Writing again

Feb 122012

I’m here! Amazing.

It’s been months, and months. Officially, King Fear isn’t dead yet, but I think it will be soon. It’s not that I don’t still do music with El. I did that just yesterday. But if we do something, I might as well release it here in my blog.

I’ve been up to many things, none of which I can really publish.

On my free time I’ve started writing a book. So that takes some of my time. Whether it will ever see the daylight is a whole another thing. But it’s something that sucks up my time.

Sorry about that.

On the art side of things I’ve also painted, but they’re all physical paintings (acrylics) so I can’t show them because all the photos suck ass.

On music side, I got myself a Bamboo Sax! It’s amazing. I play it every day. It’s so easy that it’s ridiculous. Took me a day to be able to play a scale on it, but after that it’s been great. I’ve had it for two weeks now and I can play songs on it. Tonguing is difficult, at least if I want to do it “invisibly”. On a bad side of things, the Bamboo Sax is not tuned. It’s in tune with itself so it’s fun to play, but I can’t record it. At least not if there’s anything else playing.

Been there, done that, didn’t work.

Now I am going to get myself a new bamboo sax, this time tuned. Then I am going to start saving money for a saxophone. Yeah. That’s right. Jazz is coming this way. Or at least Bohren & Der Club of Gore. Also, listen to Ulver’s “Perdition City”. I might do that kind of stuff.

Things I Like: Bohren & Der Club of Gore

Nov 112011

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This is the kind of music I love to listen while painting and just generally brooding at home. Even if you didn’t brood until you pushed play, you would afterwards when listening to this.

Things I Like: The Algorithm

Nov 102011

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God damn french, I hate your xenophobia, but god damn I love your experimental metal bands. Wonderful bastards. That said, this is a bit like “lite” version of Whourkr which is actually truly great, whereas this might be great in future.

Python, you old bastard…

Nov 062011

So, I am coding again.

This time in Python. I am looking at Panda3D as an easy way to shove things to screen. I’ve fooled around enough in SDL on both Lisp and Ruby that I felt I wanted to see how 3D works out. Panda3D seems like a brilliant tool for learning purposes. Of course, I got a little sidetracked.

And I am not talking about my other hobbies like Music or Painting, either.

I did few simple tests of putting stuff on screen and that was simple enough. Then I removed that code because it was just a test and started a project in preparation of actually learning Python in the first place. I figured a good place to start learning Python was to do some basic framework stuff for a game logic and such, something that I knew how to do on Ruby and Lisp. In the end, I came upon a realization that Python is almost like Ruby – except it’s like the stodgy big brother who never has any fun.

So, it’s not hard. It just feels a little more … structured than Ruby, I guess is the best way of putting it. I haven’t delved too deep in to it, because I’ve been doing very specific things so I don’t have huge familiarity (say, none, really) with the language. So this isn’t some kind of ultimate condemnation or judgement. Just an observation of how it feels so far.

I miss the Ruby’s ability to write throwaway lines like “if x then y else z end” and Lisp’s macros. But I miss those everywhere. That said, maybe you can write such lines in Python, but I haven’t seen how and that would definitely fuck up the indentation rules. I’ll look in to it when I need to.

Song: Wailing

Nov 052011

And here it is, my newest song, hot from the press. I did this yesterday, and fixed the mix today. I feel like I should apologize for the guitar playing because I am playing some really simple stuff, and something that probably has already been played in some of our old songs as a quick doodle. But I think I am done apologizing for simplicity. I’ve done enough complex music and art that I think I will just indulge my predilection for minimalism.

That said, I really like the song and I hope you enjoy it as well.

You can download the OGG from here, if you like. No official MP3 exists, because the format sucks.

As all stuff on my website, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

All shall wail

Nov 052011

Greetings,

I’ve been busy. I made a new song today. It’s still a little unfinished when it comes to mix, but otherwise it’s done. I’ll post it tomorrow… or well, today, technically. Saturday!

Yeah, I’ve also started coding a little on my free time. But music seems to be keeping me up these days. I’ve been constantly tweaking music from small sketches and song clips (which is very unlike me, I tend to do only do full songs) to actually finishing some pieces.

I blame it on Maschine. It makes it really easy for me to just doodle something random out while I am actually doing something elese on computer.

But, just dropping a note here. Tomorrow, a new song called “Wailing”, at least until I release it officially. We’ll see.

Activities, what are they?

Oct 292011

This will be an update to those who wonder what’s up and if I am going to publish anything anytime soon. I’ll touch all the major interests, games, art and music. Depending of people, different things matter I suppose.

King Fear:

The band is still up and running. We’re slow and don’t meet up that often. But we’ve done some songs, and quite a few that aren’t published that I really should put online. I have also made up my mind to publish the Fourth album as an “temporary” instrumental album. It’s a little repetitive at some points, because it was meant to have vocals on top of it. But at least you’ll get some proper Death Metal with heavy industrial and glitch.

That’ll be the next project, I think. After that I should look in to trying to finalize those few songs we’ve done that I haven’t published.

My Solo Music:

Well, I’m vacillating between few ideas that I can’t really pin down. But I am definitely going to publish something. Whether it’s purely electronic or more metal stuff. Or a combination. I have three avenues, electronic, metal or combo. And there’s different ways to approach the combo, as well. So, yeah. I am working on that, but no idea what I’ll end up doing.

I did, as a side note, do a new drum mix and plan out some other things. Laid out some ideas how to use Maschine and such. So I guess it could be a typical KF style Industrial metal or something, just this time done purely by yours truly. But… We’ll see.

Art & Paintings:

I haven’t done much beyond sketches lately, so that’s definitely living in a limbo. I am, however, again getting some ideas and I might start to put them down to canvas. But, I am not promising anything. I’m currently more interested in music, so visual stuff has to be on the backburner. At least for now.

Gaming & Coding:

Well, we finished up Luola with Ville and the game is done and we’re slowly looking in to another project. I don’t have a game to distribute, and it was such a quick (in the end – we took a long hiatus from it) piece of work I don’t think it’s especially worth distributing. I didn’t end up doing much of the graphics beyond the logo, because I got too frustrated with 3D. I’m an 2D artist.

My personal coding, I am again twiddling a little with Lisp but I want to do something with 3D. The odds of me doing any 3D work in Lisp are slim to none, however. So I might try my hand at Panda3d which is a really nice little python wrapper around some proper game engine tools. But there’s some issues there, namely, it uses Python. The world’s most uninspiring language. It’s a good thing in some respects, though, at least it’s not any C or Java variant.

We’ll see if I can be bothered to try to get re-acquainted with Python. It shouldn’t be hard – I’m just afraid I’ll be more inspired to sort socks than to learn it properly.

Song: Low Snake Moan

Oct 252011

So, after a long silence I have something finished. I must admit, though, that I finished the song in a bit of a hurry because I wanted to move to greener pastures and incorporate some new ideas that the song inspired in me.

I’ve done a ridiculous amount of sketches, ideas and loops but little to no finished stuff. So, here you go. Something to listen to.

As all stuff on my website, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

You can download the OGG from here, if you like. No official MP3 exists, because the format sucks.

Magnificent Maschine

Oct 022011

So! I’m back.

I’ve been busy playing around with Maschine. I got it on Friday, against all odds, and I’ve been toying with it since. With some breaks for movies, restaurant and general R&R with my significant other. But other than that I’ve been mostly tweaking with it constantly day in and day out.

My first break from it has been today. I’ve done numerous little experiments with it, trying to learn the interface. I haven’t made a full song, but I did extensively research the best way to incorporate it in to my current workflow. It’s a little cumbersome, actually.

But I think it’ll be worth it in the long run. As for making songs just on it, the arranger is too inflexible for me to consider that a possibility. The scene based system might work for live performances, but for proper arrangement… not really my thing.

Regardless, here’s a bunch of stuff I did with Maschine, ranging from 15 second loop to about 2minute loops. They’re (almost) all loops that aren’t really finished, and some could be songs if I could bothered. They usually don’t have synths, but might some simple have bass on them.

Also, obviously, the mixing is nonexistent.







All were done purely in Maschine, few of them had Kore as a synth, but then I moved to the 64bit Maschine client and lost that possiblity. Hey, Native Instruments, I could really use a 64bit version of Kore 2! Ok, that’s it for today.

I’ll try to make a real song one of these days. That “Old School Horses” (first clip) has some promise.

Maschine

Sep 272011

So, what’s up? Well, I’ve been sketching as usual, but nothing to show to the general public I’m sorry to inform.

Instead, I’ve been working on music quite a bit. We did a new song for King Fear, for example. I haven’t posted it yet, though, might need to mix it a little. I’ve also been working on some solo material. Electronic music, of course. I do the metal & other analog stuff with KF, I leave the pure electronics for my free time.

In regards to this, I’ve ordered Native Instruments Maschine, because you can never have too many drum-machines – even if they’re software. These days I tend to be almost exclusively software based musician, so having an “analog” controller for a software instrument sounds like a good idea for me. I’m late to the game, though. But that’s because I am picky about investing into stuff like this, and my idea for a solo-project more or less justified the (supposed) need for a drum machine.

I have, after all, a respectable 20gb of one-shot samples and loops, almost completely properly categorized. There’s some oddities here and there that might fuck up the otherwise perfect categorization, but it’s easy enough to navigate through. So, this would definitely get me to use those to proper advantage.

As a final note, I already have one song ready for my solo material, but I’ll wait until I have Maschine to make more. Then I’ll start posting things here.

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