The only existing album of Berlin’s open source music laboratory Girls United called “Wunderbaustelle” got released on handmade CD-r in Feb. 2003 at first and sold 350 copies in just a few months.
A completely improvised mix of synth outbursts, vocal synthesizing, breakbeats, done with a strong phantasy, not waiting, had gotten them a sudden fanbase, mostly in Berlin and around at this point, leading to 40++ live shows in the area within the first year of their existence.
In May 2007 the Florida-based record label dPulse Records then picked up on it, and put the album up on iTunes, ‘distributed’ by Sony/BMG.
As expected, Sony didn’t work for this then. They say it’s been because of restructuring, but obviously it is,
because they only care about a very small percentage of what they release every month in total,
and because their product managers are not music fans, but sales agents. They even think it’s hip to work in the music biz.
Nevertheless, when they were done ‘restructuring’ (dinosaurs!) 8 months after the digital release they suddenly realized they could release the album again.
Working at amazing speed so to say.
So well, since Feb 18 one can find the Girls United debut released for the third time (2nd time digitally) on iTunes and other major online stores again.
Girls United reportedly think, that at least now one can buy the album on iTunes in higher bitrate and without DRM. Otherwise they don’t want to comment on what’s happening, besides they seem to be quite happy, that dPulse released them at all.
It shows again, that reaction times of major labels today are in no way properly following the speed of making and loving of fans and musicians.
As a just recently force-converted ex-OS 9 user (Apfel Komputer) i probably had to run into Steve Jobs’ secret diary at some point soon.
It’s not, that i had major troubles the last weeks to clean up an used ibook under OS 10.4.11, which was still filled with invisible and massively hard disk space-taking ex-owners private data.
I just needed to give myself a UNIX command line treatment for 5 wasted days, before i could locate and finally delete 30 gigabytes of already deleted data, only to be able to use this space again.
All this, while the news are full of Apfel users being ultimately pissed-off of dictatory restrictions to the use of over-prized iPhones, or just flaky security flaws in the newest OS Leopard.
Ah what do i care. But when i got that iBook some weeks ago i had already decided not to ever upgrade a stable configuration, just as i didn’t upgrade my old Pizmo powerbook to anything higher than OS 9.2.2 in five years.
And yeah, it turns out, that, OS 10.4.11 is as stable or unstable as OS 9.2.2.
But still: I really had to laugh out loud, when, a few minutes ago, i found this great fake blog about Mister Apfel-bosses secret thoughts and realized, how just very normal this company is.
→ “Read about, how “THEY” tried to shut down the liberted [and liberating] voice of a person, who just has his/her own and individual view on the company’s issues, blogged in a wonderfully independent and ironic way.”:http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2007/12/breakfast-with-apple-lawyer.html
500.000 dollars, straight forwardly offered by the wrong person weren’t a threat to this pertinacity, of course, although that may leave the revolting person to a secret and unmentioned financial diet, by Steve Jobs.
The only existing album of Berlin’s open source music laboratory