LONEY DEAR

2011-11-14T04:10:00.001+01:00

Apparently it wasnt really a good idea to leave the blog. I didnt know how to treat it when it moved to loneydear.com so maybe ill keep up some writing here instead. Maybe Andy at Polyvinyl will find this blog soon, and transfer some of it to the site.Its the middle of the night, and im sitting wide awake in a blue sofa, completely half naked. Life storms around me and I dont really know where to go. I wish music could save me, but touring is STILL hard work, worries, hours of dead time, and minutes of singing and playing music.Its all up to me, what i do out of it. (Though). I will probably have to try to make a record, a truly great one. i should ask someone to help me, i dont know that shit anymore. I'd like to point out three places.Visingsö 1982 or 1983. Family out for picnic. I drink blueberry soup. Wind points my hats ribbon 90 degrees out to the side.I cant do this anymore.

2010-07-15T13:45:00.002+02:00

KIDS

blog is moving to loneydear.com

weve infused the site with new blood thats to new friend Scott Lowe

2010-07-06T14:45:00.003+02:00

I want it to be a touring circus of mending souls. Together. I want it to mean something. I spent a day and a night with Patrick Watson and the wooden arms. With everyone involved. The people at Salle Pleyel, the guys from Fourviere. I care for them. they care for me. I dont want to go out playing shows like, im here. im white, male 31 years old. I will sit in the middle of the room, and you will watch what i do for 1 hour. I want us to create something good, something that matters. Music matters. Culture matters. Friends matters. See you on tour 2011 and maybe 2010. We will eat, drink and mend souls together. / E

So long suckers.

2010-04-22T01:08:00.001+02:00

#6. New album.

Some hard years but things seem to happen now.

working titles;

Blues
Yesterday
So all (octopus)

possibly; you you.

more info.

2010-04-20T14:50:00.002+02:00

A woman reviewed my third album Sologne in early 2005 or 2006. I had already made the album Loney Noir finished. She described my works as whining and emotional-oholic. It made a deep impact to me and i felt like i was robbed on my language and emotions. What i felt was wrong, partly because i was a man.

I don't think it hurt me in the long run, it has been a long road around all this, but i guess i've returned to this now. In the good way. Man (woman!) we suffer here, we are disappointed, we are sad! (!). What else could we write songs about other than the sadness and the darkness. To keep it away, to keep us sane.

2010-03-29T23:11:00.002+02:00

i went to berlin to hear ane sing with peter gabriel. found a friend to join me and we left on a 16-hour notice after getting the guest tickets. berlin was tshirt warm, and i had such a marvellous time there. was away for something like 36 hours still so profound experience. i learned something about myself and of what i should do with my time.

have speeded up the work with the #6 record. im right in the middle of something huge, awesome and mysterious a.k.a life.

suMmer

2010-03-17T11:11:00.002+01:00

Its probably june or july 2009. Me and parts of my family have been biking around parts of a beautiful summer lake, and parts of it by cho-cho train ending up where we started.

My father and I decides to take our bikes home instead of the others taking the car. (summa: dinner upon arrival home). Dad is still stronger than me, knowing more of the trails and hills than i do. The sun is really low on the sky, just the good side of the warmness of it. I get really angry in the steep hills, on a bike from the 30's or earlier. A part of me knows, this could be the last time in life my fathers got more strenght than me, i knew it already there. You get closer.

ONce

2010-03-10T11:51:00.001+01:00

i was on tour with a band. we had just landed, or did i throw up the night before, after landing. i dont remember. the memory just came back, and i really enjoyed it. were probably in philadelphia, but not sure. at a radio station. it must be boston. world cafe. oscar is with us, sweet sweet oscar. stressed out bout getting malins tambourine stem, and im too hard on him. one of the greatest players i know. and best friends. im getting chili for two stairs above, getting coffee from some machine, and decides to use up the whole publicly (?) funded tape roll to turn my keyboard-box into a fake wood box. life is pretty easy, and i am happy. this must be when returning to the states second time. no, this must be the day before we started the Bird tour. Samuel connecting all his junk. Damn, i miss it now. So hard when out. I love how my brain and heart filter out. EVen considered my dark heart and mind, still i automatically filter out the good parts. this is gonna be grand.

Yes sir

2010-02-26T10:52:00.005+01:00

Im doing a secret show soon. Im working out a nice solo thing. Im using old and new tecniques and im starting to feel pretty satisfied about it. A lot of things, technical, and mostly musical needs to be worked out but its starting to feel like this could be a very good thing.

Yesterday was a pretty difficult day, rhythms and variations over financial problems and solutions. Its all gonna work out, just that it gives me a stress. Im coping with it better these days than years ago, but it still haunts me, but shorter amounts of time.

So, fck crap. Lets music.

End of chapter 23

2010-02-15T16:23:00.003+01:00

I am in a good spot. The week in Jönköping was a huge success for my personal perception of things. Artistically there is so so much that can be added, removed, tweaked and improved. I don't know if some of you americans know what "schlager" is, but some songs with band and orchestra felt a bit like Theme from Dallas, while some of the songs with less drum kit and bigger orchestral parts felt heartfelt, good, better. The big thing for me with this week was meeting people and collaborating. Just being on a regular work place with coffee breaks and staff meetings felt like being at a place i want to be at.

Monday morning started with stating the future ideas of these orchestral maneuvres. I look forward to it greatly. As much as the chance to play more with the amazing Mattias Ståhl that joined us with his vibraphone playing. amzng!

2010-02-15T15:20:00.001+01:00

2009-12-22T02:14:00.000+01:00

2009-12-21T02:59:00.001+01:00

things are moving.

2009-12-01T13:07:00.001+01:00

Piano tremolo

2009-11-19T15:41:00.000+01:00

2009-11-19T01:41:00.002+01:00

I stumbled into some really nice people in Philly. More than usual actually. I don't remember why me and Shawn Beeks started talking but i realised he was creating things for some reason. Today i got this photo of his painting and asked him to sum up his latest time.

"
The first time I broke my knee was February 13th, 2003. Up until that point I had built my life around skateboarding and designing skateboard graphics. For me, skateboarding and art were inseparable, so when I couldn’t skate, I lost the will to create, thus rolling me down a hall of deep depression. I don’t remember how I got out of it, but I’m sure being able to approach art as a creative process separate from skateboarding helped. Since then, I’ve put more energy into the advancement of my fine art outlets, and accepted the painful limitations of what I could physically accomplish. Six years later and I’m faced with similar situation. After years of multiple surgeries, physical therapy, and gym memberships, my knee is still not strong enough to handle the stress of skateboarding. October 20th, 2009 was the last time I skated. Now I have the rest of my life to recover from that lose with art.
Shawn Beeks, Philadelphia, Pa"

2009

2009-11-18T16:54:00.003+01:00

This talented drawer is johnmalloy.net

Man, im tired of being here. Not that i dont like it, i just dont know where to go from here. I just want to create something, collective, something social.

2009-11-16T20:23:00.001+01:00

http://joyzine.se/?p=3746

2009-11-16T15:01:00.001+01:00

i like this one. use http://translate.google.se/?hl=sv&tab=wT# if you dont swedish

Intervju:

Loney, Dear

Han är mannen vars vackra, spröda men samtidigt bombastiskta musik rör upp onämnbara känslostormar inombords, utombords ja, överallt. Efter ett uppmärk- sammat och lyckat samröre med Sub Pop är nu Emil Svanängen, alias Loney, Dear, tillbaka med ett nytt album. Joyzine fick sig en pratstund under Way Out West.

Den värsta tiden är precis innan man ska göra en intervju eller då man väntar på att ett band ska gå på scenen. För då står man där, och stirrar ut mot ingenting. Man är inte helt rättfärdigad där man står och stirrar, vare sig man som i det här fallet lutar sig mot ett metallräcke utanför Annedalskyrkan eller hänger ensam i en bar. Inte än. Så snart Emil Svanängen dyker upp kommer jag vara rättfärdigad, då kommer jag ha min plats. Till mitt store nöje är jag inte ensam om att ha svårt att hitta min plats. Ett tv-team med en kvinnlig reporter i spetsen övar på olika påannonseringar längst med ena kyrkoväggen, den ena påannonseringen värre än den andra. Reportern börjar bli nervös. Så jag erbjuder henne att gå före mig i intervjuschemat, låter henne veta att hon kan ta all tid hon behöver. Hon nickar tacksamt. Så svänger en van upp på grusfarten. Ut kommer Loney, Dear.
Emil Svanängen är lugn och sansad, tv-intervjun klarar han av galant, den kvinnliga reportern repar mod, och om han känner någon nervositet inför kvällens spelning i en förmodat fullsatt Annedalskyrka som en del av öppnandet av årets upplaga av Way Out West visar han det inte. Istället ger Emil intrycket av att vara en man som funnit och lever tillfredställelse. Han skrattar åt min observation efter att vi slagit oss ner på en av kyrkotrapporna framför en av kyrkans sidodörrar:
– Ja, jag har egentligen det jag behöver nu, för att ha ett trevligt liv. Jag behöver inget mer. Fast det klart, turnerandet är fortfarande ganska… det börjar kännas lättare, men det skulle kännas skönt att ha lite mer ekonomiskt marginal så man bara kunde lösa grejer genom att köpa in tjänster liksom. Det är väl en del av nästa steg tror jag.

Sub Pop blir Polyvinyl
“Sinster in a state of Hope” sjunger Emil Svanängen på “Loney, Noir”, den skiva som kom att påbörja ett ihärdigt buzz, främst på andra sidan Atlanten, både för den säregna musiken men också tack vare det faktum att Loney, Dear signades till legendariska rocketiketten Sub Pop. Nå, samarbetet med Sub Pop var väl knappast något dåligt varsel, snarare tvärtom, men Emil lyfter gärna fram att hoppet ligger i framtiden.
– Sub Pop var jättebra i början. De släpper inte min musik längre, jag ligger nu på ett bolag som heter Polyvinyl. Deras största band är Of Montreal. Det är ett mycket bättre bolag för mig egentligen, just när det gäller att bygga vidare. Men det var egentligen det bästa som har hänt mig när Sub Pop signade mig, även när jag ser tillbaka på det idag. Men sedan… Det var inte deras grej heller, det är inte rockmusik på det sättet som finns i deras övriga katalog, så det passar mig rätt bra nu att få ett annat bolag. Ett mer angeläget bolag.

”Man vill bygga sin egen värld av musik”
Att försöka beskriva Loney, Dears musik är som att försöka stänga in dimma med en knuten näve, hur hårt du än pressar samman handen sipprar ändå rök ut genom springorna mellan fingrarna. På andra kontinenter slänger man sig med begrepp som ”Pastoralt” och ”Andligt” vid försök att definiera Emils musik, själv är han lite mer ödmjuk.
– Jag gillar klanger, jag strävar ju efter originalitet, egna uttryck, egna klanger. Man vill bygga sin egen värld av musik. Jag skyr ofta saker som låter bekant, försöker styra bort därifrån. Men visst, det är allvarlig musik. Faktiskt livsbejakande musik också. Och sorgsen.
Efter framgångarna med ”Loney, Noir” var de så dags för att för första gången ”leverera”, den här gången med betydligt fler blickar på sig, och visst blev ”Dear John” en reaktion på ”Loney, Noir”. Resultatet blev betydligt mer återhållsamt och dystert än vad vi är vana vid.
– Vi var ute och turnerade med ”Loney, Noir”, 2007, och allting var upp och ner. Jag hade ingen ork till någonting, börjar Emil fundersamt. Så det kändes helt tokigt att spela sådan musik, när man själv var helt slut. Då kände jag ganska starkt att jag behöver ha fem, sex, sju extra låtar som bara är mörka. Det kändes inget bra att spela det här glada, eller, en del musik från mina skivor har blivit lite mer glad musik live, utan att den egentligen ska vara det. Så jag behövde ta ut en liten ny kurs. Sätta ner foten, välja vilket uttryck man vill ha. Ändå är ”Loney, Noir” lite av min favoritskiva, säger han och blickar ut över det gröna lummiga område som omger Annedalskyrkan. Lite vagt kan man dessutom höra att soundcheck har börjat inne i kyrkan.
– Sedan visste jag ju att den nya skivan skulle bli svår att göra så jag satte igång så tidigt som möjligt med arbetet. Jag vet inte om det var mycket press utifrån, det var press från mig själv också, jag ville göra någonting ojämnt. Jag tror också att jag ville hitta glädjen att göra musik igen, och det börjar komma först nu, för den senaste skivan blev mest att jag var tvungen att göra den. Av massa anledningar liksom. Man vill ju komma vidare också. Nu hoppas jag verkligen att det går att sätta igång igen, jag har redan börjat sätta igång lite grand. Det blir väl ändå mindre anspråksfull musik den här gången tror jag. Det känns ganska spännande.

Det växer märkligt
Trots att saker och ting verkligen börjat ta fart för Emil och hans vänner, det vankas spelningar i Argentina och en USA-turné tillsammans med Anna Ternheim (som är hans förband…), har det varit betydligt svårare att få grepp om den svenska publiken. Det är egentligen bara två städer i Sverige där Emil verkligen känner sig bekväm, den ena är uppväxtstaden Jönköping (där han gjorde en fullständigt fenomenal spelning under fjolårets Popadelica) och den andra vår Hufvudstad.
– Det växer väldigt märkligt här, för man kan inte se något av själva växandet. Det är mest att jag märker att jag stöter på folk som jag vet vilka de är, som vet om min musik och gillar den. Det är nog det enda sättet jag märker att musiken sprids på, annars märker jag ingenting. Det är väldigt suddigt för mig än så länge det där. Även om jag tycker att det går väldigt bra i Stockholm. Det är ändå en av de städerna där det kommer mest folk, i världen, när vi spelar. Det är där jag har spelat mest också. Folk känner till det. Så, eftersom jag är hemma på två ställen, så är det två städer jag har blivit profet i då, dock är jag inte profet i resten av Sverige istället! Stockholm och Jönköping känns det ganska bekvämt att spela i, men Sverige i stort är det inte lika bekvämt.

Jobba och njuta - samtidigt
Hur är det då med rutinerna? Och finner man någon ro att skriva ny musik när folk ständigt drar och sliter i en? Emil Svanängen funderar en liten stund innan han svarar.
– Just nu känns allt väldigt spännande. Jag håller på att bygga upp en liten bas hemma, för att bättre kunna göra musik och för att bättre kunna turnera. Jag håller på att koppla på benskydden nu känns det som. Men rutiner, alltså, jag vet inte riktigt, jag har inte hunnit få rutin på det än. Men nej, egentligen hinner man inte skriva ny musik när man är iväg på grejer. Man behöver lite pauser, det kan ta rätt lång tid att skriva nya låtar. Det har varit så mycket annat som jag har varit tvungen att fixa med – jag har skaffat mig ett hem och jag försöker hitta någonstans att jobba, så det har dragit ut rätt mycket på tiden. Men jag försöker att jobba på så mycket jag kan ändå, det är väl min filosofi - jobba hela tiden och njuta hela tiden. Och en liten del av jobbandet innebär att släppa saker och ting, och slappa lite, för att hitta balansen. Jag har ett väldigt lyxigt liv just nu. Det är fantastiskt.

Kafferep
Under Way Out Wests första klubbdag delar herr Svanängen Annedalskyrkan med ytterligare två artister, den vackra och extremt talangfulla Amanda Bergman (Hajen) och den precis lika vackra och talangfulla Sara Assbring (El Perro del Mar), både jag och Emil är rörande överens om att kvällen kommer bli smått legendarisk. Just festivalspelningar är annars något Emil verkligen ser fram mot.
– Jag har jättehögra förväntningar eller inga förväntningar alls. Jag vet inte, det känns som en sådan där flipp-eller-flopp-kväll i kväll. Inte så att det verkar dåligt, utan mest att ibland blir det bara liksom, fyraåringens barnkalas, när det är så kul att man börjar gråta istället. Jag vet inte riktigt vad jag ska tro. Det ska också bli kul att komma in och få träffa Sara och prata med henne. Det är så kul, hennes basist bor typ femhundra meter från mig, femtio mil bort, det känns så exotiskt liksom. Att vi åker hit och träffas här, fast vi träffas i Stockholm… Nej, det ska bli jättekul, jag älskar verkligen festivaler. Jag älskar det här kafferepet, nu är både Sara och jag någon typ av huvudperson här ikväll, men annars är man ändå inte huvudperson när man spelar på en festival. Man är bara en del av det hela, och då är det skitkul att spela.
Nästa år kanske det rent av blir huvudscenen?
– Ja, det är inte omöjligt att det har lossnat ordentligt till dess, så man kunde spelar där. Det vore rätt roligt. Jag vet inte vad som kommer att hända i karriären riktigt, annat än att det kommer att gå bra. Men det är svårt att se när. Det är nog det som jag försöker förmedla till bandet som går och väntar på - att det verkligen ska… inte smälla till, mer som en liten studs upp liksom. Bara något litet, någon liten okänd maktfaktor som man inte har räknat med. Som ska lysa upp lite. Det är inte så viktigt egentligen, men det skulle kännas ganska … trevligt.
När får vi höra ny musik signerad Loney, Dear?
– Ja… musik att höra, blir det nog… jag kommer nog se till att man får höra någon musik inom ett år. Någonting litet blir det nog, jag skulle gärna säga att det kommer ett album om ett år, men det kommer det nog inte göra. Men vem vet?
Av: Christian Stenbacke 2009-11-15
Foto: Sara Arnald (1), Erik Lindgren (2-4) Hemsida: www.loneydear.com

2009-10-27T16:18:00.001+01:00

3 toronto REVIEWS

2009-10-20T09:01:00.002+02:00

CHROMEWAVES 7.5

I think I was too harsh on Dear John when I wrote it up way back in January. Yes, it doesn’t stray far, either sonically or songwriterly (that’s a word now), from Emil Svanangen’s previous works under the Loney Dear marque, but I’m seeing now that’s because he’s fixated on capturing one specific mood or theme in music and much of what he creates are attempts to perfect it. Thankfully, his elusive goal is the moment where angst turns into elation and the sense of uplift that results and he expresses it with orchestral pop music. Of course. This was Loney Dear’s first stop in Toronto in a couple of years and a make-up for a failed attempt to visit back in May when their van broke down en route. And while that show at Lee’s in June 2007 was hardly a sell-out, those who were in attendance remember it fondly.

And those who were at the Horseshoe on this holiday Monday would likewise take away some warm memories of another wonderful show. Re-reading my review of the Lee’s show, I find myself at risk of repeating myself, but it bears repeating – Svanangen’s live band really took his songs to another level, deftly adding more bits of musical flourish and detail than four people with just two hands each really had any business doing in real time. And as such, they managed to recreate the richness of his compositions while still recasting and reconfiguring them enough to feel quite new. Particularly essential was backing vocalist Malin Stahlberg, who in addition to handling keys, guitar and percussion, sang most of Svanangen’s falsetto parts with more strength and bearing, and amazingly handled all of the tongue-twisting bridge of “I Am John” while Svanangen took the easy, “nah nah nahs”.

But as great as the band is, it’s still all about Svanangen. His permanently forlorn countenance is simultaneously at odds with yet perfectly suited for the sounds and songs he sings. Drawing material from across all his albums, the live setting proved a great equalizer for the production aesthetic of the recorded versions – the sparer arrangements of Sologne felt more fleshed out and Dear John’s mechanical aftertaste was made more organic, settling in that sweet spot that was Loney, Noir. The performance was splendid from the get-go but the undoubted highlight was when Svanangen stepped out to the front of the stage, unamplified, and sang (I think) “In With The Arms” to the house. Now he doesn’t have the most powerful voice, so it’s perhaps a good thing that the crowd was modestly sized and thus easier to silence, but doing that, and backed with Stahlberg’s harmonies, was simply perfection. In all, they played nearly 90 minutes including two encores though at no point in between did Svanangen leave the stage – no point going through the formality, we were going to keep them playing for as long as possible. And thought it finally did end, obviously, all three of Loney Dear’s last records have been a steady soundtrack for the days since the show. It makes my angst into elation and that’s just what I need right now.

ITSNOTTHEBANDIHATEITSTHEIRFANS...

When I went to see Loney Dear at Lee's Palace a couple of years ago, the experience was far and away a much more thrilling one than I ever could have anticipated. I walked away from that show converted from casual fan to rabid fan, and I couldn't wait to see singer songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Emil Svanängen again. Sadly, my wait had to be postponed a tad when his bus broke down back in May, but all can now be forgiven since the rescheduled show at The Horseshoe was every bit as satisfying as the first one.

The music of Loney Dear is made for the live stage as it consistently strikes a balance between the downtrodden and the uplifting. What I mean is that Emil's voice can't help but have a hint of the "woe is me" in its delivery, while the epic soundscapes that usually kick in within the last minute or so of his average song manages to leave me feeling celebratory. Likewise, the live show is a comparable contrast of highs and lows. Not being familiar with every aspect of his career, I was still surprised at how many songs I recognized, not only from the CD's I own, but also from what I remember about his last show. His memory was equally as sharp as he managed to even remember some of the familiar faces in the audience too. It was very amusing to watch him joke around with some of the mildly inebriated audience members that were hurling crazy requests his way, and it was also great to see him performing in such a way that showed that he was having as great a time as we were. The highlight of the show was when he approached the front of the stage and sang one of his songs without the aid of the microphone to an audience that was paying rapt attention as the din of the crowd's chatter was brought to an impressive halt. At the end of the night, he opted to simply let us know when the encore was taking place as opposed to going through the trouble of leaving the stage only to come back on, and the second highlight was hearing him perform a triumphant version of I Am John, which is easily one of the five best songs of the decade as far as I'm concerned.

I can honestly say that there are few things as uplifting as a Loney Dear show and I sincerely hope that I won't have to wait another two years for his return. Call me crazy, but being uplifted through song is just something I can't seem to get enough of for some reason. Go figure.

NOWTORONTO:
Loney Dear, on the other hand, bounced between sparse folky sad songs and synth-powered pop. But the strongest moment by far came when main man Emil Svanängen stepped away from the mic and unplugged his guitar to perform completely unamplified to the whisper-quiet room. His songs are strong enough to do without all the extra embellishments that were carefully arranged for the rest of the set.

2009-10-20T08:52:00.001+02:00

Ämne: loney, dear live in slovenia :)

check 5:28 on this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRWr1SUBc6o

well

2009-10-19T19:07:00.002+02:00

ok. will do.

i can actually see my future audience there in the background of the banner. and its so good they are so wide, and work for ANYBODY.

2009-10-17T08:29:00.001+02:00

such a nice evening at bowery ballroom. 500 there to hear our music. strange feeling, so much fun. did a very good show. all well, all nice. ending this weird tour in philly tmrw

2009-10-13T00:48:00.002+02:00

http://www.undertheradarmag.com/reviews/loney_dear_at_the_troubadour_west_hollywood_ca_october_1st_2009/

2009-10-10T09:38:00.001+02:00

Loney Dear
Loney Dear at the Troubadour, West Hollywood, CA, October 1st, 2009, October 1st, 2009

Oct 09, 2009 By Laura Studarus Web Exclusive
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Tie-wearing, cow-lick sporting musician Loney Dear (Emil Svanängen to his friends) is the kind of performer you can’t help but want to succeed. Taking the stage after Asobi Seksu’s high-spirited sonic assault that left the audience bouncing, one couldn’t help but wonder if the sweet-spirited Swede—who repeatedly and sincerely addressed the audience as “my friends”—was up for the task. Flaunting his crystalline voice and liberal use of crescendos in a set that could melt even a cynic’s heart, Svanängen proved that he was.

Backed by a four piece band and a few well-executed samples, Svanängen and co preformed pitch-perfect recreations of material spanning Loney Dear’s five album catalog. With a sweetness that makes his music’s thematic darkness both somewhat hard to believe and somehow crueler (bad things don’t happen to people with crystalline voices…do they?); the Troubadour stage was transformed into the world’s most melodic confessional. Momentarily during “Hard Day’s 1.2.3.4.” and “Under a Silent Sea” it appeared Svanängen might have been exorcizing a few actual demons.

In spite of being a show predicated on an “ah shucks” mentality that had Svanängen drawing comparisons between now and the last time they played the Troubadour (“We improved like humans are supposed to do.”), it was difficult not to be carried away with his performance. Normally, I’m not a fan of sing-alongs (I prefer to save my voice for the shower, thanks), but when he asked the audience to pitch in during “Meter Marks Okay” I was more than ready to buy what he was selling. Chalk it up to—as Svanängen would later proudly announce—his hailing from the same county as “the guy who invented Ikea.”

Despite Svanängen’s non-threatening charm, the first “I love you!” of the evening was directed not to him, but to his drummer after “Carrying a Stone.” Blushing, Svanängen admitted that he did have a great drummer, before a second, equally enthusiastic declaration of love was directed at him. “Are you one of my gay friends?” he asked, addressing a clutch of people perched in The Troubadour’s VIP section. For the rest of us he provided a somewhat obtuse explanation. “I met them and I wished I was both a gay and a lesbian at the same time. I didn’t know how to handle it!”

After an all too brief set (which seems to be a theme at the Troubadour), Loney Dear exited the stage. Of course, had you been present and blinked at the wrong time, you might have missed this—as the band returned only seconds later. “Do you mind if I play 'Airport Surroundings?'” Svanängen asked the crowd, laughing when all he got in return was a series of unintelligible screams. “I don’t know if that was a no or a yes. I shouldn’t have asked that!”

The encore also unexpectedly included “Shivering Green”—an oft-neglected song off the early Loney Dear album Citadel Band. Here, Svanängen provided an intriguing bit of background information, announcing, “We going to play a song that we played in a lighthouse in Holland.” He continued, amused, “That sounds more druggy than it is.”

The night ended with just Svanängen on stage, performing Dear John’s melancholic title track. “Thanks for the wonderful night!” he said before leaving the stage one last time. Thank me? My heart was melted, my inner cynic tamed. Thank you.

Set list:

1. I Was Only Going Out

2. Everything Turns to You

3. Summers

4. Under a Silent Sea

5. The Meter Marks Okay

6. Carrying a Stone

7. Take it Back

8. I Fought the Battle of Trinidat & Tobago

9. Hard Day's 1.2.3.4.

Encore:

10. Airport Surroundings

11. Shivering Green

12. Sinister in a State of Hope

13. Dear John

(www.loneydear.com)
Comments

2009-10-09T21:04:00.000+02:00

2009-10-08T08:13:00.002+02:00

Minneapolis/St Paul. 8 october 2009.
In a 2 story hotel right next to Mall Of America with rollercoasters and ferris wheels INSIDE the building.

I am at a turning point. This needs to become as strong as i want it to be.
Now's the time. This thing needs to move, to start building something.
I want nothing less. This could probably be said by any aspiring artist anywhere,
still that is what i want.

2009-10-06T10:08:00.001+02:00

2009-09-27T17:00:00.000+02:00

lula bauer photo

2009-09-14T23:47:00.000+02:00

phew. cut it with scissors. now just hope the us 2009 tour shirt will look somewhat like this.

2009-09-14T12:48:00.000+02:00

2009-09-07T18:34:00.005+02:00

Man, I've had a great week in Holland. We are really enjoying ourselves these days and the music keeps on growing to us. Keep looking for a shootage from a light house from Vlieland "into the great wide open" festival. We carried kg's of stuff up the stairs and did a recording we are really proud of. Have done so many things during the years just for doing it but have realised we are our own masters and can make our own difference. I look forward so much to seeing this thing. It was the song "Shivering green" which (coincidently) will be released on vinyl in the states during October 2009.

talking about releases, im thinking about skipping the song "lower your head" for the vinyl issue of Fontana. it does not make me happy, the way most of the other songs do. your opinions on this? its a neat song but a bit "teeny".

Our lovely photographer Sara Arnald took this image from the light house.

review in svenska of annedalskyrkan show

2009-08-17T21:51:00.002+02:00

Loney, Dear
Way Out West, Göteborg
2009-08-13
Av: Christian Stenbacke
Publicerad: 2009-08-16
Hemsida: www.loneydear.com

Annedalskyrkan i utkanten av Slottsskogen i Göteborg är en vacker tegelbyggnad med sekellånga anor. Mången vacker musik har ljudit inför dess väggar under årens lopp, musik full av tro, hopp kärlek. Musik full av själ. Musik som ger svar på frågor. Ikväll ljuder minst lika vacker musik, musik som gör att det smärtar i bröstet, flimrar för ögonen och höjer temperaturen i kroppen. Men Emil Svanängen ger inga svar. Han ställer frågor.

Ett par timmar innan Loney, Dear, Svanängens alter ego, gör en bejublad entré tillsammans med sitt band via en sidodörr bredvid podiet i Annedalskyrkan, berättar Emil för mig att han fortfarande väntar på det där sista lyftet. Han är medveten om att det börjat röra på sig rätt bra, men menar att det fortfarande återstår ett sista knyck för att han helt ska lyfta och för evigt lyfta mot himlen, bort mot den eviga och svarta rymden. Ambitiöst, javisst, men så är också Loney, Dears musik tidlös. Gränslös. Universell.

När jag sedan frågar om vad han tror om kvällens spelning svarar han: ”Antingen alldeles fantastiskt eller också blir det som ett stort barnkalas, där jag bara bryter ihop, inte vet vart jag ska ta vägen och börjar gråta av glädje”. Det blir aldrig ett barnkalas, men att kalla det för alldeles fantastiskt är fel det också. Det är bättre än fantastiskt. Det är magiskt. Andaktsfullt. Besjälat. Kyrkan är fylld till bristningsgränsen, ändå kan man höra en nål falla mellan låtarna. Alla håller andan, är hänförda, vad ska komma härnäst? Emil Svanängen, ja, han fortsätter ställa frågor.

Trots att senaste skivan, ”Dear John” är mörkare och mer återhållsam finns det inget återhållsamt i Loney, Dears Way Out West-debut. Allt är på blodigt allvar. Jesus hänger på korset. Allra bäst blir det när Loney, Dear får publiken att sjunga med i The Meter Marks Ok, som support. Som en dirigent står han där, Emil Svanängen, och dirigerar fram sång när helst han vill ha det, vacker sång dessutom. 2008 såg jag Loney, Dear spela i en fullsatt Teaterlada på Popadelica i Huskvarna, då trodde jag att klimax var nått. Jag hade fel. Spelningen i Annedalskyrkan var en spelning man ser once in a lifetime. Jag hoppas verkligen du var där.

Foto: Erik Lindgren

2009-08-01T22:42:00.005+02:00

I couldnt ask for more. Spend the whole day with mom and dad on late grandparents (now parents) farm. We all rode bikes 20 miles back and forth and saw a bicycle competition world cup. I rode the bike my father got on his 15 year birthday 50 years ago. He was angry as a bee that day, having driven mopeds for 3 years already. It serves well now though. Yellow and brown fields, sunshine, a little wind. Looked like the ukranian flag.

A couple of years ago, having no place to live, i spend some months recording and hanging in Jonkoping. I won some new friends, all photographers showing me the hobby of flying really cheap radio airplanes.

Unpacking some storages on the farm today we found our old record player and later i found that plane as well. Its a bit tricky to fly, no rudder only two motors with variable speeds. I flew so high today i could only hear it not see it. I wanted to attach a little light to it and fly now in the night but i could still see it, up there 120 meters in the air.

Saw the wonderful film about Thor Heyerdahl and made this little song. Ill hold it i guess.

2009-08-01T01:43:00.002+02:00

i felt like housing behind the left speaker in the end of the song. i remember i was sitting on my knees, singing with the mic lying on the sub speaker. i just dont remember WHY? like it though.

2009-07-22T23:10:00.001+02:00

I was riding around Jonkoping on my bike listening to music, when a song came up. It made me profoundly happy hearing it, tres nostalgic.
loneydear.com/carry.mp3
Feel free to send this song to anyone you want, the more the merrier.
Mail it, email it or send the link in a bottle on the sea.
Your simple bike messenger Emil

2009-07-21T13:36:00.004+02:00

One day in the van in 2007 i told erika (she was supersubbin for malin that year) my list of instruments i really wanted. im not sure of the list but x) apartment (not really an instrument) x) double bass (acquired!) was on it.

this makes me happy. x) contrabass clarinet

2009-07-14T18:10:00.002+02:00

The deserts of the States. You dont really know whether they exist or not before youve seen them. And when youre there you just dont care. Now I cant believe im there.
We stay every one and a half hours to find something eatable and those who nourish coffee get their kicks. 85% that is.

This is somewhere sometime during the Bird-tour in the states probably midwest. It is not the bus that broke down, that was the tour after. Which on the other hand led to other adventures, seeing Napanee, Canada for 24 hours, doing a solo show in Chicago and great hanging out at the Hideout.

Next album might be a little different than the previous ones. Im working on the ideas, havent really moved anywhere yet, i just know i wont have the ENERGY to make another fireworks album. I guess this one will have to be a little in between. That doesnt have to be bad though. I'm just so used getting nothing done so i've stopped surprising myself when im not doing things.

Denise, our hero in the software industry of Redmond, wrote:

Even if you couldn't write any more songs, just to know that you exists, and for everything you've already wrote, is enough to make me complete and happy

July 14, 2009 4:55 AM.

i deeply apprechiate that D. / yr E

2009-07-13T14:51:00.007+02:00

this is me having coffee in (?) Los Angeles. I am pretty sure it was. We were on some beach but i just cant remember when. if youve ever seen a picture of me on tour before 2009 you can bet yr hind i was sad on it, but this is when things changed and i started to enjoy myself and the things around me.

the years before that was hard man. i had nowhere to live, i was in the making of the albums Loney Noir and the Dear John album knowing that if id fuck those up, id have no career at all. im a pretty happy man now, thankful for what happened, its just im so lazy now, or, making music is so difficult now. im doing some sort of research, reading books and reports, building a mobile studio to fit in a bag, biking and stuff.

so far one new song is recorded. if you meet me ill play it for you on my car stereo.

2009-07-12T00:03:00.003+02:00

Tomas Tranströmer
C Major

When he came down to the street after the rendezvous
the air was whirling with snow.
Winter had come
while they lay together.
The night shone white.
He walked quickly with joy.
The whole town was downhill.

The smiles passing by -
behind turned-up collars everyone was smiling.
It was freer
And all the question-marks began singing of God’s being.
So he thought.

A music broke out
and walked in the swirling snow
with long steps.
Everything on the way towards the note C.
A trembling compass directed at C.
One hour higher than the torments.
It was easy.
Behind turned-up collars everyone was smiling.

Translated by Robin Fulton

http://www.madeloud.com/review/5243

2009-07-04T17:10:00.001+02:00

Loney, Dear - Dear John

Publish Date: April 8, 2009 - 12:02am

MadeLoud Rating:
4
Avg Member Rating:
4
Review this Album

It’s a real measure of how radically the music landscape has changed over the past few years that Loney, Dear’s rise to prominence now sounds downright old-fashioned. Swedish multi-instrumentalist Emil Svanängen was on the cutting edge in 2003 when he became Scandinavia’s buzz band du jour by self-distributing CD-R copies of his debut album. Six years and dozens of web-based distribution models later, that approach is almost as quaint as old time bands paying to cut an insta-single at the county fair.

The upside is that Loney, Dear hasn’t lost that handcrafted feel even after signing with Sub Pop. Dear John’s production values may be higher, but there’s a lived-in quality to each track that speaks to Svanängen’s painstaking investment in his work. From the delicately layered vocals of “Violent” to the unexpected organ fills of “Harm/Slow,” Dear John contains a cornucopia of subtle touches that elevate an already impressive album.

In keeping with the best of the recent influx of Scandinavian indie rockers, Loney, Dear moves deftly across the emotional spectrum. The mood shifts from mournful to triumphant to reflective, sometimes within the same song. “I Was Only Going Out” opens quietly with Svanängen’s softly accented intonations over a mellow acoustic strum, then progressively picks up instrumentation with each passing verse, finally spilling over into a buoyant, whistling chorus around the 2:30 mark. “Under a Silent Sea” takes a different tack, building from a quiet dirge to an electronica-laced cacophony that brings to mind a gloomier incarnation of The Postal Service.

Dear John isn’t an easy album to nail down. Depending on the track, comparison points range from Will Oldham to Low to Sufjan Stevens, but none of those quite capture the overall effect. This is a dense, rewarding album stuffed with fascinating little nuances. Even so, this feels less like a valedictory work than a promise of things to come. This record firmly establishes Loney, Dear as not just an artist to watch, but one who could well produce a true classic in the near future.

Recommended Tracks: “Summers”, “Under a Silent Sea”, “Violent”

2009-06-26T01:08:00.000+02:00

ok. lets start.

ok. lets start.

ok. lets start.

ok. lets start.

2009-06-23T23:13:00.002+02:00

it is such a wonderful night in solna. coffee and tea all day. did my office day in my living room. brought my mothers old guitar. its built and quality checked the 10th of dec 1934, she got it round 1953. thats crazy. finally found and bought a double bass last week, and got a bow in my post office today. i have only tried it on the guitar yet.

2009-06-23T01:11:00.001+02:00

Ahh the anxiety

Christian von Essen (fint! tack)

2009-06-17T11:14:00.001+02:00

Loney Dear - Skivkoll.se Photo: Kristofer Ljungros
Att regnet tilltar ytterligare när Loney Dear går på scenen med sitt sexmannaband gör nästan ingenting. Hans ödesmättade rymdpop blir bara ännu mer suggestiv. Loney Dear på skiva är en sak - men vad många inte förstår är att Emil Svanängen är en entertainer av högsta rang. Hans tidigare föreställningar om att livespelandet suger musten ur det kreativa skapandet tycks ha förändrats - nu är livespelningarna ett kreativt skapande i sig.

Loney Dear - Skivkoll.se Photo: Kristofer Ljungros
Låtarna byggs förvisso upp på liknande sätt - ofta en trevande början med ett crescendo som liknar världens ände - men det är ändå en fröjd att få bevittna varje svängning, varje infall, varje litet misstag. Loney Dear har nämligen lyckats med konststycket att få skivinspelningarnas perfektion att bryta ut i en organisk känsla av musiken när den spelas på plats. Det är något lite religiöst som händer.

Låtmässigt är det fokus på nya skivan Dear John, av förståeliga skäl. Men det är samtidigt lite synd att tiden är för knapp för att utforska fler bitar av den stora låtskatt som arbetats upp genom åren.

Men vad som verkligen känns tungt är dubbelbokningen med Fever Ray. Lasrar och mullrande technobas precis mittemot stör både publik och band, och Svanängen bygger till och med ett helt intro på en baston från Fever Ray-scenen.

2009-06-17T01:46:00.003+02:00

A nightingale sang outside my window.
Listened to the double bass recording from
the bunker. It sounds very nice when I pan it to the right.
Music is growing. The night is amazing. EVERY night.

The night is day but everything is dark and quiet. I find it odd and
magnetic to me.

namanama

2009-06-13T02:17:00.001+02:00

2009-06-12T02:41:00.006+02:00

Nils-Emil K

2009-06-11T13:16:00.004+02:00

One late night several years ago i was looking for a driver for a very old SCSI-scanner. I found pages serving what i needed and I entered. Just like Josef K, i found myself running through corridors, chasing something i hardly knew what it was anymore. I typed my fake e-mail several times, going deeper into the maze, starting to realize i had entered something evil and very sinister.

'this is the last step'
'this is the very last step'
'from now you only have a few minutes left'

I never found the driver, and after 90 minutes i was exhausted and scared. two men in odd hats came up on each side of me.

2009-06-10T22:53:00.001+02:00

2009-06-10T22:44:00.004+02:00

well

2009-06-08T23:07:00.002+02:00

http://www.kusf-archives.com/2009/06/kusf-060709-4-6-pm-just-another-menace.html

he spoke so fast interviewing me, making me speak real fast. sorry. like the sound of the show though.

2009-06-07T15:36:00.000+02:00

Hobbies

2009-06-06T14:14:00.000+02:00

Viruses Are Good for You

Spawn of the devil, computer viruses may help us realize the full potential of the Net.

By Julian Dibbell

What scares you most about getting that virus?

Is it the prospect of witnessing your system's gradual decay, one nagging symptom following another until one day the whole thing comes to a halt? Is it the self-recrimination, all the useless dwelling on how much easier things would have been if only you'd protected yourself, if only you'd been more careful about whom you associated with?

Or is it not, in fact, something deeper? Could it be that what scares you most about the virus is not any particular effect it might have, but simply its assertive, alien presence, its intrusive otherness? Inserting itself into a complicated choreography of subsystems all designed to serve your needs and carry out your will, the virus hews to its own agenda of survival and reproduction. Its oblivious self-interest violates the unity of purpose that defines your system as yours. The virus just isn't, well, you. Doesn't that scare you?

And does it really matter whether the virus in question is a biological or an electronic one? It should, of course. The analogy that gives computer viruses their name is apt enough to make comparing bioviruses and their digital analogs an interesting proposition, but it falls short in one key respect. Simply put, the only way to fully understand the phenomenon of autonomously reproducing computer programs is to take into account their one essential difference from organic life forms: they are products not of nature but of culture, brought forth not by the blind workings of a universe indifferent to our aims, but by the conscious effort of human beings like ourselves.

Why then, after a decade of coexistence with computer viruses, does our default response to them remain a mix of bafflement and dread? Can it be that we somehow refuse to recognize in them the traces of our fellow earthlings' shaping hands and minds? And if we could shake those hands and get acquainted with those minds, would their creations scare us any less?

These are not idle questions. Overcoming our fear of computer viruses may be the most important step we can take toward the future of information processing. Someday the Net will be the summation of the world's total computing resources. All computers will link up into a chaotic digital soup in which everything is connected - indirectly or directly - to everything else. This coming Net of distributed resources will be tremendously powerful, and tremendously hard to harness because of its decentralized nature. It will be an ecology of computing machines, and managing it will require an ecological approach.

Many of the most promising visions of how to coordinate the far-flung communication and computing cycles of this emerging platform converge on a controversial solution: the use of self-replicators that roam the Net. Free-ranging, self-replicating programs, autonomous Net agents, digital organisms - whatever they are called, there's an old fashion word for them: computer viruses.

Today three very different groups of heretics are creating computer viruses. They have almost nothing to do with each other. There are scientists interested in the abstract behaviors of self-replicating codes, there are developers interested in harnessing the power of self-replicating programs, and there are unnamed renegades of the virus-writing underground.

Although they share no common experience, all these heretics respect a computer virus for its irrepressible mobility, for the self-centered autonomy it wrests from a computer environment, and for the surprising agility with which it explores opportunities and possibilities. In short, virus enthusiasts relate to the virus as a fascinating and powerful life form, whether for the fertile creation of yet more powerful digital devices, as an entity for study in itself, or, in the case of one renegade coder, for reckless individual expression.

Getting a buzz from the Vx

One computer virus writer in his early 20s lives on unemployment checks in a white, working-class exurb of New York City. He tends to spend a fair amount of his leisure time at the local videogame arcade playing Mortal Kombat II, and would prefer that you didn't know his real name. But don't let the slacker r/sum/ fool you: the only credential this expert needs is the pseudonym he goes by in the computer underground: Hellraiser.

Hellraiser is the founding member of the world-renowned virus-writers' group Phalcon/Skism. He is also creator of 40Hex, an electronic zine whose lucid programming tips, hair-raising samples of ready-to-run viral code, and trash-talking scene reports have done more to inspire the creation of viruses in this country than just about anything since Robert Morris Jr.'s spectacularly malfunctional worm nearly brought down the Internet.

And as if all this weren't enough, Hellraiser also comes equipped with the one accessory no self-respecting expert in this cantankerous field can do without - his very own pet definition of computer viruses. Unlike most such definitions, Hellraiser's is neither very technical nor very polemical, and he doesn't go out of his way to make it known. "Sure," he'll say, with a casual shrug, as if tossing you the most obvious fact in the world: "Viruses are the electronic form of graffiti."

Which would probably seem obvious to you too, if you had Hellraiser's personal history. For once upon his teenage prime, Hellraiser was also a hands-on expert in the more traditional forms of graffiti perfected by New York City youth in the 1980s. Going by the handle of Skism, he roamed the city streets and train yards with a can of spray paint at the ready and a Bronx-bred crew of fellow "writers" at his side, searching out the sweet spots in the transit system that would give his tag maximum exposure - the subway cars that carried his identity over the rails, the truck trailers that hauled it up and down the avenues, and the overpasses that announced it to the flow of travelers circulating underneath.

In other words, by the time Hellraiser went off to college and developed a serious interest in computers, he was already quite cozy with the notion of infiltrating other people's technology to spread a little of himself as far and wide as possible. So when he discovered one day that his PC had come down with a nasty little digital infection, his first thought was not, as is often customary, to curse the "deviant hackers," "sociopaths," and "assholes" who had written the program, but to marvel at the possibilities this new infiltration technique had opened up. Street graffiti's ability to scatter tokens of one's identity across the landscape of an entire metropolis looked provincial in comparison. "With viruses," Hellraiser remembers thinking, "you could get your name around the world."

He was right. The program that had infected his own computer in late 1990, the so-called Jerusalem virus, had spread from Italy to Israel to North America before finally making its way into the pirated copy of the Norton Utilities that brought it to Hellraiser's hard drive. And though Jerusalem's author remained uncredited, other programmers from nearly every corner of the globe were pulling off feats of long-distance self-aggrandizement that dwarfed anything within the reach of America's spray-paint commandos. A kid who called himself Den Zuk had launched a virus that was flashing his handle on computer screens all over Europe, the US, and South America. Early speculation placed its origin in Venezuela, but the virus was eventually tracked to its true source in Bandung, Indonesia, when a researcher in Iceland guessed that some enigmatic characters in the source code were in fact a ham-radio call sign; they made contact with the call sign's registered operator, who immediately copped to his authorship of the program.

Equally far-ranging was the journey of the Joshi virus, which spread from India to parts of Africa and on to the rest of the world, popping up every January 5th to command computer users to type "Happy Birthday Joshi" if they wanted control of their systems back.

What impressed Hellraiser as much as the vast geographic distances covered by viruses, however, was their long range over time. After all, a painted graffiti tag would only last as long as it took to fade away or be painted over, but viruses, it seemed, might replicate forever in the wild. Indeed, the Jerusalem virus had been doing so for three years before Hellraiser encountered it, and four years later it remains one of the world's most commonly reported viruses. Likewise, Den Zuk is still reproducing on computers worldwide six years after it first left the island of Java; Joshi continues for the fifth year in a row to extort international birthday wishes. Dozens of other viruses from the US, Canada, Eastern Europe, Taiwan, Australia, Turkey, Malta, and other far-flung locales thrive globally (This despite that the antivirus industry spends tens of millions of dollars a year to eradicate them.) Bearing encoded bits of their authors' souls - clever jokes, crude graphics, friendly greetings, and, of course, occasionally, malicious intentions (though in fact the majority of viruses found in the wild are designed to do no damage) - viruses roam the earth in apparent perpetuity.

For Hellraiser, steeped as he was in graffiti culture's imperative to "get the name across," there was only one possible response to this new technology of self-projection: he had to get in on the action. But how? Virus writing wasn't exactly a standard subject in computer-science courses, and even the computer underground - with its loose-knit network of bulletin boards and e-zines proffering instruction in the illicit arts of hacking and phone phreaking - wasn't the most dependable source of virus lore. Occasionally, a hack and phreak board might offer a small collection of cryptic viral source code for brave souls to experiment with, but as far as Hellraiser knew, the only system exclusively devoted to viruses at the time was a place called the Virus Exchange, operating out of what was then the world's epicenter of virus production: post-Communist Bulgaria, where the Cold War's endgame had left a lot of overtrained programmers with time on their hands and anarchy on their minds.

Lacking the money or the phreaking skills to dial in to the Virus Exchange, Hellraiser made do with what he did have: a live specimen of the Jerusalem virus, replicating furiously inside his desktop system and poised to trash every program file he tried to run on any upcoming Friday the 13th. Carefully, Hellraiser extracted all copies of the virus from the computer and holed up in his dorm room to examine its workings. He studied it for weeks, and then finally, tentatively, he produced a virus of his own. It was a shameless hack really, essentially just the Jerusalem code with the tag line "SKISM-1" inserted in place of a few of the original characters. But after infecting as many computers as he could and subsequently finding his creation enshrined in antivirus literature as the "Skism-1" virus, Hellraiser swelled with a pride he would later recall with some amusement: "Shit, I thought I was the man back then."

Hooked on that buzz, he dove deeper into his studies, aiming for proficiency in DOS assembly language, the formidably austere low-level programming dialect in which Jerusalem was written (like the vast majority of computer viruses then and now). He quickly acquired the ability to produce viruses he could truly say were his, and along with this ability, he picked up the beginnings of a rep among New York-area denizens of the underground. Gradually, through the hack/phreak (h/p) bulletin-board scene, he made contact with other isolated virus writers - subculture orphans compared with the h/p crowd and its Legions of Doom, MODs, Chaos Clubs, and other constantly forming and re-forming groups and factions.

Hellraiser started wondering why he shouldn't put together a group of his own. Soon enough, the retired graffiti bomber was again running with a crew, formally known as Smart Kids Into Sick Methods (Skism for short) and dedicated to sharpening the virus-writing skills of both its members and the virophilic public at large.

And it was to serve more or less those lofty ends that Skism's electronic house journal 40Hex was born. Named for the assembly-language function by which viruses copy themselves, the publication hit the boards of the Vx underground with an infectiousness all its own. (Vx, short for virus exchange, denotes all boards devoted, like their Bulgarian namesake, to virus discussion and traffic in viral source code.) Its unapologetic bad attitude was a brash wake-up call to the still-embryonic virus-writers' community. "This is a down and dirty zine [which] gives examples on writing viruses and ... contains code that can be compiled to viruses," wrote Hellraiser in the introductory file of 40Hex's March 1991 première. "If you are an antivirus pussy, who is just scared that your hard disk will get erased so you have a psychological problem with viruses, erase these files. This aint for you."

The warning scared off no one, of course, least of all the alleged pussies of the antivirus industry, who took to scouring every new issue for a peek inside the mind of the enemy, getting up close and personal at last with the phantoms they'd been battling for years. Not that the life of the virus hunter was a lonely one. In fact, the antivirus community was already in many ways a more advanced subculture than that of the virus writers, complete with local color and a mystique all its own: the industry pioneer and media darling John MacAffee was famed for his giddy morning-after overestimation by a factor of 10 of the Internet worm's damage; then there were those Bulgarians, the notorious and proud Dark Avenger - who signed, and even dedicated, his viruses - and his driven nemesis, Vesselin Bontchev. Endlessly revising and debating the burgeoning taxonomy of virus species, nervously policing the boundary between the great unwashed and those trustworthy enough to handle "live" specimens, the world of antivirus research offered its initiates a thrill somewhere between the delightful romance of butterfly collecting and the grim camaraderie of working for the National Security Agency.

In comparison, virus writing - while obviously not without its kicks - lacked community. But in the months and years following 40Hex's d/but, that began to change. The previously inchoate and virtually invisible virus-writing underground at last coalesced and shifted into high gear. Various groups proliferated and crossbred: Skism merged with another New York posse called Phalcon to form the Phalcon/Skism supergroup, while the pan-European TridenT team and the Canadian-Australian-Swiss-Taiwanese-multinational NuKE crew quickly rose to challenge Phalcon/Skism's prestige and programming skills. Zines multiplied, too: NuKE's Info Journal and West Coast virus writer Urnst Kouch's Crypt Newsletter challenged 40Hex's hegemony, as did the number of so-called Vx bulletin boards that rocketed from a handful worldwide to rough estimates of as many as 200 at present.

Amid all the rapid growth it helped set in motion, 40Hex has kept pace. After the first four raucous issues, Hellraiser handed over the editorial reigns to Phalcon's designated archivist, Garbage Heap, who has steadily increased the circulation of the zine while slowly steering it toward something suspiciously like respectability. Available now in a crisp, desktop-published paper edition as well as good old-fashioned e-text, today's 40Hex still brims with the gnarliest of viral code and remains a feisty defender of the right to create and publish viruses. But it frowns on anyone who looses viruses into the wild and is more likely to solicit guest editorials from antivirus types than to hurl obscenities at them.

The young hellion who founded the zine would probably not approve - that is, if the same young hellion were still around to say anything about it. But he isn't. Not really. Hellraiser has undergone some changes of his own lately. Once quite cavalier about releasing viruses that intentionally deleted files or otherwise "fucked people's shit up" (after all, what better way to make your tag linger on in their memory?), he eventually decided that creating destructive programs just gave virus writing a bad name and resolved thenceforth to produce viruses with more or less benign payloads only. And then one day, not too long ago and without much fanfare, he simply called it quits. Partly, he was starting to chafe at the limited range of programming challenges involved in virus creation, he says, but more to the point, his evolving young world view had somehow gotten infected by a creeping respect for the right of others to control what goes into their own digital back yards. Destructive payload or no destructive payload, Hellraiser reached the conclusion that it was just plain "wrong to `pollute' other people's systems with viral garbage."

Which isn't to say he's gone over to the ranks of his old antivirus nemeses. Hardly. He's still too tight with all his Phalcon/Skism homeboys for that. Even if he weren't, he's been a virus writer for too long to feel comfortable with the easy demonizations that are the stock in trade of antivirus rhetoric. For the rest of us, of course, it's easy enough to accept the standard caricature of the underground virus writer as a low-grade sociopath. After all, what else but antisocial perversity could lead someone to produce a mechanism we encounter principally as contamination in the digital environment, as noise on the line?

Yet Hellraiser's career path - from graffiti writing to virus writing and beyond - demands a more complicated understanding of the virus phenomenon. It asks us to recognize that viruses, like graffiti, are just as much signal as noise - that they are in fact an irreducible confusion of the two. As Hellraiser came to recognize, the noisiness of viruses is built in - they are by definition information that subverts control. But as the subculture Hellraiser helped build will always remember, every virus turned out into the computer wilds - like every tag sprayed onto the hard urban landscape - is also a carrier for the purest and strongest signal a human being can send. "Remember my name," the virus says, which - after all - is another way of saying: "I'm alive."

This is about as far as most discussions of virus writing get: ignorant kids thrashing about in codes, creating horribly simple but efficient digital bombs. And even if you take a very generous view that the underground virus writers are inadvertently creating new forms of life, the discussion of beneficial viruses would have to stop here if it weren't for folks like Dr. Mark A. Ludwig.

The mutator in the desert

Mark Ludwig lives in a desert, and compared to Hellraiser's background, seems to hail from an entirely different planet. But Ludwig, too, is chasing the elusive nature of computer viruses.

A married man with three young children, Ludwig lives in Tucson, Arizona, where barrens of sand and sun and saguaro cactus shimmer not too far beyond the sump-cooled confines of his home. But the desert where he wanders is someplace else entirely: it's the lonely intellectual wilderness reserved for those who practice science on the fringe, outside the cozy realms of institutional affiliation, professional consensus, or methodological decorum.

He doesn't have to be there. With his PhD in physics from the University of Arizona (and his prior course work at Cal Tech and MIT), Ludwig could easily return to the fold of respectable researchers if he chose. All he'd have to do is let go of his somewhat obsessive scholarly pursuit of the wild computer virus, and pick a slightly more conventional object of study. Or maybe just pursue his present subject with a little more sober attention to devising antivirus countermeasures and a lot less gleeful fascination with viruses in and of themselves. Or maybe just tone down the florid libertarian rhetoric and sweeping philosophical claims in which he tends to couch his otherwise gruellingly meticulous analyses of viral performance and technique.

Really, it wouldn't take much.

But Ludwig isn't likely to do any of these things, because he actually seems to prefer the hardships of the fringe to the rewards of a life on the techno-scientific inside.

He didn't always. "Once I was a scientist of scientists," writes Ludwig in the introduction to his latest self-published treatise, Computer Viruses, Artificial Life, and Evolution. "Born in the age of Sputnik, and raised in the home of a chemist, I was enthralled with science as a child. If I wasn't dissolving pennies in acid, I was winding an electromagnet, or playing with a power transistor, or doing a cryogenics experiment - like freezing ants - with liquid propane." Eager to work his way into the company of "the great men of science" and join their noble quest for objective Truth (he'd read about it in textbooks), Ludwig rushed through his undergraduate work at MIT in two years, then plunged into his graduate course of studies with equal enthusiasm. By the time he got his doctorate, however, he'd seen enough of the political infighting and blind prejudice that structure the real work of contemporary scientific investigation to sour the romance permanently. Disillusioned, he dropped out of the hard-sci grind and into a job working with computers, a field that at least provided some of the wide-open pioneering spirit that the textbook histories of science had promised, even if it moved him further from pure science's intimacy with the mysteries of nature.

But not long after that, around 1988, he started picking up reports of contagious programs running loose among the machines he now made his living from, and the course of his life changed yet again. For Ludwig, viruses came bearing the same mind-expanding message-in-a-bottle they would not much later be bringing to Hellraiser. Except that Ludwig decoded the message a little differently. Where Hellraiser heard the signal "I'm alive" coming from the virus's creator, Ludwig understood the message as coming directly from the virus itself. Viruses behaved like living things: self-reproducing and autonomous. Might we not understand life a little better, he wondered, if we can create something similar, and study it, and try to understand it? The mysteries of nature, in other words, now loomed closer than ever - right there on the wide-open technological frontier to which he'd fled from the wreckage of his scientific aspirations - and Ludwig couldn't resist the temptation to go questing after them once more.

His initial attempts to acquire specimens to observe were frustrating. Today's teeming ecology of one-stop Vx trading posts didn't exist. When Ludwig approached the antivirus community for access to its shared research collections, he found himself shut out: then as now, the A-V crowd refused to release captured virus code to anyone outside a trusted inner circle. So, true to his style, Ludwig decided to go it alone. He set up a BBS, announced a bounty of US$25 for every virus uploaded, and sat back while the code rolled in. After building up a representative cross section of the wild virus population, he set about examining his haul, and within a few months his research bore its first fruit: The Little Black Book of Viruses, a technical primer on the essentials of virus writing, complete with scrupulously annotated source code for four virus programs of his own creation.

The Little Black Book made something of a name for Ludwig, but it wasn't an especially pretty one. Though the tutorial viruses were pointedly nondestructive and came surrounded by warnings against their misuse and instructions on how to keep them from getting loose, the book was roundly condemned as an incitement to digital vandalism. In the three years of steady sales since The Little Black Book's original publication in 1991, various mainstream computer magazines have summarily dropped Ludwig's advertisements for the book as inappropriate subject matter for their audiences. And when the book was recently released in France (as Naissance d'un Virus, or "Birth of a Virus"), its publishers there were immediately slapped with a legal injunction against distributing it with the infectious source code intact.

But Ludwig has remained undaunted in the face of the world's virophobia. If anything, its vehemence has only sharpened his determination to share the wealth of his knowledge. "People think of viruses as an invasion from Mars," he says, "and that hurts research into these things. My aim is to change people's attitudes, to cut down some of the fear."

To that end he has established an annual international virus-writing competition, flying cheerfully in the face of the "swarming hordes of antivirus developers." (One year's contest rewarded the smallest functional DOS virus submitted.) Ludwig also publishes a newsletter now, Computer Virus Developments Quarterly, in which he mingles detailed technical discussion of viral code with rants against the tyrannical tendencies of American government, the moral bankruptcy of contemporary Western culture, and (last but not least) the evils of repressing detailed technical discussion of viral code. Occasionally he even gets a sign that the general public is starting to come around to his pro-knowledge agenda: after five months of wrangling its way through the French courts, for instance, the suit against Naissance d'un Virus was finally thrown out by a tribunal arguing, as Ludwig proudly reports, that "trying this case was like putting Galileo on trial again."

Yet amid all of Ludwig's busy agitation in defense of viruses, what ever became of the intellectual mysteries that first drew his attention to them? His pleasure at being compared to Galileo, the archetype of the politically incorrect scientist, certainly suggests that he never lost his sense of scientific mission. But the proof of Ludwig's abiding interest in viruses as tools of natural philosophy lies in his sequel to The Little Black Book: the aforementioned Computer Viruses, Artificial Life, and Evolution. Published late in 1993, the book is a dense and daunting 373 pages' worth of charts, differential equations, and tightly reasoned arguments in support of Ludwig's intuition that self-reproducing computer code bears deep lessons about the workings of life.

As the title's nod to the fashionable new scientific discipline of artificial life makes plain, however, Ludwig is clearly aware that other researchers, backed by the imprimatur of Official Science, have been building on the very same intuition for some time now. The first two volumes of the Santa Fe Institute's Proceedings on Artificial Life published in 1989 and 1992 devote several papers to the idea of computer viruses as synthetic life. But taking the idea further, Ludwig argues that computer viruses, unlike such other forms of artificial life as cellular automata, mobots, or genetic programming, are the only form of artificial life not biased by the hope of their creators. Because computer viruses must exist in an environment (DOS in particular) that was designed without any thought of the digital organisms that might come to inhabit it, they are free from any accusation that the environment's "physics" were written to support the emergence of their lifelike behavior. Or to put it more bluntly, feral viral ecologies (versus the controlled experiments in university labs) represent the only known simulation of life that does not implicitly (and quite unscientifically) build God into the system.

Having carefully constructed this ambitious claim, Ludwig proceeds to test drive it straight into the heart of biology's most vexing questions: How did life get here in the first place? How did the staggering diversity of life forms that exists today come to be? He sics viruses on the theory of evolution itself, in other words, sending them in to illuminate with their logical simplicity the still murky depths of Darwin's grand hypothesis. It's a bold move, but a puzzling one at first glance. Although the viruses found in the wild may exhibit a wide range of lifelike features, they've never been known, after all, to evolve.

Or have they? Not too long after the first virus was written, the first antivirus program was written as a countermeasure. Once anti-virus software was introduced into the cybernetic ecology, viruses and the programs that stalk them have been driving each other to increasing levels of sophistication. This is nothing less than the common coevolutionary arms race that arises between predators and prey in organic ecosystems.

Step one in this quasi-Darwinian dance took place when security-minded programmers developed what has since become the standard defense against viruses for most PC owners - scanning software that looks for telltale code fragments of known viruses (often some scrap of graffiti-esque text) and alerts the user when it finds any. In time, virus hackers responded by wrapping their programs in a blanket of encryption impenetrable to scanners. But since the built-in subroutines that decrypt the programs for execution cannot themselves be enciphered, antivirus programmers simply retooled their scanners to look for the decryption code. Later, in step two, the legendary Bulgarian writer Dark Avenger came up with a clever innovation known as a mutating, or polymorphic, virus. A mutating virus randomly reorganizes its decryption algorithm every time it replicates to outsmart the policing of the scanner. In step three, antivirus engineers devised "heuristic" scanners, built to sniff out all but an insignificant percentage of a virus' mutants through educated pattern recognition.

Surveying the fossil record of this game, Ludwig found himself pondering a logical next move: what if someone were now to develop a strain of polymorphs with a genetic memory, so that rather than completely reshuffling their structure with every generation, the few mutants that escape discovery by heuristics could pass their undetectable code on to their offspring?

The prospect of virus populations able to autonomously build up immunity to any scanning techniques thrown at them thoroughly depressed antivirus programmers. To Ludwig, however, the possibility proved too intriguing to wait around for some random underground hacker to realize it, and he resolved to do the job himself. The result: Ludwig's "Darwinian Genetic Mutation Engine," a programming utility that turns any normal DOS virus into a souped-up, genetically evolving polymorph, complete with an option for sexual gene-swapping between individuals that come into contact in the wild. Curious hackers can find the Darwinian Genetic Mutation Engine's complete source code in the pages of Computer Viruses, Artificial Life, and Evolution, along with detailed experimental results demonstrating the ability of Darwinian Genetic Mutation Engine-enhanced viruses to run rings around existing scanners. But the program's deeper significance, of course, lies in its potential to transform viruses' heretofore hacker-driven pseudo-evolution into something very like the real thing: a finely tuned interaction of variety and natural selection that allows the environment itself to shape the internal code of the organisms dwelling in it.

The Darwinian Genetic Mutation Engine is all Ludwig needs, in other words, to prove viruses capable of meaningful evolution, and incidentally, test Darwin's theory. And it's no surprise perhaps, given Ludwig's hard-earned distrust of anything smacking of intellectual orthodoxy, that he has found that Darwin's venerable theory fails the test. Running his beloved viruses through assorted experimental hoops and mazes, Ludwig followed them to the conclusion that Darwinian evolutionary mechanisms alone are just not mathematically fertile enough to have created and shaped life as we know it. This is a well-worn scientific heresy, of course, but it's not without its small but respectable following within the ivory walls Ludwig so proudly dismisses.

To be fair, though, Ludwig is not asking to be ranked among his boyhood heroes - those scientific greats whose unique insights clear broad new vistas of understanding in a single bound. All he wants from the rest of the world is a modicum of respect for the wild computer virus as a legitimate subject of scientific investigation. Or at least acknowledgment that this enduringly lifelike wonder could be useful if we but understood it, rather than the casting of it as the ultimate technological taboo.

Ludwig managed a remarkable intellectual shift. He elevated the computer virus from the digital equivalent of a can of spray paint to an object capable of perhaps infinite variations and almost lifelike behavior. He transformed a tool of vandals into a field of scientific study by emphasizing a computer virus' biological affinity. But by the time Ludwig began publishing, the computer virus was already well on its way from the fringes of science to the seat of honor at research symposiums.

Booting up the Cambrian explosion

"I'll be out at my place in the jungle over the weekend," said the message, posted in May 1994 from an obscure Internet site in Central America, "so I'll be out of e-mail contact till Monday."

And just like that, University of Delaware ecologist Tom Ray (now visiting scholar at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Kyoto, Japan) disappeared once more into the rain forests of Costa Rica, leaving behind the clean conveniences of the digital world for an organic riot of plant and animal life. As promised, though, he would be back. Ray's passion for the unkempt splendor of the jungle has remained unabated after nearly two decades of intermittent research there, but in the last few years, it's the digital world that has claimed his closest attentions. Since late 1989, Ray has done his most important fieldwork seated in front of a computer, observing the busy fruits of an activity that has come to define his career: he breeds viruses.

Or to put it more precisely, he breeds worms, since that's the stickler's term for software that is both self-reproducing and able to execute its code independent of any host program. Ray, convinced that his programs are as good as alive, calls them simply "organisms," or "creatures." Whatever they are, though, he's been breeding quite a lot of them. He's been breeding them with the full support of his university employers, with the financial backing of major corporations, and with the steadily growing curiosity and respect of fellow researchers in the fields of both biology and computer science. And if all goes according to plan, he will keep on breeding them until he has achieved a goal far more adventurous than anything yet attempted by other virus programmers - infusing the vast unused spaces of the global computer networks with a roiling digital ecology as complex, as fascinating, and ultimately as beneficial to humankind as the rain forests that he has long sought to protect and understand.

In short, by infecting the Net with self-replicating code, Ray aims to turn it into a jungle.

He didn't start out so ambitious. In the beginning there was just a lone drive of a Toshiba laptop to populate, one tiny digital germ to do it with, and a hunch Ray had been kicking around for a decade or so to spur him on. The hunch was that experiments with self-replicating programs (Ray had first heard about them as a Harvard undergrad in the late '70s) might add some theoretical rigor to eco-science's essentially anecdotal attempts at explaining the abstract processes that gave rise to the complex interspecies relationships he had observed in the field. "I was frustrated," he would later tell a group of colleagues, "because I didn't want to study the products of evolution - vines and ants and butterflies. I wanted to study evolution itself."

In this, Ray's attraction to self-reproducing programs differed little from that of Mark Ludwig (who in fact was not unfamiliar with Ray's work by the time he set out to write his magnum opus on computer viruses and evolution). Unlike Ludwig, however, Ray felt neither philosophically obliged nor ethically disposed to work with viruses able to thrive in already existing computer environments. Not that he never considered the option. In fact, his initial plan was to set mutating machine-language organisms loose in a single computer and watch their evolution as they competed against one another for direct access to the computer's core memory, a strategy that might have evolved viruses superbly adapted to any system based on the same instruction set as the original petri chip. But Ray soon scrapped this idea - the risk of accidentally releasing his specimens into the wild seemed too great. Instead, he decided, he would evolve his organisms inside a virtual computer, modeled inside a real one in much the same way some operating systems today can model working emulations of other OSes, allowing DOS programs (for instance) to run in Macintosh environments. The difference, in Ray's scheme, was that his simulated system would be the only environment of its kind; thus, any program that escaped into other computers would find itself a fish out of water, unable to function anywhere but in its birthplace.

While the security benefits of this approach were obvious, its contribution to the scientific effectiveness of the experiment was even more significant: now that Ray was working with an imaginary computer, he was free to shape the system's design to create an environment more hospitable to life. And there was one key change to be made in that regard, for as Ray had come to recognize (and Ludwig would later set down in hard math), today's digital environments simply weren't built with mutant programs in mind. Typical operating systems might let a program randomly move some of its algorithms around with impunity (as the polymorphic viruses do), but at the fine-grained level of individual bit-flipping most closely analogous to genetic variation, even a single chance alteration almost always results in a system-crashing bug. Nature's tolerance of random code revisions is much greater, and if Ray wanted a more "natural" computer, then one way to get there would be to give it an instruction set in which nearly any sequence of bits would make some kind of sense to the system's virtual CPU.

So he gave it that instruction. He also equipped his phantom computer with a death function, a "Reaper," which would terminate any individual program sooner or later - but would always get to the oldest or most error-prone programs first. Thus primed to carry out the requisite natural selections, Ray's digital ecosphere was nearly complete. He called it Tierra (Spanish for "earth") and started preparing the final touch: an inhabitant. Later dubbed "the Ancestor," it was the first worm Tom Ray ever created - an 80-byte-long self-replicating machine written in Tierra's quirky assembly language - and as it happens, it was also the last. Once loosed into the Tierra environment installed on Ray's laptop, the creature's offspring quickly spread to the new world's every corner, within minutes displaying the evolutionary transformations that would "write" Ray's organisms from then on.

A 79-byte variation appeared, rapidly displacing its slightly clunkier predecessors, then smaller descendants followed - a 45-byter, a 51, eventually even a 22 - entering a taxonomy that would grow to accommodate hundreds of subspecies as Ray played with Tierra in the months and years to follow. The swift and drastic size reductions of those first runs startled Ray, but even more re-markable were the survival strategies these variants encoded. The 45- and 51-byte creatures, it turned out, were not worms but bona fide parasitic viruses, achieving their leanness by borrowing reproductive code from larger programs when they needed to copy themselves. In turn, host programs acquired an immunity from parasites by failing to register their location in the virtual computer's memory, thus foiling the parasites' attempts to find them.

To the casual student of computer viruses, it's interesting to observe that despite the wide-open and neutral terrain into which the first Tierrans were placed, they swiftly and spontaneously adopted the same techniques built into wild viruses to ensure survival in an environment thick with hostile users and their software: parasitism and stealth. But to the serious scholars of biology who soon began to take note of Ray's work, such developments were more than just interesting. Out of the barest simulation of environmental forces, some of life's more sophisticated interrelationships were emerging entirely unbidden, and while the Mark Ludwigs of the world might object that Ray's initial fine-tuning of Tierran "physics" tainted the experiment, Ray was more than satisfied with its scientific implications. Here, in the unexpectedly colorful diversity bred from a single simple program, was a compelling model of evolution's creative power.

"In my wildest dreams, that was what I wanted," Ray later told author Steven Levy. "I didn't write the Ancestor with the idea that it was going to produce all this."

As much as this bustling ecology-in-a-box thrilled and surprised Ray, however, it soon began to dawn on him that the Ancestor had produced something even more unexpected: high-quality software. Almost all of the Ancestor's progeny displayed some improvement in the efficiency of their code, but in a few cases, evolution seemed to have attained a level of tight-wound optimization difficult for even the most wizardly of human software engineers to achieve, and Ray couldn't help wondering if there was a way to yoke this inhuman skill to the development of practical applications.

It wasn't an unheard-of notion. As long ago as the early '60s, for instance, cutting-edge programmers had begun experimenting with what they called "genetic algorithms" - pools of software subroutines repeatedly multiplied, mutated, and weeded according to how well they performed a given task.

Two decades later, in the same ground-breaking work that established the ability of digital viruses to penetrate nearly any system defenses, computer scientist Fred Cohen also proved that viruses are potentially useful as all-purpose computing devices. As Cohen later put it, "anything a Turing machine can compute, a virus can evolve." Since then, Cohen has tested the proposition that viruses can create useful code in a number of applications. One notable experiment of his is a network-maintenance ecosystem in which survival of the most needed cleanup tasks ensures maximum efficiency - in which, for instance, self-replicating programs designed to delete unwanted files randomly mutate their file-chasing strategies, with those strategies least wasteful of system resources being spared the Reaper's blade.

But the benefits realized in these experiments were limited, as Ray saw it, by their dependence on artificial rather than natural selection - that is, the software was allowed to evolve only in the direction of a particular function chosen by the programmer. In Tierra, on the other hand, organisms evolved according to criteria that they themselves created collectively, constrained only by the "natural" imperative to reward the thriftiest use of existing resources. Tierra gave evolution a free hand, in other words, and Ray felt certain that the creativity thus unleashed had the potential to tackle software-writing challenges far beyond the reach of human programmers. In particular, the difficulties involved in writing the most productive code for the parallel-processing machines that will take us into of the next century of computing seem to cry out for an evolutionary approach. "We will probably never be able to write such software, as it is way too complex," Ray observes. "Yet we know that evolution can handle that kind of problem."

The reason we know that, of course, is that we - and all other multicellular organisms - are wetware embodiments of frightfully complex parallel processes. But that fact posed a new challenge for Ray. Despite the great variety of digital forms Tierra had generated, it remained an ecology of one-celled organisms, none much larger or much more complicated than the 80-byte Ancestor. In fairness it should be pointed out that the terrestrial biosphere spent its first 3 billion years or so in a similar state before finally exploding into multicellular diversity at the dawn of the Cambrian era (a mere 600 million years ago). Yet if Tierra was ever to prove its full value as a software-writing machine - or indeed as a scientific model of evolution - sooner or later it would have to cough up a Cambrian explosion of its own. And since the key to this burst of complexity seemed to Ray to lie in challenging his evolving creatures with more intricate problems than the simple bit-copying tasks they'd grappled with thus far, he decided that the explosion wouldn't happen nearly soon enough if Tierra remained stuck inside conventional computers, and he began looking into the possibility of installing Tierra on a parallel-processing system.

But then one day in early 1994, Ray had a minor epiphany: "I realized that the global network is just a loosely connected parallel computer, and much larger and more powerful than anything that will ever exist as a single machine."

And thus was born Ray's plan to colonize the Net. He wrote it up soon thereafter in a document plain-spokenly entitled "A Proposal To Create a Network-Wide Biodiversity Reserve for Digital Organisms" (See Wired 2.08, page 33), the text of which outlines a vast collective enterprise devoted to hastening the arrival of the digital Cambrian. Ray envisions a Tierran subnetwork spread across thousands of volunteer Net nodes, each of them running the environment as a low-priority background process sustained only by unused (and otherwise wasted) CPU cycles. He is confident that once his "one-celled" simple self-replicating organisms encounter the immensity, the topological intricacy, and the fluid instability of the Net, they will quickly rise to the occasion and evolve into tightly coordinated multicellular conglomerates, thus setting off the dreamed-of Big Bang of complex digi-biotic diversity.

Ray foresees digital naturalists like "modern day tropical biologists exploring our organic jungles. However, occasionally these digital biologists will spot an interesting information process for which they see an application. At this point, some individuals will be captured and brought into laboratories for closer study, and farms for breeding." Harvested, domesticated and then neutered of their self-replicating properties, these prize specimens of code could then be translated from Tierran language into standard programming languages and set to work at any number of tasks. Ray suspects some form of intelligent network agents would be the likeliest first applications to be culled, but he prefers to emphasize that the most useful products of the digital jungle would be as difficult to predict as rice, pigs, penicillin, and silkworms might have been for an observer of the pre-Cambrian ooze of early carbon-based life.

There's a whiff of science fiction rising from all this, of course, but Ray is hardly indulging in idle speculation. Already a team of computer scientists has gathered under his supervision to work full-time on hammering out the technical details of the plan. He's accustomed by now to dealing with his listeners' occasional anxieties about the prospect of Tierran viral-like pests infiltrating the workaday network environment. "I explain why the things can't escape," he says, "and that quiets the nervous people, but some of them continue to look nervous."

But when the time comes to put their systems where their mouths are, how many site administrators will do so? Not enough, fears Danny Hillis, founder and chief scientist of Thinking Machines Corporation, the former manufacturer of massively parallel computers that had been supporting Ray's work. For all the tricky engineering involved in running Tierra on a Netwide scale, Hillis believes, the greatest challenge facing Ray "turns out to be more of a political issue than a technical issue. People are not necessarily going to want to give up their processing cycles for this" - even if those cycles will otherwise rot on the vine - simply because of a deep-seated reluctance to cede so much as a fragment of administrative control over system resources to a program whose internal processes serve no immediate ends but their own.

But even if computer users ultimately reject the deliberate presence of a global wilderness reserve for computer viruses woven neatly into the fabric of the Net, they may yet fail to keep the computer landscape from turning to jungle. After all, the same personal and subcultural imperatives that drove Hellraiser's career will continue to inspire underground virus writers. And the digital terrain continues to get more interesting. If the Darwinian innovations introduced by Mark Ludwig are any indication of coming trends in viral technique, then it's not inconceivable that a vital ecology might someday flourish in the midst of our daily routines, unplanned, uncontained, ill-comprehended, and irrepressible. It's an unnerving prospect. Yet it wouldn't have to be - not if we prepared for it by actively cultivating a digital biodiversity of the sort Tom Ray proposes. This is a niche that will be filled, whether we fill it deliberately or not.

"We're just going to have to live with them," artificial life researcher Chris Langton says of computer viruses. Our global web of digital systems, he predicts, is fast unfolding towards a degree of complexity rich enough to support a staggering diversity of autonomously evolving programs.

Viruses in a suit and tie

But the future of beneficial viruses is not only in the hands of eccentrics such as Hellraiser, Ludwig, or Ray. The good folks at General Magic corporation are eager to put viral code on a firmer and decidedly more lucrative footing. Not that they like to hear it said that they have anything to do with viruses, mind you.

General Magic manufactures a hand-held communication device that relies on a nifty new network-streamlining program language called Telescript. Announced earlier this year with the very visible backing of such info-dollar heavyweights as AT&T, Apple, Sony, and Matsushita, Telescript proposes to do good things. Its intelligent agents, General Magic co-founder Bill Atkinson promises, will soon be flitting about cyberspace on your behalf, visiting remote commercial sites to buy, sell, and trade information for you, and generally behaving themselves with all the decorum you'd expect from a personal digital valet.

Still, despite rather severe restrictions on the agents' ability to replicate, it's hard to deny certain broad similarities between intelligent agents and the offerings of your typical Vx board. Both wild viruses and Telescript agents routinely copy themselves from one computer to another. Both viruses and Telescript agents can run themselves on the computers they travel to, and, for those same reasons, raise differing degrees of concern about their security. "A virus never does anything good for you, it only does things to you," says hacker legend Bill Atkinson, nervously reaching for a fine semantic distinction between computer wildlife and Telescript's semi-autonomous "intelligent agent" programs.

More intriguing, though, are Telescript's close similarities with Tom Ray's digital diversity reserve and the experiments of Fred Cohen. Cohen, now happily self-exiled from academia and in business for himself as a computer-security guru, is experimenting with a distributed database in which self-reproducing query agents scurry throughout a network, much like the Telescript scheme. And like the sprawling biosphere of global Tierra, Telescript's bustling marketplace depends on a broad base of local interpreter programs installed wherever its agents go to do their business. This has two significant implications. For one thing, the fact that the mobile organisms of both Telescript and Tierra interact only with their interpreters, incapable of functioning in their absence or of bypassing them to directly affect the host environment, obviates many of the security concerns surrounding their autonomy. (Telescript, additionally, makes use of a battery of cryptographically secured restrictions to ensure that its agents don't subvert control of the host machine, either by accident or by malicious design).

And for another thing, the fact that all the interpreters speak the same programming language regardless of the underlying operating system and hardware means that, as the base of interpreters approaches omnipresence on the world's computer networks, the Net approaches the condition of a single, vast, and unmappable supercomputer, with each wandering digital organism a process in one worldwide parallel computation.

Taken together, these two features represent something of a watershed in the history of computing. It has long been observed, rather wistfully, that in principle the world's computers sum up to one gigantic parallel processor, and that the crushing bulk of that metacomputer's CPU cycles goes to waste, unused. Only now, however, with the advent of protocols like Telescript and Tierra, do we have the means to deploy such processes that treat the Net as one machine, safely and sensibly. This, then, is the real significance of these endeavors.

The dark side of benefits

Trying to imagine the marvels that pour forth once you've successfully tapped a computer as elaborate as the Net is as futile as trying to map the future of a society, or of a life - or of life itself.

Of course, trying to foresee the risks that could emerge from that same computer is an equally hopeless task. But as it happens, we are bound to face those risks whether or not we seek to harness the full power of the Net, since the teeming and inevitable population of uncaged digital organisms will in any case plow forward with its own relentless exploration of the Net's capabilities. All we would miss by failing to orchestrate a more manageable viral exploration of our own, therefore, would be the potential benefits - including quite possibly some antidotes to the worst depredations visited on us by the viruses of the wild. And including also, perhaps, something even more precious. For if there is any purpose legible at all in the millennia of human history, it is in the unflagging persistence with which we add to the complexity of the universe. So, if we were to shrink from the chance to actively participate in transforming the Net into the single most complex information entity since the emergence of the human brain, would we not then be shirking a duty of almost cosmic proportions?

It could happen. It's hard to say which is really the more characteristically human trait - our drive toward complexity or our sometimes irrational fear of it. In the matter of computer viruses, fear could well gain the upper hand. It has already shown itself, after all, in our human tendency to overly reduce the multifaceted motivations of the virus writer to a caricature of hooliganism. Likewise it seems to lurk behind the urge to deny that viruses can be anything but lethally dangerous. But we'd better think long and hard before we let it stand between us and the epic opportunities that globally distributed viral programming presents us with. Because in the end, the meaning of our long-term coexistence with computer viruses may prove difficult to distinguish from the meaning of our own existence.

Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Viruses (But Were Afraid to Ask)

Little Black Book of Viruses ($14.95) and Computer Viruses, Artificial Life, and Evolution ($22.95) by Mark Ludwig are available from American Eagle Publications Inc., PO Box 41401, Tucson, AZ, 85717.

Tom Ray can be found at ray@hip.atr.co.jp. A copy of his proposal for the networkwide biodiversity project can be found at ftp://tierra.slhs.udel.edu/ tierra/doc/reserves.tex, and the source code for the Tierra program is ftp://tierra.slhs.udel.edu/tierra/tierra.tar.z.

For executable DOS code on disk send a check for $US50 (payable to "Virtual Life") to: Virtual Life, 25631 Jorgensen Road, Newman, CA, 95360.

Fred Cohen's book It's Alive! The New Breed of Living Computer Programs (Wiley & Sons, $39.95) is a nice introduction to the question of viruses as a-life. The book includes a disk of reproducing Macintosh programs.

To find out more on 40 Hex, e-mail fortyhex@phantom.com.

Julian Dibbell is a New York-based writer who contributes regularly to the Village Voice.

Brest

2009-06-05T00:16:00.003+02:00

http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=viewImage&friendID=401312549&albumID=1566225&imageID=22030504#a=1566225&i=22030552

Brest

2009-06-05T00:16:00.002+02:00

2009-06-02T00:13:00.002+02:00

sam just bought the coolest piano ever. on tour 2011!

2009-06-02T00:13:00.000+02:00

sam just bought the coolest piano ever. on tour 2011!

http://img1.classistatic.com/cps/l/kj/09/4/29/515/r2/54156cf_20.jpeg

2009-05-21T21:14:00.001+02:00

playing atonal organ. had an early idea ten years ago of playing all twelve notes at the same time but with different levels. like some sort of patchwork music, or some sort of woven textile sounds. painted the walls white in my new studio room close to my home that PerJohan built for me.

2009-05-21T10:27:00.002+02:00

yay. some sweet coder somewhere added a history code bridge for my fav sound from my old computer. for instance the bass sound from Sinister in a state of hope. Code happiness in Solna.

Wednesday 20 may 2009

2009-05-20T21:43:00.003+02:00

I had the most amazing dream on the plane home. (Besides the fact seeing the sunrise from the window, sleepy. It all seems so still up there. Travelling almost at sound speed and still almost getting nowhere. Tried to cry a bit.)

I dreamt i was hovering silently over the streets were i grew up, a metre above the ground. Floating forward by lightly stepping the ground one foot at a time. Everytime my foot touched the ground i heard a sustained reverberant ping. I can't remember last time i dreamt with such odd fidelity in sounds. Felt more real than most things in years.

right in the middle of it now. quiet centre of the storm. hear that?

2009-05-19T06:05:00.001+02:00

hi there. the party is over for this time. or work, or rest or whatever this is i am doing. played a "super important" or (super important) radio show today. KCRW Morning becomes eclectic. They were really nice and good people. We played 1. i was only going out 2. everything turns to you 3. airport surroundings 4. in with the arms ..chatting.. 5. saturday 6. i am john 7. violent. (+ sinister)

http://www.kcrw.com/music/programs/mb

http://www.kcrw.com/music/in_studio

((added latr:
why didnt we play under a silent sea? we (I) were was a bit cowardy. just ran into the other hotel room and hifived a bit.))

first couple of songs felt amazing but then it started to feel like.. dont know. ive been trying to not play the songs i dont like playing anymore. (im superproud of the recordings) but it just gets so powerful in the wrong way playing it live. felt sort of devastated after show, that i hadnt reached longer than this.

leaving tomorrow morning for home. im up for new songs and recordings. i need to reach that something now.

2009-05-19T05:35:00.005+02:00

2009-05-19T00:53:00.002+02:00

2009-05-16T06:28:00.001+02:00

This post has been removed by the author.

May 16, 2009 5:59 AM
Delete
Blogger Denise said...

Perfect - No visibility, more imagination. You are found, not lost!

May 16, 2009 6:06 AM

Seattle weekly

2009-05-16T06:24:00.002+02:00

The last time Swedish bedroom-pop sensation Loney, Dear came through Seattle, it was playing to a packed Moore Theatre, opening up for whistling dervish Andrew Bird. I dare say that Loney, Dear held their own in Bird's nest, thanks in part to some incredible audience participation (a choir of nearly 1500 never hurts a performance) and a venue that sounded as pristine and pure as any I've ever heard. Not trying to bag on the Croc, but I was a little nervous that the less-than-grandiose setting might make the urgency of Loney, Dear's hushed folk fall a bit short. Thankfully, the audience was less interested in conversation and soaking their bones in PBR tall-boys and more focused on singer Emil Svanängen's mannerisms and stories.

On record, Loney, Dear is more of an intimate experience, as everything you hear on the record is Svanängen, recording in his parents basement. Thankfully, Svanängen has assembled an incredibly precise backing band who flesh out his arrangements and never seem like some hack backing band who are merely singing for their supper. As warm and intimate as Loney, Dear sounds on record, and as well as it would translate to a solo acoustic set, full-blown live performances really do suit the group. Watching Svanängen playfully conduct the crowd in group vocal parts, and jokingly try to get some overeager audience members to stop singing during the whisper quiet verses, it felt like secretly observing a grade school music teacher who lives for their work, and even more so the students who make their job possible. The ability to take a room full of people and transform stone-faced casual observers into one giant smiling glee club is a special one, and when Svanängen stepped in front of the microphone to broadcast a bit of a song sans PA, the 200 or so people inside the normally rambunctious Croc quieted down to a whisper and hung on every note. It was the kind of moment that puts a shiver down the spine and is completely characteristic of that band's magic.

There is no light show, no smoothly rehearsed banter, no pyrotechnics needed to emphasize moments such as this. It was unbridled joy, mixed with a refreshing sense of wide-eyed wonder toward the entire world, and when Emil Svanängen raised his voice, the simple pleasure of a human being who has decided to spend his life making music and sharing it with the world becomes a rapturous, contagious feeling of getting something off of your chest without screaming about it. Beautiful catharsis, thy name is Loney, Dear.

Chicago

2009-05-16T06:24:00.001+02:00

Loney Dear
93XRT Concertgoers Blog: Latest post

ShareThis
Loney Dear in an XRT Big Beat Show at Schubas
By Marty Lennartz ⋅ May 15, 2009

Sometimes, out of misfortune, wonderfully unexpected things will occur.
That was certainly the case at Schubas last weekend for an XRT Big Beat
Show with Swedish band Loney Dear.

On record, Loney Dear is one Mr. Emil Svanangen. His last two discs,
“Loney Noir” and the recent “Dear John” were both recorded in his
bedroom studio as well as his parent’s basement while playing all the
instruments himself. The records are pop gems made all the more
impressive by his solitary recording process.

When he takes Loney Dear on the road though, it expands to a five piece
band.

This is what we expected Saturday night. Only problem was the misfortune
I alluded to at the beginning.

On Friday, the band’s van broke down somewhere in Canada. Not able to
get parts in time, Emil thought about canceling the show. Then, he
thought again.

In true “The show must go on” fashion, he reluctantly left his mates to
deal with the van and booked a one way flight from Toronto to Chicago
arriving at Schuba’s just in time to save the show.

Before the show he was worried the audience would be upset by the
unannounced solo acoustic performance but the crowd was supportive knowing the
personal effort he made to get to town.

He may have been missing four band members but they were replaced by a
200 person choir. Without any prompting, the crowd, who knew the songs,
broke out numerous times to provide background vocals.
Picking up on this, Emil became more confident taking even more risks.
At one point he stepped away from the mic to sing with just his naked
voice filling the room. You could hear a pin drop.

Emil played maybe 15 songs and even though the titles were scribbled on
a folded set list, the show still had the kind of spontaneity and give
and take that made us feel this was a truly unique and special
performance.

Hopefully Emil will hook back up with the band to continue the tour, but
for those of us at Schuba’s, we’d be ok if the part for the van had to
be part on backorder.

2009-05-13T04:19:00.003+02:00

here we go. im up for starting to think of the next album. ill try to be a bit faster this time. love songs in various tempi is what i am expecting. dream states, minor adventures. stereo sounds.

days are pretty (...) right now. right in the middle of it. for the first time. im not saying its easy, just that im here.
i really like being in north america. some places are almost starting to feel like my second home. those friends is different places. chicago was amazing like usual.

the future is dim, fuzzy and interesting. zero visibility.

2009-05-12T08:56:00.001+02:00

2009-05-12T08:51:00.001+02:00

7

Loney, Dear
Dear John
Polyvinyl | 2009 | Album
Buy Dear John by Loney, Dear at Amazon.com. Buy Dear John by Loney, Dear at Insound.com. Buy at eMusic Buy Dear John by Loney, Dear at the iTunes Music Store.

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Just to set the record straight, it's “Loney, Dear,” with a comma, not “Lonely Dear” and—so it seems—purposely confusing.

Loney, Dear is Swedish-born Emil Svanängen, a deeply sullen man driven by a broken heart, a laptop, a million or so odd instruments, and some damn good ideas.

The moody sounds you hear, created almost solely by him, are a hysterically desperate and distressed phone call—a call you must take. Over it you will hear soft synth beats interloped with organic instruments that enhance the electronics with a sort of romance. It's a breakup and a war within all at once. Imagine that phone call. Imagine being strong enough to find hope in it. Dear John strives to do just that.

Although these songs are certainly laden with loneliness (hence the Loney/Lonely mix-up), hope is intertwined. Opening the album is the wonderful major/minor mix of “Airport Surroundings,” a disturbing stalker-ish song that highlights Svanängen’s fear of loss. “I had a hole in my heart,” he sings before a chorus of, “You are all I want.” In visiting the airport surroundings, he deducts that there may still be a chance to recover his love. No one said hope is smart in all instances, and this realization hits by the end of the song. The summer doesn’t last forever.

Oddly, it seems that winter is the best time to listen to Loney, Dear. Dark, intimate, and intelligent, it can warm you like sitting by a fire. But it can also remind you why you want the summer back.

Nonetheless, change isn’t always the best option. But like the change in seasons, sometimes there is no choice. “Everything Turns to You” reminds us of that. “This is what I want to change, and I cried, cried for you / because everything turns to you.” The song fades away, which is a modification for most Loney, Dear tracks. The majority of his songs build momentum throughout. This is the case even on mellower ones like “ I Was Only Going Out,” a track that begins with only one guitar and vocals and ends with a drum beat, percussion, a second guitar, a bass line, and some whistles that join together with some “la, la, la’s” as if it were a plan.

Seemingly this momentum is a diagram for Dear John and, really, all of Svanängen recordings. Check out the horns in “Harsh Words” and the harmonica in “Summers” for proof. But there is other proof; proof of Svanängen’s amazing musicianship is hidden throughout this recording. Listen closely.

At first you may plug Loney, Dear’s Dear John into the singer-songwriter genre or the modern folk movement of the moment. That would be a mistake. There’s too much going on. Be patient; your payoff is coming. As easy as it can become, do not let this album drift into the background. Catch yourself; the compassion is worth the attention.

This sensitivity of Svanängen can come across at times as whiney, especially on “Harm,” which focuses primarily on vocals. “That’s how I fell from top of twelve stories to the ground,” he sings, and in unusual Loney, Dear fashion, it ends anticlimactically. But the climactic build and reassurance of the next two songs easily rescues it. On “Violent” and the title track, we are uplifted. We hear “Sleep well tonight,” sung as worries are pushed aside. The album somehow lands on an upbeat note.

On Dear John, it seems Loney, Dear takes pieces of his past records and trumps them. He steers clear of too much complaining and continuously allows his songs to build to a wonderful moment that can take you by surprise. That is, of course, unless you’re familiar with Svanängen’s map. If you’re not, it’s worth studying.

And remember, as much as it sounds like it shouldn’t be, it's “Loney, Dear,” not “Lonely.”
Nick Greto

2009-05-12T08:43:00.001+02:00

2009-05-09T16:52:00.000+02:00

sigh

2009-05-09T04:46:00.002+02:00

So many cancelled shows now. Missed todays Toronto show just because our tour bus broke down, (the belt in the motor), we got a new one sent in a cab but then another part was torn down. Im really sorry, I was looking forward so much to this. Felt like i just missed my own birthday party.

A lot of trouble these days, cancelled two shows in Europe when my bag with EVERYTHING was stolen and i had to go home for a new passport.

Is this i sign i should go back to making records?
EMmil

life ohhh life

2009-04-30T00:01:00.001+02:00

Marcus Braveboy
till mig

visa information 21:51 (2 timmar sedan)

Svara

Hey Emil,

That's pretty interesting that out of all the places you guys chose Trinidad lol

Do you think the band would be willing to do an interview with a Caribbean Entertainment Website called 'Soundvillage". It's launching within the next couple of weeks and when I told my friends who are the owners and editors of the website they were very interested in interviewing Lonely Dear, especially since you guys have a song called "The Battle of Trinidad and Tobago". The website does not only cater to the Caribbean diaspora but to individuals of other countries who are interested in anything Caribbean related.

Tell me if you are interested.

Take care

Marcus

Nice letter

2009-04-25T21:48:00.001+02:00

Hej!

Efter att ha lyssnat några gånger på Airport Surroundings (ännu en outsägligt vacker låt) inser jag att jag måste höra av mig och berätta om de enormt starka känslor din musik framkallar hos mig.
Jag har lyssnat aktivt på musik i snart 40 år (är 52) och det är inte mycket musik under dessa decennier som så innerligt och direkt gått rakt in i hjärtat (eller snarare, som den biologilärare jag är, hjärnan) som Loney, Dears.
Allt sedan jag hörde "I am John" för ca 1,5 år sedan finns det en direktkanal för Loney, Dear in i mitt allra innersta. Ett par enskilda musikupplevelser, som kan mäta sig med det jag känner för Loney, Dears musik, dyker upp i mitt minne. Det ena är första gången jag hörde Sibelius symfoni nr 5 på Helsingborgs Konserthus (1970 eller 1971) - sistasatsen fick mig nästan att levitera ur stolen. Ett annat är när jag fick höra Arvo Pärts "Cantus" ffg (mitten av 80-talet) - jag minns precis var jag befann mig när den spelades på P2. En del låtar med Spiritualized (såg dem i Malmö förra tisdagen) och Polyphonic Spree (ex Light & Day-Reach for the Sun) kan nog också kvala in i den kategorin.

Hej Emil!
Tack för den fina Dear John - var tvungen att beställa den från USA för att få den i god tid innan ditt framträdande.
Ser med stor förväntan fram mot konserten i Köpenhamn på söndag. Hade egentligen varit smidigare med Malmö på lördagkvällen men då är jag sedan länge uppbokad med att leda en grod- och paddexkursion (grod/padd"sång" är, likt fågelsång, också ett slags musik om än mer enahanda men väl så fascinerande, åtminstone för en biolog).
Fördelen med Köpenhamnskonserten är dock att danskarna inte har någon 13-årsgräns så mina barn 11 och 7år kan också följa med. Båda gillar din musik även om Maja har en oroväckande vurm för Melodifestivalen men också Regina Spektor, Kate Nash, Sahara Hotnights. Får Olle välja blir det Tom Waits för hela slanten.
För egen del upplevde jag ett mäktigt framförande av Sibelius 7: e symfoni tidigare i våras och såg The Soundtrack of our lives i fredags. Kan ni toppa det på söndag? Jag tror och hoppas det!
Lycka till med det fortsatta turnerandet!!

2009-04-24T00:08:00.000+02:00

2009-04-23T23:14:00.000+02:00

From Point FMR. Such a nice night. Thanks all.

2009-04-23T23:07:00.001+02:00

David Ola Emil Susanna playing the song Summers. Samuels left leg is also
in the picture. (Botanique Brussels)

2009-04-20T17:42:00.003+02:00

Thank you Lord.

I have finally left the UK to never return thanks you to our label who has done virtually nothing to help us there for our tour. But, big thank you to those wonderful souls that came to our shows. We really apprechiate it. The glasgow night was particular good.

Now I'm in France and my heart is light again.

2009-04-08T23:38:00.000+02:00

Hej Emil!
Tack för den fina Dear John - var tvungen att beställa den från USA för att få den i god tid innan ditt framträdande.
Ser med stor förväntan fram mot konserten i Köpenhamn på söndag. Hade egentligen varit smidigare med Malmö på lördagkvällen men då är jag sedan länge uppbokad med att leda en grod- och paddexkursion (grod/padd"sång" är, likt fågelsång, också ett slags musik om än mer enahanda men väl så fascinerande, åtminstone för en biolog).
Fördelen med Köpenhamnskonserten är dock att danskarna inte har någon 13-årsgräns så mina barn: Maja (11år) och Olle (7år) kan också följa med. Båda gillar din musik även om Maja har en oroväckande vurm för Melodifestivalen men också Regina Spektor, Kate Nash, Sahara Hotnights. Får Olle välja blir det Tom Waits för hela slanten.
Göran
----- Original Message ----- From: "Emil" <nilsemil@gmail.com>
To: "Göran

diskant.dk (sahara's photos)

2009-04-08T16:19:00.001+02:00

Emil

2009-04-07T23:10:00.003+02:00

i need to improve. this is no good and i dont make anything else than ordinary music.
i thought i was special, that i had an idea of music. i was probably wrong.

i just need some sort of reason for what i do.

2009-03-30T12:43:00.002+02:00

Hälsningar från skogen

Emil Svanägen alias Loney Dear har gjort vad som i folkmun kallas för en Jens Lekman. Han har gått från källarinspelningar och CD-R-skivor till att bli en fullfjädrad indie-axiom, och antalet mysskäggiga rockkritiker på andra sidan Atlanten som hyllar Svanängens svävande pop har ökat lavinartat. Nu är det dags för uppföljaren till 2007 års utmärkta Loney, Noir, och i samma veva har man droppat kommatecknet. Vad som i gengäld möter lyssnaren är en lite djupare ljudbild än tidigare.

Man skulle kunna inbilla sig att det beror på turnerandet med hisspostrockarna The Sea and Cake, samarbetet med renässansmannen Andrew Bird eller den fräscha storbolagsbudgeten, men oavsett anledning är det uppenbart att man har lagt ner betydligt mer tid på arrangemangen än tidigare. Precis som tidigare nämnda Jens Lekman, med andra ord, som låter mer och mer som Jens Lekmanz för varje skiva. Men precis som sin frände klär Loney Dear ovanligt bra i de matchande kostymerna.

Svanängen, som inte direkt är de stora gesternas man, låter fortfarande sin späda korgosseröst bära upp de väna poplåtarna, men den här gången har de dessutom svepts in i ett täcke av eteriska orkesterklanger. Det låter stort, mäktigt och stundtals en smula spöklikt när pizzicatostråkar, analogt blippande och den allra skiraste falsettsången smälter ihop till en suggestiv helhet. De timida anslagen till trots finns det inte en enda låt på Dear John som inte fullkomligt exploderar i en kataklysm av känslor, ungefär som den här recensionen hanterar ekfraser. Om Brian Wilson hade gått vilse i en John Bauer-skog hade den efterföljande psykosen tonsatts precis så här.

Det är ömsom vemodigt, ömsom storslaget, men det blir aldrig pompöst - för mitt i all omfångsrikedom står fortfarande Emil Svanängen och låter allra ensammast i hela världen.

Rebecka Ahlberg

Publicerad: 2009-03-30

Emil about Stockholm show +

2009-03-30T01:04:00.003+02:00

Man (woman) thanks for yesterday. It was pretty much awesome. Who sang "harm" with me? I really enjoyed that. (someone in the audience) It is my favourite song. I'm not very fond of the Albinoni part for the moment but the Harm-part is fav. A french journalist told me it is sort of a joke in france to cover that song but he understood my sort of irony. (?) He was kind though.

I need a double bass a mandolin and possibly a banjo or balalaika. Please send me those. Or possibly sell. I'll pay good.

I'm sitting in my apartment it's 1 am and i dont know what to do. Sleeping seems like a possibility. I feel lazy for not making music anymore, but i simply can't do it while touring. (even if Harm in fact was sorto written on the road).

I wish i could write blogs like jens lekman but i cant so i will head there now instead. its a dreamworld.

jenslekman.com/smalltalk (i think is the address)

Svenskan 28 mars Debaser Medis

2009-03-30T00:03:00.001+02:00

Tjejen i blankgula, högklackade mary-janes funderar länge innan hon beskriver Loney Dear som ”Inte, liksom, techno” för personen på andra sidan av sin mobil.

Hon är inte så långt från verkligheten som man kan tro utifrån bandets tidigare skivor. Live, på klubben Send in the clowns, är Loney Dear driviga och täta med mycket klaviatur och perkussion, och det känns helt naturligt att dansa till låtar som I was only going out och Airport surroundings.

Emil Svanängen är inte alls – som hans försiktigt trevande, hemmagjorda skivor ofta är – trulig och introvert. Han krånglar på och av sig gitarrer, joggar bort till keyboarden, spelar tamburin, slår huvudet i en mick och knyter skorna, allt lika avslappnat. Han är rutinerad utan att det nånsin blir rutin.

Hela Debaser kan låtarna, det blir inte ens såna där halvapplåder när Harsh words tonar ner halvvägs mot slutet. Alla väntar istället knäpptysta på det ”riktiga” slutet innan applåderna fyller jättelokalen.

På ett mindre ställe, med lägre i tak, hade det förmodligen blivit en konsert med högre i tak och en mindre passiv publik. Aula-liknande Debaser är närapå slutsålt, men det är först efter den frigörande gruppövningen i The meter marks OK (publiken körar den drömska syntslingan från skivan) som hämningarna börjar släppa. Kring näst sista låten, I am John, dansas det en hel del, och först kring midnatt, efter ett andra extranummer, går Emil och hans vänner till slut motvilligt av scenen.

Elin Unnes

noje.svd.se

2009-03-28T01:51:00.000+01:00

Wow, They're Good! Never Mind; It's Just A Backing Track

by Bob Boilen

The Decemberists did it. Loney Dear did it, and so did K'Naan. They all used prerecorded performances to enhance their own live appearances at this year's South by Southwest music conference and festival.

Backing tracks are the anabolic steroids of live music. They add muscle where there otherwise might just be a bunch of humans doing the best they can. And there's no denying that they can make something average sound pretty over-the-top.

When you go to a show and hear prerecorded backing tracks, does it bother you? Would you rather hear the climax of The Decemberists' new record without the children's choir? (It's admittedly nearly impossible to pull off live, since you can't expect a bunch of kids to tour with the band.) Would Loney Dear be less Loney without the pizzicato strings? (They're probably sampled anyway.) Would K'Naan be less K'Naan without the invisible drum ensemble?

For me, it's an old question without an answer. I used to perform my electronic music in the early '80s with sequences I had composed ahead of time on my Atari 1040. It always seemed a bit weird to be in front of an audience and start the song by pressing the letter "A" on my computer to start the first sequence, and then hitting other letters to change reverb settings, randomize the start of other sequenced loops, and so on. I always had this nagging feeling that I was cheating, even though this is the way I made my music.

I seem to remember some story about how the backing track to the Electric Light Orchestra went awry and revealed the man behind the curtain, so to speak. I also remember hearing that fans sued the band for what they viewed as a scam; after all, they came to hear live music and not a good stereo system.

So where do you fall on this? Is it the honesty you seek when you hear a live band, or is it the spectacle you want -- along with whatever it takes to make that happen? Or is it something else?

Bob Boilen

themusicfile.com

2009-03-25T23:14:00.001+01:00

Once Was Not Enough

One of the things that stands out from our whirlwind week in Austin at SXSW is just how much a good (or poor) live performance can forever change your feelings about a band.

Loney, Dear is the perfect example. I have always thought of the band, fronted by Emil Svanängen, as a solo project; sort of the swedish equivalent of Sufjan Stevens; known for his home studio recordings where he is a one man genius... but I had never had the opportunity to see them live, where he plays with a full band and to great effect. The music feels more joyous and ebullient, swelling with such great charm and subtle vocal layering that I was taken aback, so much so that we made a point to see them twice during the week.

I'll never feel the same way about his music again and I mean that in a good way.

There is no attitude or pretense and they exude a warmth on stage that makes them instantly likable- as people- and maybe that's my point. In an age where it's less about selling records and more about building a loyal fan base and multiple revenue streams, it sure helps if people like you and walk away feeling like they have been injected with your spirit. (The counter balance to this was the incredible arrogance and attitude of Glasvegas but that's a whole 'nother story).

Malin Ståhlberg and David Lindval of the band happened to be on my flight from Austin to Atlanta on Sunday and they seemed genuinely grateful when I recognized them and let them know how much I enjoyed their shows. They were headed back to Stockholm, looking tired but happy. I sure hope these guys stay together. They are magical live.

hey!

2009-03-24T22:57:00.002+01:00

hey boys and girls. since this blog has finally gone public i must start to say, it just started as a scrapbook for nice reviews i've found online. dragndrop is just so easy so i couldnt help it. the mix smalltalk and reviews isnt really a great match but still this is where its now.

yr Emil

2009-03-23T18:09:00.002+01:00

March 23, 2009
by florajasmine

2009-03-21T02:09:00.001+01:00

The last time I saw the Swedish band Loney Dear, I thought it couldn’t get any better. I was wrong.

This time around Emil Svanängen was stripped down. In place of a drummer, Svanängen relied on his trust iPod. In another change from the previous performance I saw of him, he was joined by his friend Molly who supplied keys and beautiful harmonies to his already strong and ethereal vocals. With her addition, Loney Dear sounded more like an uptempo version of The Swell Season.

The highlight of the set was when the Svanängen tried to get the crowd involved in a singalong. All the audience had to do was sing, “Da da da da da,” but at first they seemed to struggle. “This isn’t going to work,” said Svanängen, insisting on his singalong. “Let’s try to make the impossible at SXSW.” He got his “impossible” and it made for a really fun show.

Loney Dear: website | myspace | @ Slowdown, Omaha | @ Orpheum, Boston | Dear John review

new song

2009-03-14T23:43:00.001+01:00

i have made a new song.

marimba+german schlager and love lyrics. like u want it, and you know it.

CITY.se

2009-03-11T14:37:00.000+01:00

Loney, Dear, ”Dear John”, (Dear John recordings/EMI).

POP. På Loney, Dears femte album har Emil Svanängen använt elektronisk polish för att putsa den säregna, försiktigt pompösa ljudbilden. Direkta singeln ”Airport surroundings” låter som Warren G’s hjärnbitare ”Regulate” i verserna, i ”Distant” sjunger änglarna så väggarna skakar medan filmiska ”Harm” skalat bort nästan allt utan Svanängens ljusa röst. Det här är i särklass den vackraste exporten Sverige har.
Annah Björk

Sydsvenskan

2009-03-11T14:33:00.000+01:00

Dear John

Av Håkan Engström
Publicerad 10 mars 2009 23.30 | Uppdaterad 10 mars 2009 20.34

Artist:	Loney Dear
Gengre:	Pop
Skivbolag:	Parlophone/EMI
Utkom år:	2009

I himmelriket är det italienarna som lagar maten, engelsmännen som drar skämten och Loney Dear som rullar snöbollarna.

Emil Svanängen – den utbyggbara enmansorkester som kallar sig Loney Dear – är en mästare på klangliga snöbollseffekter. Han kan gå från fingerknäppstystnad och viskningar till storvulna orkesterklanger med en både blygsam och subtil lätthet som får den konstfulla musiken att te sig helt okonstlad – resultatet av en fint lutad backe och gnistrande kristaller. Praktfullt? Ofta. Pompöst? Aldrig.

Ljudmässigt tycks detta album i förstone skilja sig helt från de fyra föregångarna. Åtskilligt är elektroniskt – syntarna fogar in sig i roller som tidigare spelats av träblås och stråkar; en del beats är elektroniska. ”Airport Surroundings” blir till en sorts folktronica, med trummaskiner och pizzicatostråkar, som inte hörts från Loney Dear tidigare.

Snart är det ändå kontinuiteten som är mest påtaglig. Stormötet mellan bara halvt bekanta klanger känns igen, det intrikata samspelet. Stämföringen är ett resultat av processer inne i Emil Svanängens hjärna, inte i ett kretskort. Hantverket, melodiuppfattningen och den sköra estetiken är intakt. Det är inga som helst problem att se ”Summers” som en direkt fortsättning på ”Saturday Waits” från albumet ”Loney Noir”.

Men stundtals lämnar Svanängen sin bekvämlighetszon, för några mörkare stråk och spår; mest lyckat blir detta i ”I Got Lost”, där hans röst får sällskap av Andrew Birds fiol och ett spöke som vägrar identifiera sig.

Och helhetsintrycket blir trots allt ett annat, det är intrycket av ett underbarn som på gott och ont mognat. På nya albumet finns mindre av storögd pojkrumsfascination inför musikvärldens alla möjligheter; lite mindre av sårat rådjur i de vemodiga texterna; lite mindre av naiv optimism.

Detta är lite mer locket på. Pluggen in. Överläppen uppstiffad. Vi ska alla den vägen vandra, även underbarn från Jönköping. Det ska bli intressant att fortsätta följa honom.

Bästa spår: I Was Only Going Out

DAGENS NYHETER DEAR JOHN recension

2009-03-11T09:01:00.001+01:00

Emil Svanängen har försiktigt men målmedvetet mejslat sig fram till femte delen i projektet Loney Dear, numera utan kommatecken. Man kan också uttrycka det som att han från de tidiga egenutgivna cd-r-alstren till dagens storbolagsskivor har gått från klarhet till klarhet. Mycket på ”Dear John” är sig likt från föregående ”Loney, Noir” – men allt är lite mer.

Under den karaktäristiska mjuka pampigheten brottas ännu fler olika instrument men hans fjäderlätta popmelodier svävar märkligt motståndslöst fram även över ganska överlastade landskap. Allt verkar så självklart. I ”Under a silent sea” lyfter han in någon sorts rejvtema, han gör orientaliska tongångar i ”I got lost”, en egen variant på Bach i ”Harm”, man hör barn- eller falsettkörer här, visselkonsert eller gravallvarliga pukor där, men aldrig att hans pop hamnar ur kurs – stadigt mörk men varm och sympatisk, aldrig sockersöt. Kanske borde ”Dear John” få full pott, men jag tror att det väntar ett ännu större verk nästa gång. Likt Michelangelo mejslar sig Svanängen tålmodigt fram mot absolut skönhet.

Bästa spår: ”Everything turns to you”

Niklas Wahllöf

xan aranda

2009-03-11T08:52:00.000+01:00

(!)

Wireless Bollinger Dear John review

2009-03-10T14:44:00.000+01:00

Loney Dear
Dear John
by: Sam Freeman
Tue:27-Jan-09
Label: Polyvinyl
Year: 2009

WB rating

out of 100

Review

The once comma-interrupted Loney, Dear is now Loney Dear (apparently they left the comma “at a service station just outside of Minneapolis”) and with the change comes Dear John, the final album of a five part series. Appropriately, it is also probably the best of that five part series.

Part of what makes band leader Emil Svanangen’s new album so fresh is its ability to dart between genres effortlessly. Dear John refuses to be pigeonholed into one category, and it’s this stubbornness that ensures the record’s longevity. On tracks such as the single ‘Airport Surroundings,’ Svanangen enlivens simple song structures with bright and addictive pop hooks. For old fans of Loney Dear this template will not be unfamiliar. It’s when Svanangen combines these moments of pure pop with synth leanings, moody atmospherics and pastoral folk (‘I Was Only Going Out’) that the album moved beyond its ‘pop’ tagline.

At times, Dear John brings the listener a welcoming, familial sound. Songs like the horn-laden title track, with its jaunty rhythm and layers of orchestral instrumentation, and the aforementioned ‘Airport Surroundings’ best emphasize this, the more known side of Loney Dear. But on introspective tracks like ‘Harm’, or ‘I Got Lost’, which features a guest performance from Andrew Bird on violin, the lesser known, more atmospheric side of Svanangen’s songwriting comes to the fore.

There are also times on Dear John where the rhythm slows, lending the songs drama and intensity. But these moments also occasionally become lost in singer-songwriter morbidity. Despite this, there is an inexplicable sense of optimism on each song, even the downright sad ones. Tracks such as ‘Violent’ feel like an uphill climb. It’s as if Svanangen and the listener are on some mission together, hanging on every tribal drum beat and violin stroke until the song’s heaving climax into a crescendo of synth and cooing voices whispering, “It’s so hard to change, when everything points to you…”

Svanangen’s voice is the glue that holds the album together and provides Loney Dear with an underlying hopefullness. It is a glassy, breathy instrument that makes each song recognizable, despite the album’s stylistic and musical variety. Moving between lithe falsetto parts and near-baritone moments of introspection, there is both comfort and sadness in the performances and songwriting of Svanangen. Ultimately it is this duality that drew a more mainstream audience to Loney, Noir, Svanangen’s last album, and again it is the characteristic that most defines this new album.

Dear John presents a more grown up Loney Dear than listeners will have heard on previous releases such as Loney, Noir or Sologne. The characteristic zeal of Svanangen remains, but Dear John is as much defined by its colder moments. As an album of terse acoustics, synth-filled 1980s influences, and melancholy romantic pop, it’s a sincere release, one that will stay with you long after its 40 minute running time.

The badger herald review DEAR JOHN

2009-03-07T09:26:00.003+01:00

Loney Dear: Songs for our inner indie

‘Dear, John’ soothes music scene with sweet lullabies without putting listeners to sleep

by Lauren Schroeder

Thursday, January 29, 2009 22:02

Loney, Dear’s second release in the United States, Dear, John, is destined to generate hype in the indie music scene, and rightfully so. Emil Svanängen, the name behind the pseudonym, is a newcomer to the United States from Sweden. Back home, Svanängen rose to success nearly exclusively by word of mouth. In 2007, Sub Pop Records re-released his critically acclaimed Swedish album Lonely, Noir in the States. Stemming from that success, Svanängen has been touring with indie sensation Andrew Bird. Although released merely two years later, Dear, John beautifully showcases his growth as a musician, both lyrically and instrumentally.

It seems spending all that time without sunlight has given Loney, Dear the inclination to write near lullabies. Although an album of modern lullabies may sound uninteresting, each song brings something new to the table while seamlessly blending with the song before. Take for instance track three, “Under a Silent Sea,” which verges on techno. Yet his soothing falsetto is capable of transcending the listener to serenity. Where too many soft-spoken singers fall short is the dichotomy between their lyrics and their sound, Svanängen succeeds because his lyrics are as pleasant and whimsical as his voice. While it is fair to compare his tone to angst-free Damien Rice, no comparison can be made between his music and another’s.

“Distant Lights,” a flawless track, exhibits his talent as an instrumentalist. The song begins with the timpani, which returns during the chorus. While the timpani could easily overpower the song, it is truly the perfect compliment for his eerie female choral accompaniment. The unexpected combination of hard and soft is enchanting.

Track 10, although entitled “Violent,” is virtually nothing of the sort. Soft, melodic wind instruments are heard throughout. In keeping with the lyrical themes of the album, “Violent” deals with the ambivalence and resulting stagnancy of love. Svanängen coos, “It’s so hard to change/ When everything points to you.” While love is, without a doubt, the most common theme in music, Loney, Dear never nears triteness.

Loney, Dear concludes the album with a song clearly intended to mimic the lullaby. Svanängen advises “John” to sleep well tonight; however, sleep does not come easy to the singer. Brass instruments initiate what is seemingly a military march off to sleep, echoing the battle he feels in waking versus slumbering. As the sound slowly fades away, the listener cannot help but to let out a tranquil sigh.

The success of Svanängen’s instrumentals relies solely on the fact he is aware when enough is enough. For instance, if a song begins with string instruments, Svanängen wisely chooses to use predominately strings throughout rather than attempting to conduct a symphony. Furthermore, the album seamlessly transitions from track to track. What begins as a tempo driven album slowly metamorphoses into the most soothing of lullabies without detection. The end result, rather than a collection of short stories, is a perfectly crafted novel.

Loney, Dear, your album is the perfect antidote to the insomnia you and many listeners suffer from. Rest easy, Svanängen, for you can be sure skinny jean-clad hipster listeners will be sleeping well too.

4 1/2 out of 5 stars.

review tangzine.com

2009-03-07T09:23:00.000+01:00

Loney Dear - Dear John
Polyvinyl Records - Jan. 27, 2009
By Matthew Ralph

“With you inside my ears, with your words print to my eyes. And it’s so hard to change, from wrong to everything O.K. It’s so hard to change, when everything turns to you. Violence, come closer. Believe in me. I’m rowing, on a sea so wide. Dove into a river, wider than we had seen. And you, you.”

I usually chalk it up as a good sign when a song at the back end of an album ends up being the song with the most plays on my iPod.

The above lyrics, from the song “Violent,” capture what for me is a culminating moment of Emil Svanangen’s latest Loney Dear recording. While the caffeinated opening track, “Airport Surroundings,” is the song making the Internet rounds in promotion of the album, it is the next-to-the-last song “Violent” that provides a clearer window into a record that should earn plenty of high marks. The song starts with the sound of a woodwind, gives way to a tender harmony and slowly budding percussion that is driven home with the soaring falsetto delivery of the word violence. Words like enchanting, cathartic and hypnotic come to mind as it plays over my headphones.

All are words I’d use to describe an album with a presentation similar to when Mr. Svanangen’s handle still had a comma — a graceful blend of richly textured keys, woodwinds, percussion and horns backing Svanangen’s falsetto-prone tenor. The difference might be more experience in the studio or a more ambitious effort and grandiose vision because the Sub Pop debut Loney, Noir doesn’t sound quite as heady or mind-boggling by comparison now.

Whether it’s the soaring chorus of voices on “Distant,” the distinct pipe organ intro and harmonica sounds throughout “Summers,” the techno vibe of “Under a Silent Sea” or the build-up from single-voice lullaby to full-blown instrumentation of “Harsh Words” this an album populated with moments where those of us who appreciate heady and aesthetically provocative music can rejoice.

Repeated listens (the album has basically been on repeat since I received an advance copy last week) have done little to diminish the overall impact of an album that for me at least has pleasantly surpassed expectations. Of course, the fact that I can recite lines from the end of the album almost as easily as the beginning probably already gave that away.

BBC.co.uk review DEAR JOHN

2009-03-07T09:22:00.000+01:00

by Ian Wade
02 March 2009

Loney Dear is the work of one man, multi-instrumentalist Emil Sanangen. Since 2003, he's been quietly releasing albums to a gradually building word-of-mouth fanbase, and with Dear John – his fifth – Emil has made what he considers to be his masterpiece.

Emil's music as Loney Dear operates in the area marked 'lovely'. As is mostly the case with his fellow Swedish acts, he shares a sweet melancholy that you can cuddle up to. Dear John is the fifth and final part of his odyssey so far – it's billed as both a love letter to himself and a goodbye note to his loved ones – with delicate thoughts and gestures throughout. Those concerned for Emil's state of mind should relax however, as it doesn't spell the end for Loney Dear, just the 'first phase'.

Dear John sees Emil singing of life, and why it's worth living. Offering 11 doses of ever-evolving magic pitched somewhere around the worlds of Flaming Lips and Brian Wilson - an area that’s been reasonably well ploughed over of late - Emil manages to find fresh new magic with which to melodically beguile.

It's fairly perfect throughout with the gentle shuffling urgency of Everything Turns To You, the soft focus dramatics of I Got Lost and the perfect haze of Summers. Under A Silent Sea calvacades into a light rave crescendo that could be mixed up and have shapes thrown at it, while the album closer and title track emits a slow dazzle of martial drums and brass giving you a pleasing send off into the night.

Dear John is Loney Dear's moment. It's the sound of an artist starting to fly. It's also an invitation to you to discover what came before, and a chance to envelope yourself and investigate a whole new world of a new favourite artist.