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.