My Own Biggest Fan

In the tradition of Strongbad email, I have chosen an email from this week that is my favorite. It even beats the response to my drunken ramblings to Joe Chan. Really, I doubt that it will become a regular feature on this site, but I had to share this with you.

I am a regular reader of SexyLosers. Sometimes clever, mostly lowbrow, almost always highly offensive. This is truly the best online comic at the moment. At least it is one of only two comics currently running that has held my interest for over a year. (Doonesbury is the other) Right now Hard, the creator of SexyLosers is having a poll. I responded and offered my comments, he responded and offered to whoop my bitch-ass back in line. Economical and witty, it embodies the reasons I love SL.

On Feb 27, 2004, at 02:42, Hard artist wrote:
>From: Mason
>To: slcomicsurveyatfakeaddress.com
>Subject: Survey
>Date: Fri, 27 Feb 2004 02:29:35 -0700
>SEXY LOSERS SURVEY RESPONSE:
>1. b
>2. n
>3. l
>4. d
>5. d
>6. i
>7. b
>8. e
>COMMENTS:
>I really hate the guy who has the talking dick. Really lame.

You should empathize with a talking dick. Fuck off.

Ok… so what do we have here? Well, these were made on the PIII that I sold about two weeks ago, and Reason. I made a bit of an effort to make them sound a little like real instruments, whether I have succeded is a little debatable, not that you will be able to tell while listening to the 128K/sec mp3s here.

Practice – A little demo I made to bounce some ideas off of Joel when we were going to start the wildly successful band “The Vanity Project” Summer of 2002. Joel used this in his DVD portfolio to Concordia.

Breakup – So named because Eric (who also has a song available for download right now) said that it sounded like one. I am not sure what I was doing when I made it, but I like it anyways. the melody is improvised and it sounds like it, but no matter. Winter 2002.

Then there is the matter of the cover versions I made last year. What I did here was download .mid files and dumped them into Reason. From there I tweeked the hell out of them until they sounded, umm… well sounded like this I guess. The encoding on these are really low, so they sound a little wack.

Taxman – The best from this batch. Sorry about the electroclash. Hmm… would make a good lyric, that.

Eye In The Sky – Is there anyone who does not like this song? Well, I mean the original, mine is a little bizarre.

Blitzrieg Bop – I still want to add a vocal to this one, but not what you would think.

September – I never knew I had it in me.

Wichita Lineman – A co-worker in Edinburgh played this song on the jukebox every night. I learned to love this song and now it is one of my favorites. I guess you could call it a tribute, but that would be wrong on so many levels.

My Sweet Lord – “Blasphemy, blas-for-you,” to quote Eddie Izzard. This one is one of the few things that I have done on the powerbook, aside from a few false starts with some of Eric’s stuff. this is actually the first time this has been made available to anyone. World-fucking-premiere, this is!

I also did covers of Prince’s The Beautiful Ones and George Michael’s Freedom 90 but both turned out exactly like the originals, strange. I don’t think I am going to work on these anymore, nor will I do any new covers… not for awhile at least.

There is more yet… stay tuned.

Here we have more crap music I have made. After this post there will be no more mention of these songs ever again. I am not sure why I am even posting them. I guess I just want to keep the momentum going.

All of this is from about 1998/99. At the time I was making loops in Rebirth and then piecing them together in nTrack Studio, probably the easiest music software I have ever used. But then, I have not used Garageband yet. In the spirit of the last post, I guess I should tell you that this was made on a PII 133MHz, I can’t remember any more specs on it. Yes, I still have it, but the hard drive died in it and I lost a couple unfinished pieces, as well as the masters to these tunes. Not a big loss all in all, except for the Underworld remix, which I still quite like, despite myself. And I guess I still like Na Meme, never mind the crap name.

These pieces were originally posted under the name ezthrust on mp3.com, which doesn’t exist anymore.

On The Lam – the song starts out with so much potential, but then I bludgeon a baseline to death with a boring stick

Rolling – would probably be at home on one of those limp coffee shop lifestyle music compilations. Can you place the bongo sample?

Flyby3 – An interlude on the CD that I had for sale on mp3.com there were two others but they are lost.

Na Meme – My venture into dub territory. Not entirely unsuccessful.

Darling Mandy – many people like this one the best, I will admit that it is the most commercial sounding. Busta, Prince, Matthew Sweet, and some woman from a phone personals line are all sampled here.

Spooky (unwanted) – This is a remix of a DJ Ernest Borgnine song, I was more impressed with his name than with the song. The .wav master copy had frequencies so high that they would make a dog wish it was deaf.

King Of Snake (Sushi Bar in Dublin Mix) – Remix of an Underworld tune for a newsgroup compilation. It sometimes shows up in weird places. For awhile I didn’t even have a copy for myself, but someone managed to get one to me.

There were others, but they were lost in the mp3.com database or trapped on the ill-fated hard drive of pain before I could get them out.

In 1992 my mother bought a brand new NEC Ready 425. It was a 486 with a 25Mhz processor, 16 megs of ram and a 180Mb hard drive. Smoking!

This computer was the most amazing thing I had ever seen and I did everything I could to really fuck it up, and in the process I think I learnt a few things. In 1994 mom bought a CD-Rom drive and a soundcard! These things introduced me to the wonderful world of home recording.

Tonight I have dug out the old beast from my closet and fired her up. Funnily enough, the boot time is faster than my Powerbook. Basking in the simplicity of Windows 3.1, I poked around and found a couple gems from my nascent recording history. For the most part the songs here were unlistenable but I did find two that I care to share with you. They are identified only by the filenames because the lacked any real titles. “Soundtrack” is in fact the soundtrack to an art school video that I would prefer to distance myself from, for reasons I am sure every one can infer. Both of these tracks are from 1996.

Enjoy.

Ambient
Soundtrack

here a fucking mouse ran across the counter. I am not ashamed to admit that I screamed like a girl.

Obviously someone in the house has not been doing his job! Well, actually Buick has been trying to let me know about the house guest for some time, but I have been too stupid to listen. (really) So now I am leaving the door to the cupboard, where the mouse was spending his time, open for Buick to monitor. Luckily I didn’t keep any food in there, save for Buick’s, but I am very sure that the mouse did not get into his bag. I had just bought a new one on Wednesday and there is no evidence of tampering.

Maybe I can get a free case of beer out of the deal…