A Perfect Circle moving quickly

A Perfect Circle has 80 percent of the music already recorded for its follow-up to 2000’s “Mer De Noms” and hopes to get the album in stores by spring 2003, guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen said last week.

“It’s definitely a step up from the last record,” Van Leeuwen said, adding that anyone who liked the band’s debut should dig the new tunes. “A Perfect Circle kind of established its sound, and I think there’s just more of that. It’s very ethereal and builds up to the heavy thing rather than being heavy all the time.”

As soon as singer Maynard James Keenan gets off the road with Tool, he plans to focus on writing the rest of the vocal melodies and lyrics for APC’s second effort, Van Leeuwen said.

Guitarist Billy Howerdel, Van Leeuwen, bassist Paz Lenchantin and drummer Josh Freese have been working on the material for much of the last year at Howerdel’s home studio.

Napster files for bankruptcy

Embattled online file swapping service Napster Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy yesterday, seeking court protection from creditors as music industry heavyweight Bertelsmann AG follows through on a plan to take over what’s left of the company.

Last month, Bertelsmann said it would buy Napster for $8 million – slightly more than half what it had previously offered to purchase the company – to pay Napster’s creditors as part of a financial reorganization that included plans to file for bankruptcy. As of April 30, Napster had about $7.9 million in assets and about $101 million in liabilities, according to the filings made in Wilmington, Del.

The bankruptcy filing is the swan song for a company that three years ago set off a frenzy of online song-swapping that attracted millions of users, as well as the ire of the recording industry, which sued for copyright infringement. Napster has been offline since July 2001 while fighting the suits.

At its peak, Napster boasted some 60 million users.

– News gathered by Trevor Fisher from mtv.com and The Associated Press.