Well, the [2011 in Review] section has come to an end and by all estimations it was a huge success. The only regret is that we did not get to review all the releases that we thought were noteworthy. If we had, this series would have easily carried on in to February. But we are doing reviews on a weekly basis from now on, so any release left over from the [2011 in Review] section will probably end up getting a proper review in the coming weeks. So stay tuned for those.
Big thanks to all of the writers who contributed reviews and of course big thanks to the artists and labels who made great music in 2011 and made it available to us for the reviews.
Tomorrow night at 10pm The Upstate Soundscape will go live to air on 91.3 FM WBNY as per usual. The blog, however, will go dark from 8am until 8pm. We are doing this in solidarity with other sites like Reddit, Wikipedia, and host of other sites, big and small, in protest of the pending SOPA/PIPA legislation currently being pushed through congress by Big Content. While this blog does not specifically engage in anything that would be deemed illegal under the current bills (at least as far as we know) this legislation would make it very difficult for this site and others like it to operate.
If your new to this debate and don't understand what's at stake here, you can simply google it or check out this link. But in a nutshell, Big Content may soon have the government-backed means to strangle anything slightly innovative on the web that makes use of music, video, or any thing else that sites like this one are built on. Essentially, the freedom of the internet–which currently allows for sites dedicated to underground, experimental music from specific geographic regions to thrive–is at stake.
Check out the below video for more info.