Welcome back to Underground Hum. It's that time of the week again* Get out your geek specs and start reading up on the latest buzz and other goodies. Thank you again for the lovely emails. Keep them coming. Let's get started with this week's Reverb.

Reverb

International

After a string of insanely kickass collaborations with a veritable galaxy of musicians such as Cee-Lo, The Rapture, Sparklehorse, MF Doom, and the late soul legend Ike Turner, Uber-producer and mad mixer of melodies Danger Mouse has begun collaborations with a certifiable supernova, the eccentric genius himself: Beck. Mr. Mouse will be on board for the creation of his royal Beck-ness' follow up to 2006's The Information.

It may be old news for hardcore fans of industrial rock icons Nine Inch Nails that the Trent Reznor-fronted outfit released a 36 track instrumental album titled Ghosts on March 3 through an online release mechanism similar to Radiohead's release of last year's In Rainbows. Ghosts (the brilliance of which this writer can attest to) can be downloaded at www.nin.com. What may not be old news to their fans here in Indonesia is the follow-up project Mr. Reznor has cooked up for his fans in collaboration with YouTube.com: The Nine Inch Nails Ghosts Film Festivals. I'll let the officially released statement give the 411 on it: "To expand the idea of the Ghosts project, we're inviting anyone and everyone to create visuals to accompany the album's music. In a few months, we'll be gathering the entries we feel are particularly exceptional and highlighting them. There are no rules to this -- be as creative as you like. Create a music video, or a short film, or something completely abstract. Use only one track from the album, or use multiple tracks. Only one caveat: Incorporating copyrighted materials (clips from movies, music by other artists, etc.) into your video might limit our ability to feature it in the future.

To submit your video, join the Ghosts group at http://www.youtube.com/group/ninghosts and add your video to the group. Good luck, and enjoy. What are you waiting for? Download the album* Pick a song* And fire up your cameras*

National

After nearly three years of waiting, rock collage artists/musical geniuses/just plain nice bunch of dudes SORE are finally releasing their second full-length album titled Ports of Lima. The first single can already be heard on the airwaves. Take it from someone whose heard the whole album, it is worth pawning your most prized possession to get your hands on this baby (hyperbolic, I know. but seriously: Buy this album*). Ports of Lima will be officially launched at a shindig to be held at the Usmar Ismail Film Center (PPHUI) on April 24. More details on the launching will be included in coming editions of Reverb. For now, you can hit their myspace page at www.myspace.com/soreband or their official website www.sorezeband.com. It's about friggin time, guys* Some of us have actually been holding our breaths, you know?

The Jakarta-based sunny feel-good happy pop collective known as Ballads of the Clich* have just signed a rather nifty deal to release their 2007 album Evergreen in South Korea through the Korean label Pastel Music. The Korean edition of Evergreen will be a double CD that will contain B-sides from the band's old EPs. The CDs will be on the Korean market in May of 2008. Pastel Music is the Korean release vehicle for excellent international acts such as Camera Obscura, Arcade Fire, Vashti Bunyan, Fionn Regan, Elliot Smith, Swan Dive, and Asobi Seksu. Congratulations, fellas*

That about does it for this week's Underground Hum.

If you have any questions, suggestions, praises, and curses just send me a note at undergroundhum*yahoo.com.

Catch you all later*

-- Paul F. Agusta

For all of you indie bands or artists out there, let us know if you have a gig coming up so we can include it in future editions of Reverb. Be sure to include the name of the event you're playing, what other acts are billed, time, place, date and entry fee if any.

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