10 Print “Hello”.
Again. Fancy meeting you here. Thanks for coming back. We’re glad to be back. Here’s a little story on what all happened regarding this here blog, and what you can expect from now on. If you won’t allow me a few minutes to bore you, no hard feelings, just scroll the bottom and there are some tunes to download.

Why we disappeared.

Hosting rich media is expensive when your site is successful. We tried hard to make this site good, and had moderate success to a point where it crippled us. The overhead is huge when people can easily nab 2 gigabytes of mp3 files our homepage, often with only one or two ad impressions which amount to a fraction of a cent (I’m not complaining, just sayin’). Every time someone downloads anything, we are paying for the resources for them to do so—and we’re happy to do it, as long as we can stand to so do. We’re not blogging for the money (a music blog in itself is a shitty business model), but it came to a point where we couldn’t afford to pay out of pocket to keep the tunes flowing (recession session).

But why not use a DDL (direct-download) service like Mediafire, Rapidshare or zShare?

In a word: Crap. We don’t love to read blogs that use those services, we surely didn’t want to run a blog that uses them. We like the ease of being able to stream off our site. We want you to be able to download with a single click. The DDL business model is based on slowing you down, obfuscating the download process and forcing you to wait and watch ads. We thought it better to disappear, than to conform to lesser standards. Quality has always been a top priority.

Why we came back.

In our dormant stage, we put ourselves in a better place financially and in terms of business sense. So, now we are able to come back and run the kind of blog we want to run. We’re back because we enjoy blogging and we love music. Anecdotally, my partner, Disaster, and I met through LiveJournal at the beginning of the decade (similar to the backstory of everybody’s favorite Stereogum), through a near dead-on similarity of taste in music, design, and excitement over web technology. At this point blogger is a part of who we are.

What we were doing.

Disaster is hemmed up in Berkley making iPhone apps. I’m holding down Los Angeles; I’m getting by doing all sorts of design-y jobs, whilst schoolin’ and throwing our Missingtoof hat in the DJ/promoter arena (more on this later).

So how did the server situation get solved?

After plenty of well-meaning-but-not-so-great advice, our new BFF Alex K, former engineer at Beatport (best mp3 store ever, btw). Lent us his hand and quizzed other homies at Beatport for solutions to our server woes. What we came up with is a custom multi-server solution from eSecureData for mp3s and the front-end remaining on MediaTemple. I have faith these servers will serve us well (and by us I mean you and me).

Now, without further dudes… Working mp3s, the first of many.

There is an not-so-underlying message here, borrowed from ’80s pop stars Simple Minds at their finest hour (still chugging along with a new album in ‘09). You know the original, but have you heard these? First an eerie, minimal-ish techno cover by London’s Dino Le Cassino from his 2007 Audio Therapy release. This one’s really grown on me. And second, an official remix by Sweden’s Pacific! (alternate remix page) that goes mellow ‘lectro and appeared on the recent ‘Don’t You’ advertising campaign record for JC Penny. (However it was New Found Glory’s effort that was selected for the national advertising, go figure. Whatevs.)

Don’t you, don’t you, don’t you, for-get about ‘toof.