13 original instrumental songs. Electronic, surf, funk, rock, and more.

Each song on 7 Star Sky Flash Kick has a special story behind it. I'll be sharing those stories with you and adding them to the tracklist below as I go. I changed my mind! Though the stories are awesome, I'd rather spend my time making new songs than writing blog posts about ones I've already made 😉

7 Star Sky Flash Kick tracklist:

01. Adamantium 2:28 (mp3) (artwork) (history)
02. Da Bounce 3:20 (mp3) (artwork) (history)
03. Destruct-O-Groove 8:51 (mp3) (artwork) (history)
04. Dora Milaje 1:42 (mp3) (artwork) (history)
05. Egg Shaker 3:01 (mp3) (artwork) (history)
06. Intra Venus 1:48 (mp3) (artwork) (history)
07. Nazo 7:09 (mp3) (artwork) (history)
08. Never 1:54 (mp3) (artwork) (history)
09. Philly Right 2:57 (mp3) (artwork) (history)
10. Smells Like Cupcakes 5:34 (mp3) (artwork)(history)
11. Sultry Storm 2:04 (mp3) (artwork) (history)
12. Synthezoid Rock 4:15 (mp3) (artwork) (history)
13. Zero 2:32 (mp3) (artwork) (history)

• Download the 7 Star Sky Flash Kick ZIP file (47:30, 75 MB)

• Listen to 7 Star Sky Flash Kick on SoundClound

• Watch the 7 Star Sky Flash Kick album sampler video:

The songs on this album were written and recorded between 2003-2013. A few of them have been released with older mixes and different names. Many of them are theme songs to podcasts produced by myself and my friends including Comic Book Pitt, 3 Chicks Review Comics, and various shows on AudioShocker.com.

The album cover is a collaboration between myself and my incredible girlfriend, Justique Woolridge. She created a painting inspired by the title. I scanned in both the front of it and the paint-smudged back...

...and then I layered both of them on top of each other in Photoshop and altered the colors to produce the final album design.

The album is named after one of Chun-Li's moves from Marvel vs. Capcom. Here's what the 7 Star Sky Flash Kick looks like in the video game:

Finally but most importantly, a lot of people have supported me, inspired me, and helped me create these songs. Thanks to Justique, Ed Marino, Jennifer Marino-Gabrielli, Josh Kobylarz, Dan Greenwald, Kelly Thompson, Ross Campbell, Scott Niekum, Kaylie McDougal, Neal Shyam, and Shawn Atkins.

I often forget the process of building a beat once it's complete. Even though most of my songs and remixes take hours to create, once a song is finished my memories of the process float off into the aether.

Wakanda by Nik Furious [ 2:29 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

But that's not the case with Wakanda. I remember the arduous cutting that it took to make the sample of D'Angelo's solo piano demo of Africa line up with my digital drums and synth bass.

It was the winter of 2004-2005. I was living in Brooklyn and sitting around my room sweating in my underwear because all of the building's pipes ran through my apartment. The heat was annoying but it was a good problem to have because it gets fucking cold in NYC!

The version of Africa used in this remix wasn't officially released at the time. It'd leaked and made its way onto Limewire, the popular pirating software of the day.

Though I was working on tons of beats at the time, Wakanda stands out because it required a degree of precision that I'd never used before. D'Angelo's performance here is loose and raw, not set to a perfect rhythm. That fluidity made it impossible to neatly line up some digital drums and quickly turn out the beat.

Basically, while creating Wakanda I taught myself how to make micro-edits to audio and alter the speed of a song without destroying the music or making it sound choppy. Once you figure out how to do this sort of thing, it's just a matter of practice. But until that time, it seems like some kind of unimaginable magic (especially in the pre-YouTube days where tutorials rarely found their way online).

My name for this remix has a pretty simple story behind it. In Marvel Comics, Wakanda is the fictional African nation ruled by the Black Panther. It's one of my favorite pieces of Marvel lore and a worthy moniker for this beat, which I think carries a lot of emotion and elegance.

Ugly comes from a time in my life when nearly every day yielded a new beat.

Ugly by Nik Furious [ 2:03 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

It was late 2004. I was living in Brooklyn and trying to find work in the corporate comic book industry. I interviewed at DC Comics and tried to wriggle my way into Marvel. But there were no real prospects.

Frustrated by the experience, I distracted myself by sampling pop songs and adding my own digital drums to them. Some of these compositions ended up becoming favorites of mine for years to come (see Diamond, Nothing, Showdown, and the final track off of Sunday Best, Wakanda).

But others ended up languishing in my files and going unused and unreleased for nearly a decade. Ugly is one of those unused and unloved beats.

The beginning is a sample Craig Safan's score from Good Guys Wear Black, a late 70s martial arts film starring Chuck Norris.

The main sample comes from the extended version of "She Blinded Me With Science" by Thomas Dolby. The only reason I knew about the synth riff on the extended version is because I heard it at the beginning of Mobb Deep's Got It Twisted, which was a minor hit in the second half of 2004.

Overall, this remix is really simple -- a couple layers of Dobly's synth riff and a few variations of digital drums by yours truly. That's it. Some days I love listening to the simplicity of it. Other days, it sounds incomplete and underdeveloped to me.

But most importantly it puts a smile on my face because it gives me a reason to look back on a miserable time in my life with a tiny twinge of nostalgia. As lonely and disappointed as I was back then, I was musically experimental and cranking out new beats like a machine.