Some random thoughts and events of the past couple days. Nothing too exciting but if you're here reading this you are probably rather easily entertained.

- Finally picked up Reaktor 4. Mark and I (that would be Momu) went to the Robotspeak demo and I actually wasn't that impressed, but we decided to pick it up anyway because how can you go wrong with thousands of softsynths designed by thousands of people? There's got to be something good in there, right? Well, we'll see ...

- Spesh and I are very close to a new version of the album that starts of with "The Answer" as the first track. Hopeful J. Bowman won't mind - it used to be "Nice One" which featured some of his guitar work rather heavily but we decided to just start the thing off with a bang. "Nice One" is still on there - it seemed to be a favorite when we did our informal "what rocks? what sucks?" poll among a few friends.

- Jim Cyr likes the album! Spesh had him over for dinner and played it for him. Jim was a big fan of We Are Connected when we debuted it at Sweet!, but he was really critical of pretty much all of the versions after that. His feedback was very helpful in getting that mix in shape, but I don't think he was ever quite satisfied, even with the mix we ended up releasing. I think eventually he came around but for awhile it was like, "Damn, Jim really likes this song but he thinks we keep making it worse." Pretty funny now but it was stressful at the time. Anyway I'm glad he didn't hate the album, we might have had to start over ...

- Speaking of We Are Connected, a funny story from last night at Qoöl. Sam Burton (aka Novabass) stopped by for his annual Qoöl visit (The G couldn't make it, had some date with a tango girl or something, that guy hasn't changed a bit in ten years) and we were shooting the shit about that single because Spesh and I recently came into some copies of the original pressing. Anyway Sam mentioned that many years ago he had a read a review that panned the original We Are Connected single, the one by Huggy Burger Queen in Mixmag or DJ Mag or somewhere, and accused us of ripping an acid line from Leftfield. Then, a few years after that, he finally heard the Leftfield song in question and realized that he had actually used that very acid line in the Novabass remix, without knowing it was from Leftfield - he had grabbed it off some sample DAT tape that was making the rounds. What he didn't know was that I had written a letter to the magazine in question defending the Jondi & Spesh mix, insisting we hadn't used the sample, liberally insulting Huggy Burger Queen (including an offensive illustration, etc.) which they promptly published in their next issue. Well, as I learned last night, Huggy Burger Queen was right, there was a mix on that record that included the Leftfield acid line, it's just that none of us knew it at the time.

So, Huggy Burger Queen, we apologize. You were right, we were wrong. And to anybody in Leftfield, on the very slim chance that you'd be reading this post, we apologize as well. The mix in question is long out of print ...

That's it for today. Remember to take your Melanotan before you go out in the sun this weekend ...