Tag: music

Spring Break Extended

  • The two bonus tracks promised to Gold Skull and White Leather Skull backers have been sent out. Both A MERCILESS NIGHT and IF YOU HAD A TIME MACHINE were professionally mastered by the same professional engineer who mastered the 10 album tracks. They’ll go up on UATV after the rest of the album is uploaded there. They may be released as singles or b-sides later. We’re now working on the organic bonus track, which is an entirely new song that is arguably the best yet.
  • Vibe Patrol released the Spring Break Extended mix of A DRINK WITH A COCONUT today. It’s on iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube. You can always keep up with new releases by using the links on the left sidebar.

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The Only Darkstream

Nothing dramatic, actually. But tonight’s Darkstream will be a listening party for the new SOULSIGMA album release, so if you are interested, please stop by. And if you’re not interested, then please don’t because we will not be discussing JD Vance, Russia, the release of the Epstein Files, or anything even remotely related to current events.

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THE ONLY SKULL is out

My first complete solo music project, The Only Skull, was released this morning on YouTube, iTunes, and Spotify, as well as a number of other music platforms of varying degrees of obscurity. It’s not entirely solo, as I collaborated with one celebrity corpse and an AI system in composing and recording everything, and all ten songs were mastered by an excellent audio engineer whose primary clients are heading one of the world’s most iconic music festivals this summer.

A link containing the appropriate download will be sent out to the backers later today, and for those who are interested, we’ll hold a listening party on the Friday Darkstream. I have not selected the two bonus tracks yet from the five that have been recorded, and the engineer and I are still working out how we want to approach the promised organic track, which is likely to be a really good new song that does not appear on the album but will be provided later to the relevant backers. It may be that this song will be provided only to the backers, because there is a reasonable chance that it will be released by another artist who is interested in recording and releasing it himself.

    1. Ride and Die
    2. The Only Skull
    3. Angel in Flight
    4. Seasons
    5. Neptune Grieves
    6. My Secret Sin
    7. The Shining Wire
    8. The Word Descended
    9. Once There Was Sorrow
    10. The Ride Never Ends

    Anyhow, I am well aware that this is not an area that most of the readers here are much interested in, but I would encourage you to check it out if you are curious about the current state of the art of music technology at the moment.

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    SOULSIGMA Update

    In light of The Only Skull campaign hitting its goals – thanks to the backers, of course – I’ve gone ahead and had the ten songs professionally mastered, so they’re going to sound even better than they do on the sampler video which John Bradley of Booster Patrol graciously prepared for me, and which we put together to demonstrate the audio quality.

    This required changing the first stretch goal, which now, in response to some requests, will be a fully human-performed song that will be professionally mixed and mastered, a song that is not one of the ten that are already on the album. So, if you’d like to see how far we can push this thing into the organic realm, consider backing the campaign.

    And if you missed it, you can also watch the video for A Merciless Night.

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    Project SOULSIGMA

    SOULSIGMA represents the current cutting edge of music and technology, with the combination of man and machine intelligence. All ten songs are entirely produced with AI music technology, then edited and mastered with digital audio tools to produce a very high-quality alternative rock sound that is original without feeling lifeless or uninspired.

    The ten songs on the album entitled, THE ONLY SKULL, are:

    3:35  RIDE AND DIE
    4:17  THE ONLY SKULL
    5:03  ANGEL IN FLIGHT
    4:16  SEASONS
    3:58  NEPTUNE GRIEVES
    3:28  MY SECRET SIN
    3:27  THE SHINING WIRE
    3:15  THE WORD DESCENDED
    5:29  ONCE THERE WAS SORROW
    3:53  THE RIDE NEVER ENDS

    All ten songs were written by your favorite dark lord, with the exception of The Only Skull and Once There Was Sorrow, which were co-written with George Gordon Byron. If you’d like a taste of what the songs sound like, Booster Patrol have helpfully created a showcase video for one of the songs that isn’t on the album, A Merciless Night. UATV viewers will probably recognize it as the English version of 悲しみの影 as a reverse-Murakami approach was effectively utilized.

    If you’d like to back the album, you can do so via the two-week campaign on Fund My Comic. As I mentioned before, this isn’t a priority project like the campaign at the end of March will be. The final mastered versions will be made available on UATV and Spotify after the campaign, so you’ll be able to hear them whether you choose to support it directly or not.

    UPDATE: Thanks to the four backers, the project is officially funded already!

    UPDATE: Fandom Pulse very kindly covered the project’s announcement.

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    Booster Patrol Backers

    All of you should have received an email now containing a link to download all of the high-quality, fully-licensed covers that we promised you nearly three years ago. If you haven’t, please email me and I will get it to you. If there are additional rewards owed, such as the promised cover of When The Man Comes Around, rest assured the band will get one recorded and delivered to you.

    On a related note, I plan to launch a very small crowdfunding campaign next week for the Soulsigma album, a 10-song collection of original music which I wrote and produced using AI technology and digital audio tools, on FundMyComic, which graciously added a Music category at my request yesterday. Soulsigma is very different than the Booster Patrol covers and Vibe Patrol tunes which you’re accustomed to hearing, being more in the hard alternative rock category. This isn’t a major community project, so don’t feel any pressure to back it if you’re not genuinely interested in the music. The big campaign for which we’ll be hoping for massive support will be at the end of March and I will soon have some very exciting news about that.

    I understand that a lot of people are either skeptical or openly derisive about AI music, and understandably so in light of what we’ve seen from ChatGPT, but they simply don’t comprehend that there is a massive difference in the degree of difficulty in producing meaningful text and meaningful music due to the way in which music is much more easily reduced to numbers and numerical patterns. The three best musicians I know, world-class musicians who compose in three very different genres, are uniformly excited about the possibilities being created for them on the AI front, and to be honest, theirs are the only opinions on the matter I take seriously.

    I’ve just never had much patience for the buggy whip crowd. Even in these early days, the quality of what can be produced is much better than what was being professionally produced by the record labels in the 1990s, and it’s only going to get better as the technology improves and is further refined. The fact that the particular form of the evolution happens to favor lyricists at the moment only makes it more interesting to me; as we learned from games, the earlier one gets in and masters the development technology, the more one can reasonably hope to accomplish.

    Anyhow, if you’re a UATV subscriber and you’d like a taste of the coming campaign, this is one of the alternative mixes of a song that is on the album, the Midnight Ride mix of Ride and Die. UATV

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    They Smoked it Out

    Curses! Those cunning Ukrainian disinformation agents have smoked out the plot!

    Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation has accused the viral pop song ‘Sigma Boy’ of being part of an “information war” aimed at promoting a positive image of Russia among young people.

    Sigma Boy, performed by 11-year-old Betsy (Svetlana Chertishcheva) and 12-year-old Maria Yankovskaya, has gained attention on TikTok and other platforms since its release in October 2024. The track has reached the top ten on Billboard’s Hot Dance/Electronic Songs chart, peaking at seventh place, and has accumulated millions of views.

    Ukraine’s disinformation watchdog, which operates under the National Security and Defense Council, has claimed that Moscow could have manipulated the song’s popularity, drawing comparisons to alleged Kremlin interference in the 2016 US elections. The agency has argued that Sigma Boy “erodes critical perceptions of Russian content” and helps normalize the nation’s cultural influence abroad.

    “Sigma, sigma boy, sigma boy, sigma boy
    Every girl wants to dance with you
    Sigma, sigma boy, sigma boy, sigma boy
    I’m so special, it will take you a year to win me.”

    I’m pretty sure that under ASCAP’s rules I qualify for a writer’s credit on that one. I mean, I wrote nearly one-quarter of the lyrics.

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