It was a warm, wet, summer evening when the mantids attacked, without warning or provocation. We huddled together on rain-soaked streets, listened to the distant artillery, and waited…
I made a thing! I’m currently working on other things that will join it, to form an electronic music EP, which will be released at some point in the mysterious future.
I came across this album on Reddit yesterday, and it’s magnificent. Atlas, from FM-84, is the lush, synth-heavy soundtrack to every 1980s movie where a lone cop takes down the cocaine kingpin who murdered his family. Or maybe it’s that summer at the shore where you stay out all night, fall in love, and never see her again because that’s how it works when you’re 15. Whatever it means to you, I think you’ll love this, especially if you’re Gen X.
I’ve been a fan of Nerf Herder since before the first record came out, because my friend had a pre-release. It was right around the time that Weezer stopped being Weezer, and Nerf Herder was all OH HELLO PEOPLE WHO LIKE CATCHY NERD ROCK WANT TO HANG OUT?
When I found out that the band was going to be on this year’s JoCo Cruise, I peed a little. But just a little, because I have moderately decent self control from time to time.
I got to spend some time with every member of the band while we were on the boat, and they are the nicest people, you guys. I also got to stand in the front row when they headlined JoCochella in Lareto, Mexico. I also also got to perform Sloop John B. with them on stage on the last night of the JoCo Cruise.
So, yeah, it was a pretty big deal for me, and one of those times I stopped to look around and say thank you to the universe for putting me into this timeline (as you can imagine, I spend a lot of time wondering when me from the future will get around to repairing this timeline).
Every day last week, I had a light night followed by an early morning. I averaged 6 hours of sleep, so when the alarm went off earlier today so I could wake up in time to go to the hockey game, I smashed it with Thor’s Hammer and went back to sleep. I’ve only been awake for an hour, which disappoints the part of me that wants to wring every second out of every day, but satisfies the part of me that is like “shut up with that Type A shit for a minute and accept that you can sleep as long as you need to on the goddamn weekend every now and then.”
So I recalibrated my day. When I finish this coffee, I’ll have another coffee. I’ll probably make some oatmeal pancakes because that’s been on my mind all week long, and then I’ll clean up and organize my office, then my game room, and finally my kitchen. It will eventually be a busy, productive day in Castle Wheaton.
But at the moment, I’m having this coffee and listening to the classic Ambient album Earth to Infinity, by Deep Space Network, while I get my day slowly started.
As I do from time to time, I’m going to evangelize about this album, which is perfect for background music and active listening, depending on how much of a journey you want to take. So as I say from time to time, if you want some ambient in your life (you need it already, whether you know it or not), here’s one of the greatest tracks off this album, Soylent Green:
This album is nearly impossible to find, because it went out of print within minutes of its release. If you can track it down, though, it’s worth the effort.
This is another one of those visual background noise things I like to make.
I used some public domain moving images that I found at Internet Archive, did a bunch of editing and filtering in iMovie, and then replaced the sound with a classic out-of-print ambient track from Earth to Infinity called Memphis to Mars.
I’m surprisingly happy with the way this turned out. When I watched it all the way through, it made me think of syncing Dark Side of the Moon with Wizard of Oz or Echoes with Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite. That wasn’t intentional, but I’m happy it turned out that way.
