More Super Mario World

There's this insane Super Mario World hack called Kaizo Super Mario World that's like Syoban Action in that it's a fiendishly difficult take on the conventional Mario paradigm. There's a lot of videos of it on YouTube, which are very entertaining. Then there's another take entirely, by a guy who hacked Snes9x to record all the times you reload a save state and play them all on top of one another. The whole thing takes on a quantum-mechanics "multiple-world" kind of thing where there are many copies of Mario doing slightly different things. Very cool.



But while he was testing out this wonderful hacked Snes9x he ran into some problems, resulting in this gem:



Reminds me aesthetically of another very cool (intentionally glitchy) creation, Crystal Castles.

DJ Obama Footage LEAKED!

We first broke the rumors that Barack Obama has been DJing rare musical events. And now we bring to you LEAKED FOOTAGE of a recent performance in Madison, WI. The dark, gritty cameraphone footage shows Obama dancing fiercely, he does a little scratching (yes!), and you get a few good clips of the kind of music he's interested in.

Tell us what you think!



Update:
We've got a tentative tracklist of a few of the songs heard in these clips, sent in by reader poorlostbread:

The first one is quintessential freestyle, and it is definitely TKA - You Are the One. The second one is a little bit of italo disco, it might be Dharma - Plastic Doll but I'm not sure. The third song sure sounds like Chip Davis, the mastermind behind the hugely popular Mannheim Steamroller. It's probably one of his solo pieces. I'm not sure about the last song--maybe something from the demoscene? Jesus, I never knew Obama could move like that!

Thanks so much for that. On second viewing I noticed the vocal clip near the end, and it's almost certainly from this spectacular YouTube video.

Here's that TKA track.

TKA - You Are the One

స్మాల్ Update

Sitting on a new track from a Supergun sideproject by one of the Madison band's members, multi-instrumentalist Nick Turco. Until we get permission from somebody, we can't release it, but get ready, cuz it's HOT.

Only Technical Details

I'm registering my blog with Technorati, so please disregard this post until further notice.

Technorati Profile

Fake or Real?

http://www.celemony.com/cms/index.php?id=dna

Who knows? Looks impossible to me, I say fake. Either that or it doesn't work very well.

Supaa Mario World

While trying to relocate my recordings of Sadao Watanabe's amazing smooth jazz-fusion arrangements of Super Mario World (and earlier Mario) songs, I found this interesting cover of the entire SMW soundtrack by what was initially described by some stupid website as a one-man band, getting my hopes up for a Dick van Dyke-in-Mary Poppins interpretation, but what turns out to be just a young man like myself making what turns out to be remarkably competent versions of pretty much every song in the soundtrack. It's actually really good, well, recorded, and almost entirely accurate. They've all got kind of a Jon Brion-I Heart Huckabees vibe going on, if Jon Brion slammed some Howling Monkeys and could get over himself. There are SOME notes that are wrong, but he gets a lot of stuff right that I'm sure I wouldn't be able to do. And it's all free. I am impressed.

You can also download the Goldinum edition from his site, which includes about ten more songs that he didn't include in the original.

Here's the guy's website, just for fun. He's also got an album called CINEMA 80'S, in which he covers 30 songs from video games based on 80s movies.

Not only that, this mysterious Jason Cox fellow outlines this spooky and scary tale of Videogame: The Movie: The Game, a bootleg game that began appearing around 1988 and including "mashups" like Mario during a historical circus fire. He's provided the original soundtrack for us to download, along with cover versions. This guy gets busy.

Here's some tracks for you:

XOC - SMW - Title Screen
XOC - SMW - Donut Plains
XOC - SMW - Underwater Theme
XOC - SMW - Vanilla Ice Dome
XOC - CINEMA 80'S - Indiana Jones & The Temple of Doom Mine Cars
XOC - CINEMA 80'S - Roger Rabbit Theme
And this one's really good:
XOC - Sonic 1 - Green Hill Zone

P.S.

New Hope for Pretty MIDIs

Well, back in the mid-90s FM synthesis for MIDI playback on most soundcards was pretty standard. When we got our first Pentium with Windows 95, Microsoft thoughtfully included some nice bonus media to show off their new OS. This included the classic canyon.mid, as well as a nice version of In the Hall of the Mountain King, Fur Elise and some others. Anyway, this era of FM-synthesis GM was great, and when really shitty wavetable synthesis started to become dominant, I think everybody agrees that it was bad. So that makes me happy to announce that I've found a nice easy way to get something that sounds like the same ol' FM synth stuff, even if it probably isn't. That's right, foobar2000 version 0.9 now has a very nice MIDI decoder complete with synthesizer, and it sounds very nice. You can get the plugin here; it's foo_midi, of course.

And here's a nice MIDI I made for one of our old one hour MIDI compos we used to have. I was never good at MIDI sequencers.

SONAR KILLS DREAMS

In other news, reddit showed me this very interesting page about a man with a great idea: making infrared goggles that block out all light in the visible spectrum so that your eyes start to see what little infrared they can pick up. It sounds so cool walking around on a sunny day seeing things trees glowing pinkish white while the sky is black. Maybe I'll try making these pretty soon.
Note: there may be concern that this will damage your eyes; but I don't think UV leaks through the filters, as shown by the light spectra graphs he has up. It's possible that lots and lots of infrared radiation is getting through to your wide-open pupils, however, and I think that might be a concern.

Adam will NOT like this

Justice's newest video for "D.V.N.O.", a song from their so-9-months-ago album. Luckily this is a baby that was worth letting hatch.

yoooooooooooobama