Random stuff: Animusic

I came across this video by accident earlier. It's bloody amazing, quite frankly. I just couldn't resist putting it here! It's made by a comany called Animusic. a content creation and licensing company. They must be raking it in (and having lots of fun in the process). Some bloke on YouTube seems to have ripped all their videos, so you can see more of their stuff here.

Random stuff: Evil Maria.

This is the name of a great little song that I came across on a rather interesting little website that had been languishing in the backwaters of my bookmarks for months. The site is called grke, which is a shortened version of the name of site’s author, Graham Keeling. I somehow stumbled upon his site whilst browsing the forum on Outpost Gallifrey.

Anyway, about Evil Maria. It’s damn catchy - so catchy in fact that it’s been in my head for the last few days. Aaargh! People who can write songs like do that should be making megabucks! I have cheekily bounced “Evil Maria” over to this blog (using odeo.com) for your listening pleasure (use the player above). I hope this is OK, grke!

You have been warned - it's catchy!

The interesting thing about Evil Maria, is that it’s loosely based on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum game, “Jet Set Willy”, which is an astonishing coincidence as only just a week or two ago I was buggering around downloading Spectrum emulators and games over at www.worldofspectrum.org. There’s more to come on all that later...

Anway, all about Evil Maria (including the lyrics) here, and do check out grke.net – there’s some great tunes he’s written – fun and quirky (and damn catchy) stuff, and some other interesting things too.

DrGaz's Music: Old Old Stuff

I finally figured out how to convert my old audio tapes into MP3. Horray! This has given me a the perfect excuse to inflict all my old music on you!

"Old Old Stuff" is a collection of tunes I recorded on an 8-track about 9 or 10 years ago. It's a bit like with my Garageband stuff - lots of little ideas, short snippets and concepts that were recorded in the hope that one day I will harvest the better ones and develop them into proper songs! Some of them are intended to have vocals which were not recorded (I'm no singer), so it's all instrumental - just me with a guitar, occasionally accompanied by a shit keyboard.

So here they are! All 31 of 'em - some short, some long, some bloody awful, some irritating, some cheesy. But hopefully you'll find one or two tolerable ones. My apologies for the quality of some of the recordings, but the little analogue 8-track I used was just borrowed from a mate and it wasn't a particularly great one.

What I've done is compiled all the songs as MP3s over podcast and you can listen to them using the players below. The reason there are two players is because for some reason odeo.com wouldn't let me put more than 20 MP3s into a single podcast. Very annoying, but hopefully I'll work out how to get around this soon.

DrGaz's Motorhead jacket

I was a bit of a heavy-metaller when I was an undergraduate ('92 - '96). I had the full rock credentials; the mullet, the leathers, the oversized white trainers, the range of Iron Maiden T-Shirts, and of course the inevitable 6-string. In about 1993 I decided to paint the sleeve of my leather biker jacket with a "Motorhead" logo (click the thumbnails for a bigger view). I was quite pleased with how it came out. I used acrylic paints on it which were pretty tough and kept their nice rich colour. I also did a crazily green "Overkill" logo on the back of a mate's jacket too.

I put my jacket on eBay last year and amazingly it went for about £22! Not bad for an old jacket. And I thought I'd be dumping the thing at the local charity shop! I had to get rid of it one way or another, you see. The time had come. As a respectable member of society I hadn't worn it for over 10 years, and certainly couldn't think of a socially acceptable occasion (apart from maybe a fancy dress party) where I'd ever wear it again.

Anyway, below is a view of the jacket that I used for eBay auction. That's my Fender Stratocaster I'm holding!