by SHANE SINNOTT

Two weeks ago saw the release of Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, a collaboration between David Byrne and Brian Eno, and in the music world, a big fucking deal. In their work together with Talking Heads, the two are often credited with things like “changing music,” and this record is their first collaboration since 1981. Better still, they’re doing it sans label, releasing the record in a bunch of digital and physical formats, and streaming it in its entirety for free on a Web site, www.everythingthathappens.com.

The album is being billed as a mix of gospel and electronic, and the story goes that Eno and Byrne did a lot of the collaborating over e-mail in the past two years—so kinda like the Postal Service, except with a singer who can write interesting lyrics. The idea apparently came about at a dinner party when Eno suggested finishing some lyric-less songs he’d had kicking around for years and Byrne took home a CD of demos and wrote the words. More importantly for our purposes, it goes to show that if you’re incredibly famous and critically acclaimed musicians, you can release your work digitally, without a label, and be hailed as innovators. Kudos! That said, the record is a good one—take a listen at the site.

A disturbing development occurred last week in one of the seemingly endless litmus-test court cases brought forth by the RIAA against music downloaders: a judge has ruled that defendant Jeffery Howell wilfully and intentionally destroyed evidence of his file-sharing activities after being notified of pending legal action, and “therefore warrants appropriate sanctions.”

Poor Jeffery: RIAA forensic guys found that he uninstalled his file-sharing program (KaZaA), deleted everything in the shared folder, formatted his hard drive, and then used a special file-wiping program to further remove traces of evidence. How the hell they’re able to determine this I dunno—personally, my if-I-was-ever-sued-by-the-RIAA plan was to format my drive just like Howell did—but you are hereby warned: apparently, the deliberate destruction of evidence “compels the conclusion that such evidence supported Plaintiffs' case.” Yikes!