“My silence is better than yours”

Experimentalist composer John Cage is famous for his piece 4’33”, which is just silence of just that length. Recently, Mike Batt composed a piece of minute-long silence for an album. But, Cage’s lawyers didn't take kindly to that.

Mike Batt, the man behind the Wombles and Vanessa Mae, has put a silent 60-second track on the album of his latest classical chart-topping protégés, the Planets. This has enraged representatives of the avant-garde, experimentalist composer John Cage, who died in 1992. The silence on his group’s album clearly sounds uncannily like 4’33”, the silence composed by Cage in his prime. [...]

Stupid lawyers. (Link from Adam Shand’s Word Up mailing list)

ClearChannelSucks.org

Via this thread on MetaFilter, ClearChannelSucks.org has launched. ClearChannel, if you're not aware, is an enourmous radio MegaCorp, owning over 1200 stations nationwide.

I’ve never been a fan of ClearChannel but my primary distaste from them is that they accept payola from record companies. That is, they regularly accept payments from record companies to play songs on the radio. Yes that’s why you keep hearing the same 4-5 artists on the radio. Bleh.