jd's Journal: Sisters of Mercy

Once upon a time, a long, long way away, there was a group called Metallica. A member of said group complained about Napster, yet admitted that he had trouble with e-mail.

On the other side of the galaxy, there was another group. "The Sisters of Mercy". This group consisted of an Eldrich voice, a drummer second only to the guy from Def Leppard (hey! that's what their web pages say!), and assorted guitarists over time.

Their drummer, a Doktor Avalance, is apparently a military-grade, heavily-armoured synthesizer system linked to an aging ISA-era PC.

Their knowledge of technical stuff is fascinating, with a basic familiarity with real-time systems, hardware compatibility issues, high-availability system architectures, UNIX and DOS.

This goes a bit beyond the "can't figure out e-mail" stage, and is strongly indicitive of geeks who hack in the audio spectrum, as well as in hardware and software.

Whether you like "The Sisters of Mercy" or not is not the point. Imagine an age in which the bands and labels were technically-aware. Where they could understand the difference between a bit-bucket and KFC basket. Where they understood what technology did, because they did it.

We're not going to see such an age, in music, simply because there are way too many airheads who have way too much money. What we can do, though, is cheer on those who do make the effort, and to remind the monotonous, slavish Voice From The Deep that it is the ignorant who are complaining, and the wise who simply learn.