mechanic rhythms creating new values. All of that and more could be the introduction to Formication’s Agnosia, released on the Dark Winter netlabel, notorious for its rather gloomy music selection. Formication’s line of music is remotely derived from IDM, in that there are fixed rhythms and repetitive analogue synth sequences that go through some serious filter manipulation. But there are also references to what is commonly identified as industrial and dark ambient: hovering synth tones, the obligatory vault sound and an artwork strongly reminiscent of the Goth scene’s black celebration standards. Add to it some zombified phone-line voices, nervously stuttering sequences and you are nearly there.

Perhaps the sound is not that groundbreaking if you look at it from the angle of innovation, but then again this is a rather moot point as this shortcoming is overcompensated with intelligent arrangements and well adjusted antennas for creating a cinematic atmosphere loaded with tension. The pale, synewave tortured staggering rythm of the second track is a class of its own, how it mercilessly proceeds with sinister harshness in a hostile, post-atomic war environment. Then the sky lightens up with a faint synth motif, although it is too distant and soft to be a real comfort and is too quickly pushed aside by a subsonic wavering bassline that tosses up metallic splinters in a steamy vault filled with the slurping sound of digesting aliens. At times a melancholic minor sequence echoes a final desperate thought, reflections slowly dripping from the walls like tears shed in vain.

The bizarre scenery culminates in the final track that courageously expands to an impressive range of almost 13 minutes and succeeds where many other artists fail miserably. It picks up the lighter intermission theme from track three, this time pushed into the virtual foreground and slowly drowning in dubmatic echoes, soon to be interfered by noisy feedback hysterically screaming in anxiety. Slowly a analogue synth bassline is fading in and terribly mutilated overflanged zombie voices announce their final state of insanity. No doubt, these are great moments of dramaturgy and well supported by a decent production quality. To me this is one of the top releases of the year and probably one of the best ever heard from Dark Winter, thus I strongly recommend my readers to download this release, pick up some high quality earphones and enjoy the mind movie.

What would you expect from a release called Divertimento 1? Neoclassicism a la Hindemith or Stravinsky in his pre Serialism period? None of that is Kaede Mira’s release on the Mimi netlabel, which happens to go by this title, except for the remote connection of having studied the piano and practicing as a piano teacher. This is also emphasised by the cover art that could have orginated from a children’s book, displaying a child looking down from a bridge in contre jour with Art Nouveau like stylised flowers and butterflies gracing her hair.

Passpied, the introduction, appears to recapture the teaching lessons: patches of simple diatonic scales rub against each other, form random conflict rhythms and fade away, before another set of tones ascends the stereo panorama. This juxtaposition of events creates a kinky toyland atmosphere with glockenspiels, giant Hello Kitty dolls and pastel coloured heart wallpapers decorating the walls. More organised structures become apparent in Werdemunter, (“werde munter” is German for “perk up!” – with exclamation mark, since the phrase is meant as imperative) where single tones light up and are immediately echoed by all participating instruments. The transition between relaxation and contraction and the usage of sudden breaks culminates in the gentle call of a female voice. These voices will then multiply, join the tone chasing and on occasion form strange harmonies.

If there is something Kaede Mira manages to play out well, then it is the art of surprise: You cannot be sure what will follow next, just by the time you settled for a likely event to follow, something unexpected is happening and forces you to start all over again: For example in Madrigal, which begins with a shuffled, Motown-like piano theme. Just by the time you are prepared for the worst, like Ayumi Hamasaki chiming in with one of her Kitsch songs, the phrase is unexpectedly silenced by bubble noise and continues as scalar transposition afterwards, accompanied by gentle female voices with glassy noise as background. Easy listening in a room stuffed with cuddly toys, distorted mirrors, heart-shaped candles and the awareness that a soft, furry cat still has sharp claws she could dig into one’s flesh anytime.

Carelessly picks up the piano lessons impression from the beginning as intermission before Pavane provides a slightly disorganised, but nonetheless almost charming final with at times dissonant tone sequences interspersed by the piano. No doubt this scenery has a rather fragile nature and could fall apart anytime because of a sluggish gesture, a clumsy wording or just the humming of a fly landing on the tip of one’s nose. But the mixture and its underlying tension behind the facade of happiness sticks and I have to admit that I like the release a lot for its originality and strange charme.

Cover art can sometimes be deceiving: In the case of Cory Allen’s 30 minute epos Satori in Atlantis I was anticipating a bittersweet meditation happiness of foolishly smiling, middle-aged top tier managers who cheerfully dance around a Buddha statue with daisy chains around their necks. But fortunately none of that is happening here: Instead, we are pushed into the world of field recordings and laptop improvisations.

In the beginning there are noisy disturbances and some time has to pass until a flanging keyboard weaves a dense carpet of glassy tones with piercing sampling artifacts. Like pictures at an exhibition, there are frozen moments of a scenery with each new track and thus white noise alternates with pentatonic chord patches, chains crushing against each other or drowning in wavering noise. Unfortunately the juxtaposition of events lacks binding elements and contrasting structures that could prevent the tracks from falling apart.

The exception – and without doubt the release’s summit – is the title track “Satori in Atlantis”, where an almost impressionistic chord sequence is constantly repeated with minor shifts of details, similar to Steve Reich’s and Philip Glass‘ concept of minimalist music in the late sixties. Towards the end, a counter motif appears and nicely contrasts the introduction theme. “Sangha” starts quietly with echolot like bleeps before a slow fade in introduces additional elements like tape hiss and a constantly repeated chord sequence with occasional spots of analogue synth sounds. While not as strong as “Satori in Atlantis” it surely is one of the better tracks of this release.

The final track, however instantly defeats the brighter moments of this release with broad and almost brassy tone clusters swirling around for more than six minutes, just to find out that there is nothing more to add to this momentum. Why people see the need of stringing out monotonous sequences to epic lengths will remain a mystery to me, but then again, using it as background stimulus in a shopping centre, sculpture exhibition or hotel elevator may lead to a more satisfying listening experience. As mentioned before, one possibly has to consider it as one single element out of many more in a multimedia live performance and then it might even serve its purpose well.

Krystof Berg from Poland decyphers his personal definition of music by his moniker Krypton and a “Silent Drama” is the subject of his release on the TestTube netlabel. I do not know whether the cover art was deliberately chosen by himself, but I think it matches the title pretty well: A black and white photography with an indetermined background and three persons oblivious to a strange world taking in irritating poses. Neither the person in the foreground nor the two in the background have anything common save their self centred absence. So is “Silent Drama” begging the question whether it refers to isolated individuals, autism, schizophrenia?

The first three tunes are characterised by sinister tension: Piercing tones hover over the misty ground of a vault and form sharp glassy counterpoints to indecisive harmonics. There appears to be no escape from the silence as motives are circling around themselves, hindering any development that could lead to a change of mood. Instead, more accents are added or subtracted: Whenever there are glimpses of sunlight, they turn out to be delusions soon to be swallowed by gloomy chords. In “Labour” even those sparse orientation points are retracted and all that is left is a state of helpless gliding. These first three tracks are great intense moments that do reflect the “silent drama”.

Unfortunately, three rather mediocre fillers that try to fish in more conventional waters spoil the initial impression. Sometimes they appear to use Autechre’s “Chiastic Slide” period as role model, albeit not reaching their highly skilled level of orchestration. These rather aimlessly fading episodes clearly point out the limitations of the vault sound strategy occuring in each track, as contrasting details are smeared away and boomy low frequency rumbles sometimes make the sound a rather unpleasant experience on high quality equipment. There’s a remarkable contradiction between letting things slide and tearing apart conventional harmonics on the one side and shrinking back from daring soundscapes and replacing them with traditional elements, such as a steady 4/4 time rhythm section on the other side. Fortunately the last track bridges the contradiction and turns out to be a deserving final, as it resolves the tension of the first three tracks without trading it for concessions to mainstream music trivialities.

This could have become a very good 4 track EP, but as a full length release it cannot keep up the high quality level introduced in the beginning and turns out to be sightly disappointing, considering the potential Krystof Berg’s music is able to unveil. Finding one’s musical identity is not an easy task, and it seems he’s still at the beginning. But, at least there is a beginning: Way too many musicians even fail to see the shore line, stick to safe mode and hide behind conventional structures.

On December 17th, the second release of Nodepet called “En fin terrible” was made available to the public for downloading. The release itself had a rather turbulent story, which eventually led to the foundation of Petcord. Perhaps one day I may decide to write an article about it, but that is rather of low priority right now…. Anyway, if you would like to learn more about the release you are invited to study James McDougall’s detailed review of En Fin Terrible and see for yourself whether it will be something for you.