You’ll usually find:
Released on July 3, 2000, via Century Media Records , is the sixth studio album by Dutch rock band The Gathering . It stands as a monumental landmark in post-metal, trip-rock, and progressive alternative music.
💿 The Gathering – if_then_else (2000): The Bridge to Ethereal Rock
For digital music collectors, not all audio files are created equal. The tag indicates a specific standard of digital archiving:
FLAC compresses the audio file to roughly 50-60% of the original size, but unlike MP3, it is lossless. This means when played back, the audio is identical to the original CD data. the gathering ifthenelse 2000 eacflac
: Often cited as a fan favourite, this song leans heavily into the trip-hop influence that defined their late-90s era.
By the late 1990s, the band was moving away from metal roots and toward a more atmospheric, alternative, and experimental rock sound. This evolution reached a critical point with their 1998 double album, How to Measure a Planet? . The follow-up, and the subject of our investigation, is the album (stylized in all lowercase with underscores).
The album title itself borrows a conditional statement from computer programming ( if-then-else ), reflecting a themes of choice, modern isolation, and systemic life structures. Musically, it blended the raw, driving guitar power of alternative rock with experimental trip-hop undertones, lush string arrangements, and melancholic soundscapes.
The band was at the top of their game, with René Rutten’s guitars acting as both a heavy and ethereal force. 2. A Track-by-Track Sonic Journey You’ll usually find: Released on July 3, 2000,
The Evolution of The Gathering: Contextualizing if_then_else
This article dives deep into the origin, the technical significance, and the enduring legacy of this legendary release.
An open-source format that compresses audio without losing any data, preserving the full sound quality of the original CD.
The Gathering continues to make music (now with a new singer, Silje Wergeland), but Ifthenelse from 2000 remains frozen in amber. Thanks to a dedicated fan armed with EAC and FLAC, that amber is flawless. It is a perfect, uncorrupted, and future-proof document of a band at their atmospheric peak. The tag indicates a specific standard of digital
The album has been reissued several times, including a 2019 vinyl edition.
By the turn of the millennium, The Gathering had fully shed their early doom-metal skin. Following the massive atmospheric and electronic leaps of 1998's How to Measure a Planet? , if_then_else positioned the band at a fascinating creative crossroads.
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