Halb Mensch. Halb Ding.
The new UNKLE album, War Stories, is coming, and Burn My Shadow is the track spearheading the album.
But, can anything ever really beat Never, Never Land?
PS: If you’re into UNKLE, get your hands on Edit Music for a Film and Do Androids Dream of Electric Beats.
To celebrate the 25th anniversary, here is the trailer for the final cut of Blade Runner, coming out in October. Warner Brothers, in their infinite wisdom, apparently don’t quite understand the concept of a trailer, and have decided to do their best to deny people access to it. Go figure.
Not bad, a bit jarring with the ‘hey, we can do After Effects text animation’ stuff going on. I’m still not convinced it needs new footage injected, but then I’m naturally skeptic when it comes to Blade Runner.
PS: The music in there is Death is the Road to Awe from The Fountain, by Clint Mansell, and it is the most heartbreaking, tear-wrenching, uplifting, spiritual piece of score in ages.
That said, one has to wonder why you would use someone else’s score for your trailer, when Vangelis’ Blade Runner score is one of the best and original scores ever written? Especially considering how over-used Requiem for a Dream’s score has been in trailers since The Two Towers first hit; and while I love this, there is some semblance. Has Clint Mansell become the grand-choir-track of today?
John Romero was kind enough to post up some old never-before-released midi tracks from DooM.
As the climate grows more and more desperate for record labels, their answer to their mostly self-inflicted wounds seems to be to screw the consumer over even more. #
He then goes on to exemplify this with the pricing of his own Year Zero album.
So Warren Ellis doesn’t think much of Björks latest outing:
This is just gutless, half-blind grabby-handed cultural tourism from a woman who may not even realise she has nothing left to say. If there’s fascination in VOLTA, it’s in watching a corpse continue to twitch years after it pissed on its chips. #
Oh snizzaps… Personally I think it’s alright; a hell of a lot better than both Vespertine and Medulla (which was absolute anguish to listen to).
The Ninja Tune label has their own podcast, and the second episode is a half an hour that takes you through Amon Tobin’s career, roughly from the beginning to his latest (awesome) album. Bear with the first couple of rather generic jungle tracks, and you’ll find yourself in dark unfamiliar territories.
This is not an intended pun, I just cannot be bothered with rephrasing the fact that I’ve been spending a lot of time over at Time’s new website. It’s so inviting… Anyway, I came across this neat little photo essay, detailing a few of the high points in Ennio Morricone’s career as a film composer. More of those please.
The Nine Inch Nails concert next week is coming up fast, and I’m pumped. To get you pumped as well, I figured I’d jazz you up with a little something I got by way of Rassi.
It’s Friday again, and the doctor prescribes power-pop/rock!
Though known for playing bass for such heavy-hitters as Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, and A Perfect Circle, Jeordie White’s music endeavors actually began with a band whose main muse was Star Wars. Around the late ’80s in Florida, White and his friends formed the thrash metal band Amboog-a-Lard. Their only album, aptly named A New Hope, focused entirely on the themes and characters of the original trilogy.
Just over a month till the Copenhagen NiN concert!
If you don’t know scores, don’t pretend you can review them. While sifting through my soundtrack and movie score collection, I came across this piss poor Alien 3 score review, in which the ‘reviewer’ asserts:
“Alien 3: (Elliot Goldenthal) An abundance of noise, with little substance.”
and
“One of the major pitfalls of this score is the fact that it isn’t scary. Nor is it grand.”
Alien 3 was the score that made me recognize Elliot Goldenthal, who in the humble opinion of this blogger, is one of the best ‘new’ score composers out there. Whether you like or dislike his style is one thing. It’s a challenging score, certainly. But to accuse the Alien 3 score of not being scary and not being grand… Well that categorizes as ignorant in my book.
Personally I trust Score Reviews for my ehm… score reviews.
PS: I’m putting together a list of my personal favorites, any suggestions?
Update: Now here’s a guy who gets it:
“What is most worth noting about this score is that it conveys a distinct post-apocalyptic feeling, one of dystopia, devoid of any joy or hope. I think this is what makes Alien 3 repugnant for so many people. James Horner’s Aliens, despite its brutal action sequences and creepy underscore, still had an underlying heroic and adventurous tone to it that listeners accepted. Jerry Goldsmith’s Alien was more desolate, yet you could detect a few hopeful chord progressions nested within the main theme. But Alien 3 banishes all musical warmth, and the result is much like being imprisoned in a nightmare. The only glimpse of hope is achieved at the score’s climax, and it is the hope of self-destruction. Whether this is a good thing depends on what you consider good music, but I consider Alien 3 at least effective, if not uplifting.”
Being the gaming geeks that we are, the talk around the non-existing water cooler somehow always seems to boomerang back to gaming in the good-ol-days. And as these conversations go, the Amiga is often brought up, and along with it such classics as Flashback. Now if you have never played Flashback, that’s okay, you can still enjoy the music; or at least pretend to enjoy so as to not be left out.
2 years ago, in Scotland, I slacked off celebrating Halloween because I felt it stupid to ‘celebrate’ an American tradition in a non-American country… Oh how arrogant and stupid I was.
Looks like I won’t be putting down money on iTMS from today anyway. Plenty of new European outlet’s, just not in Scandinavia. Fuck. And color me amazed, they did put out a color iPod Photo. I wouldn’t have put my money on that happening, that’s for sure. Especially since they only just updated to 4G. The photo function is pretty cool I suppose, but the coolest thing about the iPod Photo, is definitely that it shows you the album cover of the currently playing track! With me being the anal sucker I am, all the albums in our 80 something GB music collection have had their covers painstackingly added, and I would just love to have this feature.
But with my 3G iPod being merely 9 months old, I doubt I’ll be fronting the money for a new model any time soon…
I am looking for the soundtrack for The Bounty by Vangelis. It has never been officially released, and as far as I know, has two bootleg copies on the market today, one from 1994 and one from 1995, both more or less identical. I have looked high and low, searched through endless p2p networks and newsgroups and even made a pact with the devil (who is now officially my cleaning aid, the looser).
I cannot find it.
If you can find it for me, I’ll surrender my header to you for 3 whole days.
Whew! Sorry for the long wait. I’m now back in Dundee, Scotland waiting for school to start again. I’ve now moved in with 4 other people in a kickass apartment the size of Europe (though it’s in the usual Scottish “Hey, they’re students, they can live in a hole in the ground if need be”-condition). The last 3 aren’t arriving until tomorrow though, but I predict a good year ahead.
A few days before I left Denmark, I went to the concert with Jarre in Gammel Vraa Enge. It was amazing! I don’t really have any pictures that give an impression of the entire thing, which is too bad, because everything was alive for those 2 hours on a watery and muddy field in the middle of nowhere. (And DAMN was it hard to get out of there!!). I’m trying to get my hands on more pictures from the concert from places other than where I was (20 meters from the stage baby!!), when I have enough cool pictures I’ll post a gallery and concert report should anyone be interested. As a short taster of it, I can reveal that the concert was amazing, a couple of new tracks, a fantastic collaboration with Danish Safri Duo and an overall amazing show.
As for work, there’s not a lot going on at the moment. I’m doing some sketches whenever I can kick myself hard enough to actually sit down and do it. No doubt I should’ve spent more time drawing over the summer, I’m very much out of shape. But I’ve made it a goal to increase my drawing skills dramatically this year, so we’ll see how that goes :).
As for projects starting up or already going, I’m still working on Cloud City for Jedi Knight 2, haven’t gotten any work done for a month now, but I’m hoping to start again this week (I’d show you a shot, but I don’t have any compiles of it done yet).
Also I think I’ll rework two of the movies I did last semester and throw those up here, if for nothing else, then so people interested in Computer Arts at Abertay University can see what kinda stuff we’re doing over here. Also I’ve started doing a human body in lowpoly that I’ll try and see if I can bone and animate this semester to get a head start on the classes. I need to get a book on the subject though, as I doubt I’ll be able to figure it out by myself. I wonder if that Paul Steed book is any good…
As a “sorry for the lack of updates” gift I’ve uploaded the 1024×1024 desert dried riverbed texture I did for a small project at Inverse Cinematics, you can get it in the Gallery if you’re so inclined.
