Category: Music

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Music Television & Movies

Kasatochi: Beamed

Kasatochi: BeamedJust in time for the release of Star Trek: Into Darkness, I thought it’d be fun to reach into an alternate universe and whip out a soundtrack from that mirror universe’s vastly superior library of Star Trek video games. (I make little secret of my opinion that a lot of licensed Trek games are big piles of steaming salt monster excrement.) In this other universe, virtually every movie and series has had a knockout video game based on it, with outstanding music from some of the big screen’s finest composers. Here, then, is an entire full-album-length chiptune tribute to the Star Trek universe from Kasatochi, free for download. … Read more

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Music

Kasatochi Expansion Pack #1: ’80s

KasatochiOh, look over there – well, you know the drill by now. It’s Monday morning, Monday mornings suck, and drastic anti-suck measures must be taken by all available means. Hence: more Kasatochi.

Right-click to download kasatochi-ep1.zip (63mb)

Unlike prior Kasatochi downloads, this one is “EP length”; doing Kasatochi stuff could easily eat all of the time I have to put into the site and my other projects (like my dandy daily podcast), so it’s time to scale back to sane proportions. The good news: it’s all ’80s. (Yes, I know that technically the Gary Numan song is 1979. But hey! Gary Numan as chiptunes!) … Read more

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Music

Kasatochi: PROG

KasatochiOh, look over there – Kasatochi is back!

Right-click to download kasatochi3.zip (158mb)

As promised last week, this collection is much more narrowly focused, on two of my favorite orchestral-prog-rock songwriters/performers/producers. Each gets equal time on this bunch of chiptune conversions, which finally comes in at under the record time of a CD-R.

The tracklisting may baffle those expecting to hear the heavy-radio-airplay hits. In many cases the available MIDI files of the songs in question just didn’t make for good chiptunes. I wasn’t even necessarily able to do my favorites! What a deal. Track listing after the jump. … Read more

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Music

Kasatochi: I Have A Nichibutsu!

KasatochiOh, look over there – Kasatochi is back!

Right-click to download kasatochi2.zip (174mb)

This is the second “album” of Kasatochi chiptune conversions for your amusement and bewilderment. Again, I slightly overshot the record time of a CD-R, because I couldn’t bear to leave anything out. (Is anyone really using 80 minutes as some kind of limit anymore, or does it all get crammed into an iPod at the end of the day? Obviously, if I’m converting mostly-’70s-and-’80s-favorites into something that sounds like it comes from an old video game system, I’m a little behind the times – you’ll have to let me know. For all I know, I’m supposed to stretch this out to fit on a C-90 cassette.) Track listing after the jump. … Read more

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Music

Cheese For Your Quest

KasatochiI’m going to start at the end: Here! It’s a free album of chiptunes!

Right-click to download kasatochi1.zip (179.17mb)

Now let’s rewind to the beginning.

A few days ago a friend of mine on Facebook posted a link to a really rather impressive NES-style cover of Yes’ “Roundabout”. It was truly impressive.

Then I did some digging and figured out that, really, anybody can do this. Only a select few can do it well, but if you’re wondering about the proliferation of “8-bit cover song” channels on the ‘tube, here’s how it works. … Read more

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Music

And speaking of spaceships…

Voyager (CG)A few days ago, I was raving about the short film Stardust, inspired by (and, in a CGI sort of way, starring) the Voyager 1 space probe, and I have to fess up that I’m still pulling this up and watching it at a rate of about once a day. I’m just a wee bit of a Voyager fan myself, to the point of having a little plastic one sitting on the shelf, and Stardust pushes my buttons – in a good way – on many levels.

One of those levels is that rhapsodic, hypnotic piece of music playing in the background. I’m a sucker for anything with a prominent cello line (see also: early ELO), so this music stuck in my head. Thanks to persistent pestering by myself and others, Stardust sound designer/composer Guy Amitai has released the four-minute piece of music from the short on iTunes. Just as Stardust is dedicated to graphic designer and cancer victim Arjan Groot, the proceeds from the iTunes single go to cancer research.

A worthwhile purchase on so many levels. If you want to read up on the real history of the real Voyager 1 and 2 space probes, go here – I’ve included many important dates from the Voyager program in theLogBook’s new timeline menu, all meticulously researched via NASA’s wealth of archive material and several other sources.… Read more

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Gadgetology Music

That sounds familiar

I CAN'T HEAR YOUInternational Space Station astronaut Chris Hadfield has posted a really interesting sound file or two on Soundcloud. In response to a Twitter question about what it sounds like aboard the ISS, Hadfield posted a recording of the ambient sound of constantly-running life support/air conditioning and a few dozen computer fans. You can hear it here.

Kinda sounds like home to me. I’d be the last person to trivialize spaceflight or anything related to it, but that wall of computer-fan-and-A/C sounds an awful lot like… … Read more

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Home Base Music

Shooting stars and sh…tuff

whooshI spent a lot of time this weekend outside, trying to see the Peresid meteor shower. I was only rewarded with about four sightings, even though I live out in the sticks and can see the Milky Way across the night sky, but one of them looked like it was about to leave a mark. Whew. Exhilarating stuff. Two things brought my meteor-gazing to a halt: the clouds creeping in, and my own Canis Major and Canis Minor deciding that it’s playtime since I was outside.

Many years ago, I wrote and recorded a piece of music that I called Perseids for no readily apparent reason, and I can now report that it fits the experience rather well.

[audio:https://www.thelogbook.com/earl/music/percyy.mp3]

(More sonorous synthesized sounds can be found here.)

Speaking of music, I’ve spent recent weeks delving into the works of Erik Satie. It’s been a while since I “adopted” a classical composer wholesale, but it’s not unknown – in my music directory, Rachmaninoff is right above Radiohead, and Rimsky-Korsakov can be spotted between R.E.M. and the Rolling Stones, probably squirming in his seat the whole time. Actually, what’s happened in the past is that I’ve adopted a lot of Russian composers, totally by coincidence; it wasn’t like I scoured the classical section looking for someone with a vaguely Russian sounding name that I hadn’t heard of before. Apparently I’ve been bumping into Satie for quite a while without realizing it. Contemplative, quitely troubled stuff. That fits the experience of being me rather well at the moment too.… Read more

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Music

Mission (A New Beam Record)

Blaster Beam me outta hereBecause everything goes better with blaster beam. Well, maybe not everything. I’m not going to drop some beam on top of “Call Me Maybe” (though I’ve no doubt it would be an immense improvement). The song has to have a sound that lends itself to having this weird sound in the middle of it – there has to be a certain style of arrangement and, you know, it wouldn’t hurt if it fit thematically. Yesterday’s Edgar Allan Poe-flavored selection was almost tailor-made for this experiment, but I wasn’t going to give up on my favorite band just yet.

It turned out that I had been trying to tiptoe around committing sacrelige. Because, you see, I’ve gone and added blaster beam to my all-time favorite song, by anyone, ever. … Read more

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Music

The Raven Rides The Beam: a musical experiment

The human adventure ROCKS OUTA few weeks ago, La-La Land Records released a definitive, long-overdue 3-CD edition of the soundtrack of 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and you better believe I snapped a copy of that mother up – it’s my #2 favorite soundtrack of all time (next only to The Empire Strikes Back). Near the end of the third disc is a track isolating the sound of the blaster beam from the rest of the orchestra. Anytime in the first Trek movie you hear something that sounds like a cross between an electric guitar and the gates of hell opening, that’s the beam, baby. … Read more