If you tried to read up on some Krimson News over the last hour or two, you may have noticed nothing.  Absolutely nothing, except perhaps for a few browser error messages that our site wasn’t available.

The reason: memory problems.  Whether that’s because our virtual private server (VPS) doesn’t allot more than 200MB of RAM (even though our plan allows 256MB) or some of the physical memory on the shared server is faulty, I don’t know.  I don’t care, either, because:

Jeff just executed an order on a dedicated server, which should be ready by tomorrow.  Over the next week, I’ll monitor this server and deploy the New Place®.  After that will come a testing period and, finally, the transition period, which I’ll announce well ahead of time and that will cause Krimson News to be unavailable for at most a couple of hours.

Before mid-September, we should be moved to a bigger, better and–most importantly–dedicated server, and Krimson News should be a much faster and enjoyable experience.  Until we’re on the new server, please keep in mind that we’ve outgrown the current server, and that temporary hiccups may happen.

Cheers and thank you for your ever-generous patience!

Nadim

From Bernhard Wöstheinrich (centrozoon, the redundant rocker) comes this announcement: 

RAUMZEIT
an ambient exploration
with Bernhard Wöstheinrich and Stefan Erbe

Hagen Planetarium – Saturday, 30 June 2007 – 21:00, doors open 19:00 – free admission

The Hagen Planetarium, renowned for its lecture and special events about astronomy, invites you to an extraordinary musical event on 30 June 2007: RAUMZEIT takes listeners and watchers on an atmospheric voyage of spectacular images and fascinating sounds in a universe far beyond everyday reality.

Musicians and live electr(on)icians Stefan Erbe (Hagen) and Bernhard Wöstheinrich (Gütersloh) host this real-time audiovisual composition in the unique setting and ambience of the Hagen Planetarium.

Stefan Erbe, well-known electronic musician from Hagen, has fascinated Hagen Planetarium audiences again and again over the past 12 years. His eclectic amalgamation of diverse branches of electronic music brought him fame far beyond the German Ruhr region.

Bernhard Wöstheinrich is mastermind of the cosmopolitan ambient combo centrozoon. Solo, he is known as one of the great ambient music artists across German. In concerts, he engages and surrounds listeners with his sprawling, elegiac brand of live improvisation.

As the venue opens at 19:00, guests are invited to join a lecture by Dortmund astronomer Werner Volmer as he provides interesting insights and impressions of Earth’s nearest start-the sun. After the lecture, guests may observe the sun through the special telescopes and take a tour of the planetarium.

This scientific background provides an exciting contrast and sets the mood for the night’s artistic highlight.

Free admission!

www.sternwarte-hagen.de

Why does our Eleven Versions of ‘11-11′ end with a fourteenth episode?  Easy: Markus and Pat of TUNER wanted to share an excerpt of their original version with you.

So, here it is: an edit of TUNER’s ‘11-11′ featuring Pat’s original drum track.

Be sure to check it out over at the ‘Eleven Versions of  11-11′ page now!

Pat Mastelotto and Markus Reuter of TUNER announced today that their sophomore release Pole is now available and will start shipping on Monday, 18 June 2007.

If the coolness and intelligence of King Crimson and centrozoon members isn’t enough, Pole also features the talents of Peter Kingsbery (vox), SiRenee (vox), Chrysta Bell (vox), Lisa Fletcher (vox), Laura Scarborough (vibes) and Pamelia Kurstin (theremin).

Visit their MySpace site to listen to a couple of excerpts and look at strange pictures involving Pat, Markus and a bug!

And to order (bad things will happen if you don’t), visit DGM’s Pole page! 

NB: to provide closure on the Eleven Versions of “11-11″ series that recently ran on Krimson News, TUNER will post an excerpt from the album version of “11-11″, featuring Pat’s drums and percussion, on Monday.

Just a quick reminder…

You can hear Bernhard Wöstheinrich (the Redundant Rocker of Centrozoon) live on air via Dortmund radio and an international webcast tonight between 22:00 and 24:00 Central European Summer Time.

More infos including links to the eldoradio webcast in the original Krimson News article.

Bernhard Wöstheinrich (of Redundant Rocker and centrozoon fame) will perform live and on-air for “Codos Traumreisen” on the Dortmund, Germany radio station “eldoradio”.Date: 16 May 2007
Time: 22:00 to 24:00 CEST (Central European Summer Time, UTC+2)

Bernhard will play two hours of ambient soundscapes exclusively for Codos Traumreisen. During the performance, you will hear him freely improvise dense, atmospheric textures and subtle, pulsating beats and meld them into complex sound cascades … a great experience for any fan of ambient electronica!

The show will be broadcast locally via radio and internationally via webcast:

1. In Dortmund and surrounding regions: UKW 93.0 MHz
2. ish cable radio in Dortmund: 88.4 MHz
3. Wherever: “eldoradio” live stream

During the show, you can send live feedback about the music via chat and watch Bernhard perform via webcam, making the event a true multimedia happening.

Codos Traumreisen web site
“eldoradio” web site

2006 is about ready to go out the window.  All of us at Krimson News would like to wish you a merry Christmas with much joy, many gifts and great food, and a good slide into 2007 filled with happiness, health and a lot of new music.

Cheers, and see you in the next year!

Nadim

You may have noticed that Krimson News went down completely early this morning.  Without notice from the hosting company, the folks at T_____ first set all file systems on the virtual hosts sharing this particular server to read-only, causing fun problems like failed SQL queries that you may have found on the KN web site early on today, and then took down the server completely for the rest of the day, which resulted in a total outage of all web sites hosted on that machine (not just ours, but many other customers’ as well).  The culprit: faulty hardware.

About half an hour ago, the admins returned the server back to life, and so Krimson News is back among the living.  An initial frolic through most sections makes me think that everything is working as it should.  However, if you do happen to find anything that doesn’t work as expected, or if you see error messages, please e-mail me at admin@krimson-news.com.

I’m very unhappy about the almost day-long outage period, but this time around the matter was outside of Jeff’s and my sphere of influence.

Cheers,

Nadim

Heureka, the following announcement just dropped into my mailbox:

Bernhard Wöstheinrich (one half or one third of Centrozoon, depending on when you look) offers the original multi-track files of his piece “We’re Not Afraid” from the Redundant Rocker album “Collider” for download and remix.  You can find these files at the following URL:

http://www.redundantrocker.com/remix.html

At this site, you can also download the album cut of “We’re Not Afraid” so you can get an impression of the track’s original sound.  It should be fun to listen to the multi-track files individually to get a deeper insight into Bernhard’s sound world.  Hopefully, many of you will find interest and inspiration to create and submit your own interpretations of this track.

The submitted remixes will be aired as part of special radio shows with Uwe Schallenbach (”E-Pochen” on Antenne Düsseldorf and “Elektronische Klangarten” on Radio Gütersloh) and Silvia Sommerfeld (”TraumKlang Radio” on 98.5 Radio Bochum).  The overall winner will receive Native Instruments software worth about 150 Euros.

Don’t be afraid if you’re only able to submit pure MIDI files–they’re welcome as well, and a winning MIDI file will get a special prize.

The remix contest ends on 01 December 2006.  You can find e-mail and snail mail addresses for submissions on the download page linked to above.

Wow, that was ugly! 

What happened:

What was ugly, Nadim?  Well, everything.  On Friday afternoon, the server’s operating system (as a Windows proponent, let me just mention it’s a Linux distribution *evil*) gave out completely after little pieces of the system had flickered into and out of operability over the morning.  A complete reinstall of the server and its software became necessary.  Three questions actuated immediately:

1) How do you back up data from an inoperable system?

2) How do you store backups efficiently without having physical access to a server to burn them on DVDs?

3) How stable and contiguous would backups of an inoperable system be?

Well, finding answers to these questions was painful and took quite a long time.  Hence, the five-day downtime.  Now that everything’s been backed up successfully (after days of hitting dead ends and a work-related, high-priority system restore of a Linux server that was gruesomly hacked into little pieces), I’m starting to bring elements of the Krimson News server online again bit by bit.  If you find anything I list as working below that doesn’t work correctly, please send me an e-mail at nadim@crimsonjazztrio.com .

What’s working right now:

News site, WordPress dashboard, diaries and forums.

What’s going to work in a little while:

E-mail (SMTP/POP/IMAP).

Apologies:

Sincere apologies that it’s taken this long for anything on this site to get back up.  I hope it is understandable that neither Jeff nor I were able to work full-time on this reinstall project–we’re both people who need to work for a living.  Over the course of Wednesday, I will revive the remaining pieces of Krimson News as I find time.  Please keep watching the status updates in this news post (immediately above this paragraph) to see what is and isn’t working.

We’re going to implement a pretty cool and new backup methodology (Cleversafe Dispersed Storage) to schedule dispersed and versioned snapshots of all elements of this site and its operating system so a long downtime such as this won’t happen again.

Again, sorry that Krimson News has been down so long, but rest assured we’re working on keeping you up-to-date with news and podcasts consistently from now on.

Cheers!

Nadim S. Haque
Krimson News Chief Engineer