As you might probably remember, Sylvia and I recently released our new Album “Beyond Good and Evil”, which has been the result of our crowdfunded “The Most Remarkable Album On This Entire Planet” project.

While the album is already available to everyone as promised, the multi-tracks have not been released yet. This is mostly due to the enormous bulk of manual track-dumping work that’s ahead of me, but I promise it will all be up until end of February, latest. Then you can make your own mixes of our album.

So far we received a few mixed and a lot of positive reviews from our friends and fans, and not a single bad word from our patrons, who generally made the impression of being very pleased with the final CD we produced, especially the artwork.

Then, just a few minutes ago, I’m getting this in my Inbox:

from Anonymous Remailer (austria)
date Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 8:02 PM
subject Re: The Most Remarkable Album On This Entire Planet
mailed-by remailer.privacy.at

“The Most Remarkable Album On This Entire Planet” is probably
one of the biggest lies ever made in human history but
probably you mean the little “Planet Paniq” , there, in your
imagination it is “The Most Remarkable Album On This Entire
Planet”, in your small world, but in our reality it is NOT
- the earth is too big for you moron.

“The Most Remarkable Album On This Entire Planet” is just a
dumb basic LIE. Period.

I admit I picked the title because I wanted the album to be extraordinary, especially in relation to my earlier work. What I originally planned was a lot more ambitious, but I quickly discovered that it was impossible to pull off what I had in mind in just a three month time frame.

We wanted to do something amazing and breathtaking with open source alone,  that we could then release under a free license, devoid of any ownership and say: see, it is possible to do it the right way.

But three months proved to be not enough time to do that. In the first three weeks I was severely struggling with the software, the music and the story (we originally planned a musical).

Sylvia and me were under way too much pressure. The additional criticism on the VIP mailing list on the first results cracked me. I pulled the plug on the original idea and started doing what was possible: write new tracks, improve the software, make the best out of the available time, try not to burn out, and hope people aren’t going to hate us for failing their expectations.

Well, that didn’t work I guess. Someone in Austria found us out and called it like it is.

I’m sorry I let you down, pal.

Update: that is not to say I don’t like the result. Far from it. I’m still listening to the album every day to work and back, and even at work. I believe that, musically, harmonically, it is the best I’ve ever done. I excluded myself from the loudness war. I put the ear-straining drums in the background. I’ve made great strides towards producing more wholesome sounds and writing good melody lines and chords. So, personally, the album has grown on me, and I love it, if even only like a dad can love it.