Coma is my favorite Romanian bands and I've known them almost since they were formed. They have been singing for 16 years now and it was nice to see the concert room filled with people of all ages, including a 16 year old boy who had his birthday on the same day. For me this concert was a double whammy, as the lead singer of one of the opening bands is a former colleague of mine. Yeah, small world.

The opening bands where Till Lungs Collapse and Pinholes. TLC were nice, with my boy Pava almost collapsing his lungs. Pinholes were a bit strange: from five people on the stage, only the drummer didn't sport a guitar. Their writing process must be weird. Then Coma came on stage, at about 0:00 and played for an hour an a half. They were great! I've been to many of their concerts and this is one of the best yet. The band's "curse" struck again, on Dan Costea's acoustic guitar, but they were able to continue without it with no problems. They sang all time favorites, some newer songs, they also did Morphine, which is one of my personal favorite songs of theirs. I wish they would have managed to squeeze Daddy in there, or at least 3 Minute.

Catalin Chelemen was on fire, Dan was doing his usual PR thing and he was great as well and it seemed like they all had a good chemistry with the new guitar player, Matei Tibacu. Well, new for me. Unfortunately the sound in Fabrica was pretty bad. While inside you could kind of focus on the right notes, especially if you knew what the songs were supposed to play like, if you try to gauge the quality of the concert from the videos that are online now, you want to mute it almost instantly. People were respectful enough not to smoke during the concert (I can't wait for the smoking ban to come in effect!), but my clothes still smelled of tobacco when I got home, from people smoking in the next room.

As far as I know you can hear them next at the Electric Castle Festival, July 14-17, with so many other great bands. I am tempted to go there, but I am not one for festivals. Great job, Coma, and good luck!

Click here to see some nice photos from the concert.

I was just thinking about Coma a few days ago. I don't know why. I thought I miss one of their beautiful songs. And here I see on YouTube they released a new video just when I was thinking of them. This one is a very nice combination of Catalin's lyrics, melodic and hard sounds and a cool interweave of the voices of Catalin and Dan - it's not the usual contrast between singing and shouting, but rather a vocal collaboration which works surprisingly well. Without further ado, here it is.
Chip, by Coma:
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Also, if you want to see a live version:

I thought about translating the lyrics to English, but there would be no point. It is pure poetry and it is beyond me. For the non-Romanian visitors, I just hope you like the song.

Coma has finally released a new song. It's completely free to listen and share. Here is the SoundCloud link for it: Un semn. You can also listen to it here.
Coma - Un semn [2011] by COMA-band-official

I wish it weren't such a light piece or that Dan Costea would have added some of his trademark screams in the background at least. I can't but think of Linkin Park, starting with great, powerful songs and continuing with whining in their next album. But being the first piece out, it may be a teaser for what it is to come.

Update:
There is a video for the song, and here it is:

Coma is one of my favourite bands if not THE favourite. They are Romanians, I know them, they're cool guys. Recently they organised an unpluggish concert called Coma Light. This is one of the songs there, although I do encourage you to look at them all (YouTube links gracefully provided by Imig/Smallex under the video). Great job, guys! Most of the songs you played deserve an album of their own. Here is the video for Culori, high quality from MetalHead TV. from YouTube.



Links to all the songs in the concert:
Stai
Mai presus de cuvinte
Bizz
Culori
In mine in soapta
Hectic
Un loc sa ajung
Daddy
Morphine
Coboara-ma-n rai
Cine iubeste si lasa
Canta-mi povestea

Update 2020 - most of the links here are dead, the things they referred to long forgotten. So much for "once you put it on the Internet it never disappears".

Having reached the 200^th entry, I really wanted to write something cool, something interesting, something that sticks (and it ain't shit).

I thought of blogging Kartoo, a very nice - albeit slow - visual search engine that shows not only relevant links, but also the context items that link different pages.

But Kartoo is not personal enough, so I switched to YouTube, thought about blogging (yet another) female vocalist nu-metal with goth overtones band like the Italian band Exilia. Or something else, like the Turkish band maNga, or the Spanish Dead Stoned or Demiurgo. But this is a blog, not a video/music site.

Then I thought about programming; there must be something in the three projects I am working on worth blogging about, or at least something important like Don't use the .NET Random class when concerned about security. But then again, the blog is full of (I hope) interesting programming hints.

What else is there? Ranting about bycicle lanes the city hall is building on the sidewalk and on which old people are happy to walk (slowly) without losing themselves;
interesting conceptual games like BoomShine, Straight Dice or Stickman Fight and how they can be improved;
the BBC Baghdad Navigator, to show you the distribution and timeline of Baghdad bombings;
the Lilium song for the anime Elfen Lied;
the Coma article on Wikipedia (I didn't write it);
coming improvements in the Sift3 algorithm;
InuYasha manga reaching chapter 500;
the new Google/Kartoo/Wikipedia searches for any selected text in the blog;
how I am reading Il Nome de la Rosa and The Name of the Rose in the same time, trying to grasp more of the Italian language;
Gwoemul, a very nice South Korean film...

No, there is too much to choose and I can't decide. I think I will skip entry 200 entirely.

Today Orange Romania had organised a concert in their brand new "Concept Store". A Concept Store is exactly what it says it is, a place where they sell you an idea, the idea of buying and using Orange phones and subscriptions. Therefore everything that takes place in that store is directly linked to image and marketing.
Well. today they blew it, royal style. 15 minutes before the start of the concert (Coma was going to perform, they are this extremely cool Deftones meets Linkin Park via Tool band) they announced that the concert was not going to take place due to complaints from the neighbours. What actually happened is that some greedy idiots thought they could get some money from Orange because they lived right above the Orange Concept Store. Well it didn't work, but the funny thing is they announced the cancellation of the concert after keeping tens of fans out in the cold while watching them through the glass doors of the place. And these were only the ones that got there earlier. I got there about 30 minutes before the announced hour for the concert so I was amazed to see a couple of suits staring at us from the other side of the glass and doing absolutely nothing about it. Then the cancellation news came.
The band members were devastated, the fans disappointed, Orange made complete fools of themselves. But will this ever reach the news? NO! There is no rape or murder involved, no political scandal. Just a few ordinary teens were completely stepped upon in the name of Orange Corporation Choppers!

Check out the newly released Coma video, to celebrate the release of the new album on the 30 of november in Club Fire, Bucharest, Romania!