blog :: IO Life → [String]

Hungarian Folk Metal is one of the best genres out there!

Nachtgeschrei (lit. night shouting) is a German medieval folk rock/metal ensemble based in Frankfurt and founded 3 years ago. I first saw them live in 2007 at the StuStaCulum without even knowing them. They were just awesome. Then one year later they released their debut album “Hoffnungsschimmer” (lit. hope glimmer) to which I’m still listening today while driving. Yesterday I stumbled upon their latest album “Am Rande der Welt” (at the edge of the world) which was only released less than a year later.

Their sound reminds of bands like Subway to Sally, In Extremo or Korpiklaani. There’s generally an abundance of layers to the music with numerous instruments twittering at any given moment. The composition of heavy rhythmic guitar riffs, strong vocals and the perfect proportional use of classic folk instruments like bagpipes, flutes, hurdy-gurdys and accordions, though, is quite unique in the folk rock/metal genre which makes their songs true masterpieces.

In their newest incarnation the folk rockers’ style is still the same as on the previous release. But their sound most certainly never gets old. Think of Korpiklaani, who are basically playing exactly the some style since five albums and still rock your socks off.

The first track, “Fiur”, is a very epic intro with slow and quiet flute and bagpipe parts interrupted by guitar riffs and a fury of other instruments. “Muspilli” and “Herz aus Stein” (heart of stone) are classic Nachtgeschrei tracks featuring Hotti’s strong dark voice and their typical combined instrumental elements building up tension in the bridge and explode in the chorus. The fourth track, “Fernweh” (lit. wanderlust), is more melancholic than the previous songs and relies almost exclusively on guitars, which I find a bit disappointing as the classic folk instruments could’ve blended in perfectly. “Niob” starts with a nice melodic intro but as rhythmic element in the verses only guitars are used. The chorus is compared to other songs of Nachtgeschrei a bit weak and lacks in depth. “Lauf” (run), the sixth track, employs a more romantical atmosphere with a very catchy chorus. But what makes this song a masterpiece is the instrumental second part of the song. Truly amazing!

“Windfahrt” (lit. wind ride) delivers a pretty dark feeling in the verse, reminding one of Subway to Sally, though the chorus and the instrumental parts, even though very pleasant, sound much too happy to tie in. The following track “Nur ein kleines Stueck Himmel” (only a small part of heaven) then has again the classic Nachtgeschrei elements with verses without much instrumental support and catchy, multi-layered choruses and instrumental parts. “Wahrheit” (truth) starts very epic and minimalistic with a acoustic guitar, a hurdy-gurdy and the vocals. At the instrumental bridge the e-guitar kicks in but is muted again for the coming verses. The atmosphere is also a bit more melanchonic, but this time the chorus is able to express this feeling in their usual instrumental style. “Der Totmacher” (lit. the deadmaker, sounds just as wrong in German) relies again more in rhythmic guitar elements delivering combined with the vocals and the melody of the instrumental parts a very gloomy feeling. The last track, “Glut in euren Augen” (blaze in your eyes), focusses more on the vocals than every other song on the album, i.e. the bridges are just composed of soft vocals and a quiet arpeggiating acoustic guitar.

All in all, it is my opinion that Nachgeschrei is one of the best folk rock/metal band in existance. Their compositions are more rich and diverse than those of In Extremo, which in my opinion is one of their main competitors here in Germany. Even though they come close to Subway to Sally, I have to admit that Subyway’s singer Eric Fish is better than Hotti in many respects. And finally to compare them to Korpiklaani, I just have to say: If you know humppa you know it never gets old. ;-)

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Translation: System crash? Reboot. Adventure Philosophy.

So this is my next blog software switch. After having gotten bored by Habari due to its errors and random breakages in the current SVN trunk, which is the only usable version per se, I decided to try Zine. Zine is quite a new blog software written in Python, which looks pretty promising.

Let’s try and wait until it breaks like those who came before it…

The great Italian folk metal band Elvenking has finally come back to its roots. After their strange emo-inspired much more raw album “The Scythe”, with “Two Tragic Poets” they decided to play more folkish, melodic and romantic metal again. They’ve even recorded acoustic versions of two older Elvenking classics, “The Winter Wake” and “The Wanderer”, which sound absolutely amazing!

After hearing the brief instrumental introduction, I already knew that this album would rock my socks off. The next song, “Another Awful Hobs Tale” is an up-tempo track with loads of violin and an electric amplified guitar solo. With more folky arrangements and acoustic guitars, “From Blood To Stone” and “Ask A Silly Question” are just a wonderful massage for your ears. Very beautiful is the soft, piano-featured “She Lives At Dawn”’. Also the cover of the eighties hit “Heaven Is A Place On Earth” is done properly, while the influence of Skyclad is mostly noticeable in the more melancholic “My Own Spider’s Web”. The flurry tracks “Not My Final Song” and “Miss Conception” then pick up the cheerful partying side of Elvenking.

So if you enjoy folk metal and bands like Skyclad or Blind Guardian, this album is a must-buy! Unfortunately, they won’t be playing here in Munich. But they will be here in Germany for the Summerbreeze festival, for which I already got a ticket and looking forward to finally seeing Elvenking live!

The MVG, the public transportation company of Munich, is providing a pretty neat webservice called MVG-Live. If you provide your stop, all departure times of the next subways, busses and trams are displayed in real-time with delays. However, this service is only working in a browser. I wanted, not only for a console client, but also for displaying the next busses in our local hackerspace, the Kapsel, access to this data.

On first sight, it looked pretty easy. They are actually using some kind of AJAX to get the data. But the problem was that they were using the Google Webtoolkit (GWT). This nasty piece of crap obfuscates the JavaScript and all the data sent and received. With Wireshark I was able to get the following kind of replies:

//OK[20000,120000,14,1232003149036,4,13,2,9,0,8,12,11,-5,1,1232003280000,4,3, 10,2,9,0,8,7,6,2,5,1,1232003160000,4,3,2,2,1,["de.swm.dfi.net.entity.EinzelAnzeigenInfo/537619726","java.util.ArrayList/3821976829","de.swm.dfi.net.entity.AbfahrtInfo/627857308","java.util.Date/1659716317","de.swm.dfi.net.entity.FahrtRichtung/3712975985","S-139.gif","139","Bus.gif","de.swm.dfi.net.entity.Verkehrsmittel/82840327","Giesingx20Bf.","S-145.gif","145","Ostbahnhof","java.lang.Integer/3438268394"],0,3]

After a while of pondering I found out that the first numbers contain the current time as UNIX timestamp and the actual lines, with departure time as UNIX timesteamp and references to the elements of the list (third-last element). This list contains the strings of the destinations, images of the type of transportation (bus, tram, u-bahn) and images of the lines (i.e. S-139 or U-2). The other data seems not to carry reasonable information. But this information is enough anyway.

I wrote a litte parser in Python which makes a request and parses the response. Unfortunately I had to embed the plain HTTP request because I couldn’t encode the binary stuff with the urllib2 module. There is also support for our LED matrix which is facing the street. The other day the panels at the bus stops weren’t working, so we thought we provide the passengers this little service. ;)

The output looks something like this:

145 Ostbahnhof              0
144 Giesing Bf.             1
144 Scheidplatz             3
145 Fasang.Kiesmuellerstr.  4
139 Messestadt West         6
139 Giesing Bf.             8
145 Ostbahnhof              10

The code can be found here: https://franz-pletz.org/src/mvglive.py