Don’t really have much time today, so I’ll make this post quick.

This is a song that was a Steeleye Span song. In this case, The Imagined Village is doing a really good cover of it that I thought I’d share. The song is Cold Haily Rainy Night. I’ve always liked Celtic / Indian fusions…

Well, got rather distracted when I was looking for anything related to foxes or kitsune on youtube by discovering that CBS has a bunch of old episodes of Star Trek on youtube. Full length and all. Embedding disabled, unfortunately.

I did find this clip from the movie The Court Jester of Danny Kaye singing the song Outfox the Fox, though, as the outlaw, the Black Fox. Thought it was rather amusing, and close enough to the theme we had going…

I was tempted to follow up Wasteland with Teenage Wasteland, but you know how I dislike repeating songs I’ve already played.

On the topic of games I’ve overplayed, especially on the Mac, I have to mention Escape Velocity: Nova. This is one of the few shareware games I’ve gone so far as to pay for. (By Ambrosia Software, probably the best known Mac software outfit out there).

The premise is that there was a large series of hypergates to several different areas of the galaxy. Then all the hypergates broke down, and things collapsed into three empires, with a forth basically getting enslaved in the mix.

Then you come into all this flying around in a shuttle. From there, things are marvolously open-ended. There are several main plotlines you can get into. Or you can just run around, doing missions, making cargo runs, and ferrying passengers around.

Or you can find where things are being sold cheaply, and sell them for a profit. Even hire escorts to carry the goods. By a new ship. Pay for all sorts of upgrades. Hang around lurking in wait, ambush ships, loot all their cargo, sell their ships, or even take them over.

And if you start to feel brave enough, challenge planets, and after you’ve whipped their fleets into submission, get them to pay tribute to you. Or you could dink around mining asteroids. All up to you.

And did I mention that if you pay for the game, you can add plugins ranging from adding new ships and outifts, to adding new plotlines, to turning the game into a different game with the same engine. It’s notable that this is actually the third Escape Velocity game they made (and the best, in my opinion), and the previous two were remade as plugins available (for free) for Escape Velocity:Nova.

I got hooked on this on the Mac, and missed it when I went mainly Linux with a dash of Windows. Then, glory be, they ported it to Windows. And it runs decently on Wine. All in all, was worth the $30.

Here’s some video footage of the game, with action music all plastered over it, as some people are wont to do.

Well, I didn’t really play with an Intellavision that much, Sean. (Though I’m fairly sure it didn’t have Grand Theft Auto…)

I did play a bunch of old mac games, though. As far as RPGs go, I used to like Taskmaker & Tomb of the Taskmaker, and I still play them in emulation occassionally with Basilisk II. Or, did you ever play Dark Castle? I died a lot, but the sound effects were great:

I wasted a lot of hours with Scarab of Ra, too, finding treasure, and being harrassed by monkeys, and chased by panthers, and mummies:

And that’s not even to mention Fool’s Errand. I don’t even know how many hours I wasted on this classic game. A Tarot based storyline with lots of fiendish puzzles. Cliff Johnson wrote 3 in Three[1], and At the Carnival, too. He even has them on his site for free download:

[1] You are wrong! This cannot be! There is no 3 in Three! And therein lies a tale.

I loved this game. Only other puzzle game I played that approached one of Cliff Johnson’s games was Systems Twilight. But then, I’ve always loved Andrew Plotkins games, too.

Well, while we’re on the subject of Little Red Riding Hood… here’s a CGI short that I stumbled across today. It’s a fairly intense retelling of Little Red Riding Hood by four French students – Emeline Bafoin, Eric Le Dieu de Ville, Tristan Michel and Vincent Techer, with music by Eric Orbaf – as their final school project at Supinfocom Arles (movie site and free download here). The scenery and CGI work are imaginative and amazingly well done, especially the wolf… or wolves.

Courtesy of gemtracker.

Free things for poor people are always good. (So are videos based on O Brother, Where Art Thou. Nice ending to that, too) However, stretching this respite from blog themes as far as it will go, let’s get out No. 2 pencils and get ready to dive under our desks to survive the nuclear holocaust as we learn What To Do in a Zombie Attack.

It’s a series of helpful and informative films on the Communist I Mean Zombie Meance from those fine folks at Chlorinox (better living through chemistry, indeed) and it makes some interesting observations about zombie combat that only the hothouse mind of uptight white 1950s America could make.

Such as?

Well, for instance, did you know that women are supposed to fly into mindless hysterics in a crisis? And that becoming a remorseless killing machine devoid of compassion and emotion and sacrificing yourself to a zombie horde Makes America a Stronger Nation? And that the zombie virus really is part of the Worldwide Communist Conspiracy? Yes! Those dirty commie bastards really are trying to sap and depurify our precious bodily fluids!

Oh, you may be wondering about the non-regulation haircut that the kid has. Director Jose Carillo has something interesting to say about that at archive.org:

Well, we shot this thing in one day, nobody was paid, most of the zombies supplied their own costumes AND makeup, and the most expensive thing I had to pay for was lunch, which consisted of around 100 hot dogs, couple of big cans of chili, a tub-o-mustard, buns, sodas and bottled water.

I felt that it would have been cruel to make the kid cut his hair without paying him…

That’s indie filmmaking for you in a nutshell.

Anyway, Carillo and writer Paul Scofield are to be commended. Sure, you could download it for free at archive.org. But why not encourage them and drop a sawbuck for the DVD at Amazon?

Courtesy of Lone Bannana Productions (site here). The extra N is for “nifty”, by the way.

Well, my neat thing today is about as far removed from traditional modern airs as one can get.

Imagine what happens when a deathcore outfit like San Francisco’s Animosity lets Berlin techno artist Aaron Spectre, aka Drumcorps, play around with their album Animal? The result is Altered Beast, a sample of which I heard on Brian Turner’s show yesterday on WFMU. You know those clichéd buzzwords that Nathan Explosion likes to throw around on Metalocalypse, words like “metal” and “hard” and “dark” and “brutal”? Altered Beast is the only music that I’ve heard recently where words like that have any meaning.

Spectre has twisted and tortured Animosity’s screaming and howling into non-Euclidean shapes that sound like radio telemetry of galaxies imploding. It’s what deathcore would sound like if you shot it off to the ends of the universe and had it come looping back after ten trillion years and through uncharted dimensions, the Muzak of R’Lyeh. And it makes the fanged, fetid, sinuous thing inside me writhe with something approximating joy in its unlit lair.

Don’t believe me? Just take a look at the cover art.

Altered Beast cover - Animosity & Drumcorps

At least, I think that’s the cover art. Could be concept art from John Carpenter’s The Thing, for all I know, or a color plate from the Unaussprechlichen Kulten: “Summer Camp on Shaggai! Note to self: never drink the bug juice there ever again”.

Free Altered Beast download at www.drumcorps.cc
http://drumcorps.cc/alteredbeast/mp3

And for a preview of what you can expect, here’s Animosity and Drumcorps on the single Altered Beast video that I could find (or at least the single one that I could find with decent audio quality): Thin Retro God. Courtesy of guynm.

Continuing the Parts and Labor theme today, we move on to A Great Divide, off 2006’s Stay Afraid. Never has alienation and isolation sounded so damn heroic. Worth a listen or three.

You can listen or download the MP3 version of A Great Divide by clicking on the link below. It comes courtesy of Parts and Labor and the Audio/Video section on their Web site.

Parts and Labor – A Great Divide (MP3)

You read Slashdot, Shanoah? Be careful. Someone might think you’re a geek or something.

Anyway, I’d like to continue to focus on Parts and Labor today with probably my favorite song from them: Fractured Skies, off 2007’s Mapmaker. Why is it one of my favorite songs? That requires a little explanation.

I’ve noticed lately in pop music that songs like to build you up, but not to release you. If you listen to pop music with any regularity, you know what I mean: A song will build you up with, as noted music scholar Dr. Gonzo put it, “a rising sound” – higher notes, rising volume – but won’t let you release that emotion. Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit is a perfect example: Grace Slick’s singing will get higher and louder, but she never “jumps off the cliff”. She never switches to a lower key, which allows you to release all the emotion that you’ve pent up during the song.

That’s why my favorite song from Nirvana isn’t Smells Like Teen Spirit but rather Heart-Shaped Box; I live for that cymbal crash in the refrain between “Hey, wait” and “I’ve got a new complaint”, which marks Kurt Cobain switching his voice to a lower register. And that’s why my favorite Parts and Labor song is Fractured Skies. It  builds you up and then lets you down rather nicely and, more than that, it does it multiple times. Very nice.

You can listen or download the MP3 version of Fractured Skies by clicking on the link below. It comes courtesy of Parts and Labor and the Audio/Video section on their Web site.

Parts and Labor – Fractured Skies (MP3)

I am rather excited about today’s neat thing, Shanoah.

I’ve wanted to put the music of the Brooklyn wall-of-noise outfit Parts and Labor on this blog for a long time now. (If you think you’ve heard Parts and Labor here before, well, maybe you have) Problem is that most of the YouTube videos out there are from live performances with poor audio quality.

This is a problem cos I’d almost call Parts and Labor a strictly studio band. This statement is given the lie by the fact that they obviously kick ass live (or at least they do in the many live performances up on YouTube), but it’s nevertheless partially true. Noise rock in general, despite its name, can be full of subtleties and complexity, despite its name, and Parts and Labor’s sound is no different.

Like I’ve said before, they can come at you with the hammer of the gods, but trailing the hammer are drones, dirges and lots of high-frequency and (dare I say it?) delicate sounds that don’t survive a big concert amplifier, a teeny video camera mike or YouTube’s compression algorithms very well. Such music deserves to be contemplated in a smaller venue – headphones, perhaps, or computer speakers.

Well, I finally figured out a way to post their music yesterday (post a link to the free MP3s on their site… duh), shot off an e-mail to them for permission and received a response in gratifyingly short time. That’s why your neat things for the next three days will be from Parts and Labor.

Your first neat thing Nowheres Nigh. This is from their newest album Receivers, of the Jagjaguwar label and due out Oct. 21. (One Neat Thing a Day is actually ahead of the musical curve for a change? Isn’t that a sign of the Second Coming?) It sounds like it’s going to be a killer album. They asked on their Web site for sound samples that they could use for the album and, according to Jagjaguwar, managed to use every single sample that they got. Listen to it through the link below (the one that says “Parts and Labor – Nowheres Nigh”), download it and then buy buy buy when it comes out in two months.

Parts and Labor – Nowheres Nigh (MP3)