Here’s a little background from S.L.A.M. (Save Live Australia’s Music), a “non-politically aligned, independent entity made up of musicians and music-lovers”:

In a bid to address street violence, Liquor Licensing Victoria (LLV) has introduced sweeping changes with unintended consequences for the local music scene.

LLV should admit its mistake and make simple changes immediately, acknowledging that there is no link between live music and high risk. The Tote is gone, who’s next?

On 23 February, coinciding with the 34th anniversary of AC/DC’s famous ‘It’s A Long Way To The Top’ film clip shoot down Swanston Street, S.L.A.M. is protesting in support and celebration of Victoria’s music scene, where new liquor licensing laws threaten to pull the plug on live music.

Today is the day people!  If you’re in Melbourne this afternoon and want to show your support (or just hang out with your favourite local musicians), head over to the State Library at 4pm, where they’ll be marching to Parliament House and being generally disgruntled until 7pm 6pm.

I work in the city, so I’m hoping to stop by later on.  I’ll be sure to take some of my usual low-quality Blackberry photos.  Come say hi if you’re there, I’m the one in the brown jumper (because stupid me forgot to bring one of my many local band t-shirts).

Update: as promised, my happy snaps…

You can find more photos from the rally under the “slam” tag on Flickr.

Unfortunately we don’t have any studio tracks for you, but we do have a metric shit-tonne of raw video footage taken from our 2009 jam sessions. “Shit-tonne” is of course the technical term for a hard disk full of video files, which I’ve been trawling through like a pig digging for truffles.  Before you get too excited, let me first point out that these videos were never meant to be high quality productions.  What we have is a demo reel of musical experimentation, and some of those experiments failed spectacularly.  Others sucked considerably less (to my ears anyway), so I’m going to release those ones to the world.  Why?  Because that’s how we roll bee-atch (cue the gansta beatz).

My god that was a lot of preamble.

If you’re keen to hear some raw new music, check out this demo track I cobbled together from our second jam session on 28^th March 2009.  It features Jase on bass, Jake on guitar and both Gazz and myself on the duelling drum kits.  Roll it…

Click here to view the embedded video.

So now that we’re all sharing, it’s time for you to share your comments.  You can even share the video itself if you want, it’s free under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.  Have fun!

Here it is in a nutshell:

We’re back baby, yeah!!

Here it is again in slightly more words:

A sixth jam session was intended for mid 2009, but other commitments demanded attention at the time and unfortunately Ground To Zero lost momentum. The media landscape of course continued to change and I did my best to capture the highlights on our FriendFeed. Lessons were learned, the Ground To Zero concept evolved and pretty soon another decade passed into history. I was keen to get this project rolling again, and so were a lot of people apparently, so it’s about time we break the silence… and by that I mean make some serious noise!

To be more specific:

• Demos from the 2009 jam sessions will finally be released. For real this time. Seriously, I’m editing them right now. Stay tuned.
• There’ll be more rants coming. You’ve been warned.
• A new round of jam sessions have been scheduled, starting this Saturday! We’ll let you know how it goes.

So there it is, lots of stuff happening. Probably a good time to subscribe to our news feed if you haven’t already.  Not into RSS or newsletters?  Fine, we’ll come to you.  We’re on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Myspace, plus I have just carved out territories on Flickr, Vimeo and thesixtyone as well, so friend us up on your favourite sites.

That’s enough words from me, I’ve got videos to edit and jam sessions to organise. Ciao.

iiNet won their court case against AFACT!!

If that statement alone has you fist-pumping the air right now, then carry on celebrating noble freedom fighter!

If you’re wondering why I’m so happy, let me explain.  Way back in November 2008, Australian ISP iiNet was taken to court by the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) for allegedly failing to pass on copyright infringement notifications to its customers.  AFACT argued that by not enforcing their demands, iiNet was supposedly “authorising piracy” on their network.

Let me put it to you like this: if someone steals water from their neighbour’s garden hose, is the water company responsible because they provided the water?  The correct answer of course is HELL NO!  The water company is just a utility providing a service, they’re not responsible for how water is used.  In the same way, ISPs are a utility for providing internet services, not for policing how it’s used.  If AFACT had their way, ISPs would be forced to monitor all their customers’ usage.  It’s illegal for the postal service to check our mail, so why should ISPs be allowed to snoop on our internet activity?

Despite logic being on our side, most of us didn’t expect iiNet to win this case.  However, last Thursday Justice Dennis Cowdroy found that iiNet did not authorise the infringements and ruled in their favour.  Cowdroy stated that “The mere provision of access to the internet is not an authorisation of infringement“.  Despite what AFACT would have us believe, this does not mean pirates are “off the hook”.  After the verdict was announced, iiNet CEO Michael Malone emphasised that they do not condone piracy, but insisted that litigation isn’t the right way to fight it.  Rather, the best way to deal with the issue is to make the content available legally online in a way that’s mutually beneficial for the studios and the consumers.  Couldn’t have said it better myself.

That’s nice, but why do I care?

You should care because this is a big win for our privacy as consumers.  It means the big studios can’t bully ISPs into breaching the privacy of their customers.  The pretence of fighting piracy doesn’t give them the right to spy on all of us, and fortunately the court saw it that way too.

Just when things were looking gloomy for Australians with the proposed internet censorship filter still undefeated, it’s nice to see some good news for once.

Click here to view the embedded video.

You may have noticed a No Clean Feed banner on this site lately. If you’re unfamiliar with this cause, you should know that No Clean Feed is an initiative by Electronic Frontiers Australia in protest against the Australian government’s proposed mandatory internet censorship filter, a filter not unlike the infamous Great Firewall of China. This is the first of its kind in a democratic country and hopefully the last. You might think this is a good thing to help protect children from all the bad stuff in the world (wide web), but here’s why it’s not:

• It doesn’t work.  The proposed censorship system only filters unencrypted web (HTTP) traffic.  Not only is this relatively easy to circumvent (for those so inclined), but the filter has no effect on chat-rooms, peer-to-peer file sharing and other internet mediums, which is where you’ll find most of the stuff they want to block.
• The filter is based on a secret blacklist.  Only the government gets to decide what’s on the list, we don’t get a say when they get it wrong.  There have already been reported cases where legitimate business were blacklisted during the filter trials.
• There is no opt-out.  Even if you’re a consenting adult over the age of 18, you’re still treated to the same content censorship as everyone else.
• We pay the price.  The cost of rolling out a censorship filter that no one wants will be passed on to the ISPs, and then on to us.
• It’s a dangerous precedent.  This could be the start of a global trend that will cripple the web for everybody.

Surely no free country would introduce such a scheme, right?  Think again: in December 2009, Stephen Conroy released the reports from the trial program and now it seems the federal government will give it the go ahead.

Blood boiling yet?  Good, now you’re ready to fight back.

You can help raise awareness by darkening your website (like we did) or your profile photo during The Great Australian Internet Blackout from January 25 to 29 (which includes Australia Day).  Find out how to black out your profile picture and join the resistance.  We lost the battle, but the war has only just begun.

Imagine there are no record labels, just artists connecting directly with fans.  No middle man required.

Imagine there’s no RIAA and sharing music was legal, free and unrestricted.

Imagine if fans were free to share any music from their favourite artists, helping them reach a diverse audience. You can’t buy that kind of publicity. Literally.

Imagine portable devices designed to make sharing media between friends easy… like Zune’s squirt feature, but without the DRM.

Imagine if your portable music player was a short-range private radio station and friends nearby could listen in via their own media devices.

Imagine media sharing as just another form of communication, like sending an SMS text message.

Can you imagine?

(photo by Juliano Mattos, used under Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

If you haven’t seen it yet, you should watch Kevin Rose interview the man for an episode of Digg Dialogg.  It runs for about 40 minutes, so settle in with a bottle of wine and get ready to open your mind.

• Jam #3, #4 and #5 happened, and they were good!
• Jam #5 was extra special because it was our first laid-back-unplugged-family-fun-day-BBQ jam session, just in time before Melbourne’s weather became penguin paradise.
• Many more awesome songs were conceived thanks to my talent …ed collaborators.
• I have a (digital) stack of photos, videos and demo recordings to sort through and edit. I’d like to get them online for you soon, but that all depends on my productivity.
• Speaking of productivity, I have been working on another project of mine these past few months: the rebirth of Nitidus under the new name “Shotgun Zero” (yes I realise the similarity, but it’s the only name that the three of us could agree on, and I’d much rather play gigs than argue band names).
• Shotgun Zero had their first gig at Musicland last week in support of Spark Iris (fronted by Ground To Zero regular Jake James). If you missed it, check out the Shotgun Zero website for full coverage.
• Oh, and between all that I’ve been working long hours at my day job so I can keep this project afloat and the internet bills paid.  You’re welcome.

Enough of the retrospective, now let’s look towards an even brighter future:

• From today, we’re trying on a new website design by AskGraphics.  I think it’s an improvement over the last one, but if you think you can do a better Wordpress theme, drop us a comment below.  Ground To Zero is all about supporting creativity so we’d love to get you guys involved in any way we can.
• Jam #6 happens real soon, which means another load of photos, video and demo tracks for me to sort through, yipee.

Later down the road we will take our ideas, form them into completed tracks and record them so you can have something to put on your iPod, won’t that be fun.  More on that another day, but for now it’s back to day job.  Make sure you’re subscribed so I don’t have to keep throwing rocks at your window to get your attention.

Since the announcement, Billy Gould, or @MRGOULD as he is known on Twitter, has been keeping us posted on rehearsal progress, tour dates… and the relaunching of fnm.com as their official website.  Previously a fan site maintained by a group of devotees spread across four different countries (though somewhat neglected since the band split), the new official website has lost none of the community spirit of the old, nor even most of its content.  The bio and fan-collated photo gallery from the old site are still available on the new, although the bootleg live tracks are unfortunately absent.  If anything, the site has been catapulted into today’s online landscape by embracing the current web culture in a big way!  For web-savvy music buffs like me, there’s much to like.

For instance, the Videos section points to a YouTube search for “Faith No More”, the Photos section links to a similar Flickr search and the News section scrapes updates straight from Billy Gould’s Twitter feed.  It’s an extensive use of social media on a scale of almost Skittles proportions, which is great to see especially from a band who last played together in the late nineties.  Some might see this as lazy web design, but that kind of thinking is so… earlier this decade.  If Trent Reznor has shown us anything, it’s that fans and bands find mutual benefit in a thriving, sharing community.  Also, did I mention the website is very low on clutter?  Seems that FNM are making all the right moves so far.  It will be interesting to see how they push those boundaries in the coming months… I mean, this is Faith No More we’re talking about here!

On a related note, anyone know where I can score free tickets to the Download Festival this year?  Flights to England are cheap these days right?  I’d better stop before I get myself too depressed.

• Jase on bass.  My brother joined us for the first time, but you can catch him on stage with his band Dusted Orange on Easter Saturday at Ruby’s Lounge.
• Jake on guitar.  The man whose riffs evolved into our first song returned for more mayhem.  He is currently working hard on an album with his band Spark Iris (formerly Against The Grain).
• Gazz on acoustic drums.  This time, the mean machine of the metal marching beat brought out his monstrosity of a Tama kit (that thing is HUGE!) and laid down some rocking grooves.  You can catch Gazz on stage with Crimson Face and check their Myspace for some freshly recorded tracks.
• Me on the digi drums.  While I’m plugging, I might as well mention that you should definitely see Dusted Orange next Saturday because my other band (currently known as Nitidus) will also be on stage rocking out.

Once our equipment was set up, we launched into a 4 hour non-stop rock soundscape.  The special effects and percussion made possible by the digi-kit blended brilliantly with the acoustic drums, which Gazz and I alternated a few times.  Jase brought his own uniquely progressive stylings to the mix as I’d hoped he would, which fit right in with Jake’s mammoth riffs (the dude seems to have an endless supply).  Some interesting ideas emerged during the session, plus a very interesting reimagining of the Terminator theme.  Video footage was taken, however due to technical difficulties I’m yet to tell if there’s anything worth showing.  The issues involve Sony hardware and Apple’s iMovie, so if you’re an expert in either, it would be awesome to hear from you.

Photos on the other hand…

Thanks Jase, Jake and Gazz for sharing your skills.  Another fantastic jam session down, bring on the next one.