Duck Book

The book has been printed, and babyduck is in touch with Pilgrim Management in regards to delivery. She will be attending the February 3 show in Birmingham, so I'm guessing it will take place there.

One might say 'lucky ducky' for getting to go and represent us in England, but luck has nothing to do with it. This book has been a huge undertaking, and has put babyduck to some trouble and expense, so she deserves gratitude from the fan-base who have had this opportunity to send their love to Rammstein. LILT is in the book and the project is in keeping with my stance on fans as a united body, so she gets my warmest best wishes. Go babyduck!

[discuss]

Stream to be Ramped Back

Management have had a change of heart, and TG's stream is being downgraded to 30 second clips.

I know! Mad! Watch the torrent seeds surge...

[discuss]

Sounds Like Concrete

While my skepticism was based on rational processes I'm happy to say I was wrong. The Gauntlet has posted to Herzeleid's boards with this:

Sorry, I haven't stopped by here recently. Wasn't there a news section? Anyways, I have confirmed many times via multiple sources that Rammstein has infact signed a distro deal with Vagrant Records. The news was first broke here
http://www.thegauntlet.com/article/307/16542/Rammstein-signs-with-Vagrant-Records.html

Anyways, to make sure it wasn't a mispost like a few months ago, I spoke with management (Pilgrim), Vagrant, and PR. All confirmed and said in the next week or so to expect more news, including release dates, songs titles, album cover, etc. an online publicist has been retained for a few months so it is close and they wouldn't have hired her unless they had lots of news to send out.

As have have in the past, I will post things both on my site and here, but will also comment here and do my best to track down responses from the powers that are working the album. Stay tuned, the hour is upon us.

That's a bit more like it! That sort of citation should have been in the original article.

Further to that he/she/it says:

A distro deal is just using a labels distribution network and manufacturing to get a CD in stores. Instead of Vagrant Records handling the album, press, licensing, etc, they just take the finished album and get it into stores. Chances are, if you go into your local CD shop and don't see albums by Alexisonfire, Senses Fail, and Thrice, you won't find Rammstein there either. I am assuming the band has their own label at this point, most likely setup with their management as they still need a label.

[discuss]

Vapour or Concrete?

Around 17 hours ago The Gauntlet posted a news item about Rammstein signing with Vagrant for their US distro. I've been dubious about it, as there has been no citation of a release from either Rammstein/Pilgrim or Vagrant.

Now a second English language posting has popped up in the last half hour on Metal Underground. Still no citation from either party, and no definite source, though MU says the announcement has come from the band.

It could be that this is a case of horrendously amateurish journalism or a very bad/non-existent press kit. Surely if Pilgrim or Vagrant have released this information they sent out comment from the involved parties and information? It'll be interesting to see where it goes from here.

The only other information we really get from either article is that there will be eleven tracks on the new album, and anyone who knows Rammstein's past albums could have worked out that wee pearl.

We'll see I guess. I'm still skeptical...

[discuss]

Community Rammagement

I'm starting a new project. It's entirely unrelated to LILT, aside from the fact that it's Rammstein-based, but it's going to go on quietly in the background in parallel with it, using the communities I'm now part of because of LILT and Rammstein.

I'm going to write a proposal for Pilgrim and Rammstein. I'm going to work very hard on it. I'm then going to bind it and post it to Pilgrim, Rammstein, Universal Music, and anyone else I can find with a stake in Rammstein. This proposal is going to include community management strategies and also ideas for building PR. I'm no PR expert, but I'm more up with community management and I've got a solid idea of how that ties in to PR. I may need to tap some PR experts for help with this.

Either way, I've decided that something has to change, or Rammstein's fan-base is going to suffer a serious reduction in numbers and a highly negative disillusionment if things continue as they have, most particularly as pertains to the issue of IP protection. The PR and community management for Rammstein is either non-existent or horribly bad. This must change.

Rammstein and Pilgrim can't rely on the intrinsic loyalty of their fans. Yes, it's intense. It's exceptionally strong, given the PR (or lack thereof) we've seen. It's not enough though. There needs to be some love flowing the other way. SOON.

If you have gripes about how the band is presented to the world, with the communications between the band and their fan-base, with the implementation of ideas such as the ticket roll-out last month, with any aspect of the band's public interface, please write to me. Send me your rants, your reasons, your broken hearts. I need them!

[discuss]

Update: I've realised that I will of course have to buy a Fan Arena membership to do this properly, but simply can't afford it at the moment. This may push out my time-frame of a couple of months to be a bit longer, but I will do this.

Droppings

If you got hold of the leaked track from the upcoming Rammstein album please take a moment to look back over past albums before remarking the song. I've been reading disappointment and criticism of the leaked track, and it's frustrating. I can only imagine how infuriating it is for Rammstein themselves.

Every single Rammstein album to date has been a complex journey. To take a single vista from that journey and judge the whole on it is unrealistic and preposterous in the extreme, as well as being unfair to the band. Many individual Rammstein songs stand alone well, but there are tracks on every album that really need their siblings to make sense, and there's no reason to believe this isn't the case here.

Give over with the whining and sneering, please. You've got hold of a song you should not have access to and it's only one eleventh of what you're meant to have, based on history. You don't have enough data on which to base a judgement yet.

Also, if you have the leaked track do not distribute it further. Propagation of this leak is disrespectful to the band, and highly illegal. The person who leaked it in the first place is a complete fuckchop, so don't join that sad little club. It won't become you at all, and Pilgrim aren't likely to let it slide if they find you.

If you get nailed for sharing the leaked song it's all you deserve.

[discuss]

Open Letter to Pilgrim Management

There has been a leak, or perhaps more than one person gave out Rammstein properties. I don't know. Obviously this is against your wishes. Communities have found users are getting hold of these properties, and one of the first to combat this and try and quash the spread of your property was Herzeleid.Com. The community team on that site were deleting posts, banning users, and generally combating the spread of the leaked track and images from the day they came to light, and continued to do so as long as I was able to access the site. Right now the site is not what it should be.

Now, I'm not sure if Pilgrim has approached Jeremy, the site owner (I don't know him personally to ask), and I don't know the nature of any contact that might have been made, but I'm seeing rumours all over the show that sites like (and including) Herzeleid have been threatened with legal action or closure over the leaked material. I hope this is not true in the case of Herzeleid, at least. This community is run with the protection of Rammstein's interests at the fore, and this kind of consideration should be taken into account by Pilgrim and Rammstein.

Perhaps, rather than going for fan communities in cases like this, Pilgrim should look to the people they gave the material to in the first place. Perhaps not releasing sensitive material at all ahead of time would be a better way to protect it. Perhaps individually watermarking images given out, so the source of a leak can be readily identified would pay off. Perhaps similarly marking audio files would be sensible. The fan communities are not the source of your leak, Pilgrim, and to alienate them is not sound business practice. You're making fans angry and upsetting what should be a very positive year for you and the band.

All my experience of IP protection is in the games industry, but I am aware that it is possible to individually tag any given file in various ways, so as to be able to identify them later on. Image watermarking can survive any number of methods to foil it and I can imagine that running a tick or tone throughout an audio file would be similarly hard to eradicate if the NDAed individual were aware of it, which they needn't be.

Please look at your own systems and processes before threatening the fan community over the leak of your property, and please pay special consideration to those communities who are doing their best to protect your properties. Using fear, rather than care, is not going to serve your interests nearly so well.

[discuss]

Odd Question re. Pilgrim

Has anyone out there had any dealings with someone at Pilgrim Management called Hanna/Hannah/Hana?

[discuss]

Taking Words From Another

Sometimes you hear something said in a language you don't speak yourself, and it just works, even when it's meaningless due to a lack of comprehension. Sometimes just the flow and rhythm makes it into art, simply as the aesthetics of sound make it so.

I've found that I get huge amounts of amusement and pleasure from listening to the work of Rammstein, though it's almost entirely in German, and I don't speak German myself. The lyricist is a poet, and so comprehension is not necessary for enjoyment of the words. It also helps that I like the music itself, and that I could work out some of what was being sung (or threatened in the case of some songs).

I've found that a gentleman by the name of Jeremy Williams has published English translations of the lyrics of Rammstein's music. Note these are translations, not adaptions. They are not lyrical or poetic. They bring the words from one tongue to another, and are good prose in their own right.

Having read his translations, and those of others around the place, I've become even more appreciative of the lyrics. Very simply put the lyrics are brilliant, and as far as I know they're mainly written by Till Lindemann, the primary singer, hence the name of this page.

Many of the lyrics are tongue-in-cheek, and there's a screamingly in-your-face theme of love (and its siblings hate, lust, and resentment), but it's also really beautiful, even when it's deliberately provocative or brutal. Some songs are utterly blatant, such as Rein Raus, but others are really heavily layered with ambiguity and extra meaning, so it'll be pretty tricky to try and cover everything that might be taken from the German lyrics. It's also going to be close to impossible to work in German plays on words with English. I'm going to try really hard though!

I haven't heard back from Jeremy yet, but I have asked for permission to make use of his translations, as I attempt to take poetry translated and re-lyricise it.

I also contacted Rammstein's management firm to get their blessing, but they're also not responding. At this point I figure I'll just go ahead and if they don't like it maybe they'll finally get back to me. Nothing better for whipping people out of their lethargy than doing something they don't like, right?

I'll post my work here, though not Jeremy's translations. I like what he's done with Herzeleid.Com, and will not harm that by reproducing his work in that way.

With regard to the works of Rammstein, they are absolutely within their rights to shut me down. Until they do I hope I'm not doing them any harm and that whatever I come out with is enjoyed. What I'd really like is their approval, but the odds of them acknowledging me are slim to none.

More to come...

[discuss]