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ETIQ

 

 

 

*What kind of music can be discussed on 4AD-L?
*What non-4AD bands do people on the list like the best?
*What does the word thislisty mean?
*Is it kosher to advertise items for sale/trade?
*I was listening to Dead Can Dance the other day while tripping on 'shrooms and wrote some really un-frackin-believable stream of consciousness poetry that I'd like to share with the list since it was influenced by my listening to 4AD music.
*How do I send a reply to just the sender of a message, and not the entire list?
*How do I stop myself from being really really annoying?
*How about those acronyms people sometimes use?
*I was forwarded a true story about a $250 Neiman-Marcus cookie recipe...
*I want to alert the list to the extremely dangerous Good Times virus!
 
What kind of music can be discussed on 4AD-L?
Anything to do with the 4AD record label, its present and former recording artists, or the graphic design of 23 Envelope, v23 and Vaughan Oliver, is obviously fair game.

There is also much discussion of record labels associated with 4AD (guernica, detox, leaf, too pure), bands whose members have appeared on 4AD recordings (Cindytalk, Shelleyan Orphan), bands that have the 4AD "aesthetic" such as Slowdive, Cranes, My Bloody Valentine, Sundays, anybody who is or has been on Too Pure (Laika, Seefeel, Scala, Moonshake, Mouse on Mars, Stereolab) and Kranky (Labradford, Stars of the Lid, Windy and Carl), music commonly known as "Lo-fi", "Spacerock" and "Postrock" (eugh!) and noisy pop in general. Use discretion, hang out a bit, look in the archives and see what other people have discussed.

A sister mailing list is available to those who wish to discuss music often associated with older 4AD influences without having to discuss anything currently related to 4AD. It's called pure-impure and is run by the original composer of this FAQ, Jens Alfke.

*4AD
*too pure
*kranky
*pure-impure information
*pure-impure archives
 
What non-4AD bands do people on the list like the best?
The following is a partial list of our favorite 1994 non-4AD releases may be of help; thanks to Lars Ingebrigtsen for running the voting!

portishead, the moon seven times, love spirals downwards, cranes, collection d'arnell andrea, robyn hitchcock & the egyptians, nine inch nails, stereolab, future sound of london, velocity girl, bark psychosis, laika, stina nordenstam, lovesliescrushing, tindersticks, laurie anderson, the cranberries, loreena mckennitt, grant lee buffalo, echobelly, bryan ferry, the catchers, orange.
 
What does the word thislisty mean?
It's an adjective, referring to the kind of music discussed on 4AD-L (See the previous answers for examples.) The word was proposed in jest back in 1992 but stuck because it fills a need. It's hard to categorize exactly what kind of music we talk about (nor can we exactly agree on what it is) so it's useful to punt to a nonsense word. From time to time people get upset by thislisty, interpreting it as some kind of elitism - "Oh no, don't discuss that band here, they're not thislisty enough" - but that's not the intention. The 4AD-L mailing list is a consensual shared hallucination of its members, and the word thislisty does no more than reflect that.

 
Is it kosher to advertise items for sale/trade?
Yup, and it's done all the time. Please, if you do this, make sure to tell people to reply to you personally, not the list. (See below...) Likewise, when responding to a sale/trade offer, please make sure before sending your reply that it's going only to the seller. We've had several flame wars caused by floods of people discussing sale items on the list, which drives other people nuts and inspires the usual "just use your Delete key" type of tiresomeness. You might find the internet auction services useful for selling - the "eBay" auction service has been used successfully several times for the buying and selling of a selection of 4AD items. There are, of course other auction services so if you have discovered a better auction website, let me know.
*eBay auctions
 
I was listening to Dead Can Dance the other day while tripping on 'shrooms and wrote some really un-frackin-believable stream of consciousness poetry that I'd like to share with the list since it was influenced by my listening to 4AD music.
It's been done. No sir, we didn't like it. Try alt.poetry or /dev/null instead.
 
How do I send a reply to just the sender of a message, and not the entire list?
Thanks for asking; for some reason, the list is periodically inundated by personal replies sent by people who didn't think about or get an answer to this. Having said that, we can only reply that the details are specific to your mail system. Try consulting your system administrator or reading a manual. As a last resort, if you have access to the message header you can read off the "From:" address and type it into the "To:" field of a new message.

If you absolutely have no alternative but to send a personal message via the entire list, at least be very contrite and regretful about it. This will save you the trouble of getting flamed...

It should also be noted that some people are subjected to rinky-dink mail systems that hide the return address of the sender. For this reason, it's a good idea to include your address at the end of your message, otherwise these people will be unable to send personal mail to you.

 
How do I stop myself from being really really annoying?
Apart from checking to make sure whether you really, really want to send that one-line message to 1000 strangers and use up valuable Internet resources, ensure that your mail reader software is only sending out plain text messages which do not contain additional formatting. Modern mail readers such as Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer have the ability of sending formatted mail messages which don't necessarily just contain text; these messages are usually encoded in a MIME format. Please, switch off MIME encoding when sending messages to the 4AD-L mailing list. It's not only annoying for the people that don't have the same mail program as you, but it's wasteful of the Internet and totally unnecessary for a discussion list.

 
How about those acronyms people sometimes use?
Here are some of the more common ones, listed alphabetically:

AATT
And Also The Trees
AVAM
All Virgos Are Mad, the 1994 4AD festival in Los Angeles
BTfaBG
Black Tape For a Blue Girl
CT
Cocteau Twins
DCD
Dead Can Dance
EoST
The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa
FSA
Flying Saucer Attack
FSOL
Future Sound Of London
HNIA
His Name Is Alive
J&MC
The Jesus and Mary Chain
MBV
My Bloody Valentine
MM
Melody Maker, a British weekly music paper
M7X
The Moon Seven Times
NME
New Musical Express, another British paper
PiL
Public Image, Ltd.
PJH
P J Harvey (or maybe Pearl Jam Hurls)
RHP
Red House Painters
SY
Sonic Youth
TMC
This Mortal Coil
TWP
The Wolfgang Press (or maybe The Wedding Present)
VG
Velocity Girl
13YI
13-Year Itch, a 4AD party held in summer 1993

There are also the usual net-talk abbreviations like IMHO or "Ob-"; if you're confused about those see any netiquette guide or the New Hacker's Dictionary (edited by Eric Raymond, published by MIT Press, very informative and amusing.)

 
I was forwarded a true story about a $250 Neiman-Marcus cookie recipe...
Don't even think about posting it to the list or you'll end up more charred than the cookies. You might want to post it to alt.folklore.urban, though, they love cookie recipes there.

And speaking of which, do NOT post any MAKE.MONEY.FAST-type pyramid scam. Most are illegal. Worse, they reveal your net-newbieness.

*Yahoo urban legends
*usenet alt.folklore.urban
 
I want to alert the list to the extremely dangerous Good Times virus!
We've already been alerted, thanks, and we should alert you that it's a hoax. No real virus can infect your system merely by your reading an e-mail message. You'd have to download an application and run it.

In general, none of these off-topic, massively-forwarded, origin-unknown pieces of net.samizdat should be sent to the list. None of them are appropriate, most are false, and most have already been seen a bajillion times by the other members. For example, as well as the "good times" virus, we've had a plea to vote against the creation of the rec.music.white-power newsgroup [it was massively defeated a long, long time ago], request to send emails to a book company for charity, blah blah blah.

*Yahoo virus hoaxes

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