Don't Be Afraid is a 1997 industrial / electronic album by Information Society. It saw a dramatic change in creative direction from the pop stylings of Information Society's earlier work to a darker sound with prominent themes of paranoia and disaffection with modern life. The sound of Don't Be Afraid is most similar to the late 1990s dark industrial work of Gary Numan. The album was created as a solo effort by Information Society frontman Kurt Harland. After the breakup of the band in the mid-1990s, Harland decided to retain the band name for this album. In 2006, the band reunited and reassumed the name.
Track listing
The original retail release of Don't Be Afraid includes a bonus multimedia disc with videos, photos and other documents from the earlier years of Information Society offered from Harland's personal collection. Unlike most companion CD-ROMs, it is not self-executing, the user has to navigate through the file system to fetch the material.
Tracks 10 and 11 on the V.1.3 CD re-release were accidentally swapped. The above track list reflects the intended order, as listed on the back cover.
"White Roses"
The 10th track on Don't Be Afraid is titled "White Roses" and sounds as 55 seconds of modem noise. When decoded, text data is displayed revealing clues for of an Internet scavenger hunt of sorts to collect 16 separate ARJ-compressed, password-protected files which add up to the completed "White Roses song" in WAV format. Most of the pieces are now lost, due to hosting being taken down. The song itself is a dark synth and acoustic guitar piece lasting over seven minutes whose main theme is depression and internal identity crisis. The website has a page of information related to this hunt and an MP3 download of the complete song.
Alternative releases
The Brazilian release of the album has three bonus tracks — remixes of "Closing In", "Are 'Friends' Electric?" and "On The Outside" by DJ Double B. Also, it had the full "White Roses" song, rather than the hidden message. However, it lacks the multimedia bonus disc.
The Brazilian and German releases were given new covers, as the local publishers deemed the original "too satanic".
The same remaster was released on CD, on September 22, 2008. This version includes "White Roses" and a cover version of "Kebabträume", a 1980 hit song by the German band D.A.F.. Accidentally, the order of these two tracks was swapped. Remastered versions of "Empty 3.0" have a short but noticeable skip in the audio around 2:55. This release does not contain the data disk. Also, with the exception of the front cover, all of the album art is different from the 1997 release.
Tracks 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 9 produced and mixed by Steven Seibold, recorded at Seibold Studios.
Tracks 5 and 7 produced and mixed by Fred Maher, recorded at Fred Maher's studio.
Tracks 8, 10 and 11 produced and mixed by Kurt Harland, recorded in KurtsCar.
Use in media
Three songs were used in video games that had soundtracks composed by Kurt Harland.
Early versions of "Closing in" and "On the Outside" as well as reworkings of previous InSoc material were used in the 3DO version of Ballz.
The instrumental track "Ozar Midrashim" was used as the intro theme of , and was the main theme and basis for much of the other music for subsequent games in the Legacy of Kain series.
