Brilliant Shower artwork by Shawn Atkins

There's something very unusual about Bacon -- it was written and recorded in about 45 minutes.

Bacon by Nik Furious [ 3:56 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Most of the songs on Brilliant Shower took hours to compose and perform, evolving with every new layer and morphing into something far different than what I'd originally intended for them.

Bacon, however, was written on a lark and recorded in a pinch. And it came out sounding exactly like I'd intended.

Intermission!!! For your sharing pleasure, here's Bacon on YouTube...

...and on SoundCloud.

Okay, back to the history of this song. My friend and co-creator of the AudioShocker, Neal, was visiting me in Pittsburgh. Improvising, I was playing my acoustic guitar while he was chilling with me. I wrote this riff and fell in love.

I busted out my drum machine, added some quick keyboard bass, tossed in a couple of acoustic guitar tracks, added some keys and percussion and VOILA! The track was complete within minutes. It was just that quick.

NEXT TUESDAY: Super synth meets smooth acoustic guitar and thick slap bass.

Brilliant Shower artwork by Shawn Atkins

It's been eight months since I halted my (somewhat) weekly Nik Furious music posts. But now the jams have officially returned!

Let's kick off the celebration with After the Wink, the first track from my instrumental album, Brilliant Shower:

Nik Furious - Brilliant Shower [ 1:05 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Up until now, my free music downloads were strictly limited to my mixtape cuts (a.k.a. songs with samples in them). The only way to get my 100% original instrumental music was to buy Brilliant Shower from iTunes, etc. But as I explained a couple of weeks ago, I've taken Nik Furious off of those sites and now ALL of my original songs will be available here on my blog.

For the foreseeable future, all of these new Nik Furious posts will also contain a YouTube video of the song:

...and a SoundCloud version:

Well, at least until I get sick of embedding both of them 🙂

OKAY! Now let's talk about After the Wink. It was originally composed in 2004 as part of a 10-minute soundtrack for a student film of the same name by Claudia Duran and Jonathan Martofel.

We had a bit of a miscommunication somewhere along the way... they were expecting a plain guitar soundtrack, while I was aching to experiment with synth-heavy electronic sounds. I'd only recently begun producing hip hop beats, and I was hype to fuse my new hop hop style with my experience in performing rock music.

They hated the result. I wasn't sure how I felt. At the time, I guess I hated it too. At their request, I went back in and redid everything as a single track of acoustic guitar. And the electronic soundtrack was scrapped.

About a year later, I was going back through some of my shelved recordings to mine them for beats (or, at the very least, ideas). I relistened to the entire electronic After the Wink soundtrack. Of the 10-minute recording, a single minute stood out. I decided to hack off the dead weight and VOILA! This song was born.

Genre-wise, I think it tends to confuse people. It's not exactly rock. It's not exactly electronic. It's certainly not funky like my most of my other songs. And there's no way it could sit comfortably alongside my hip hop productions. No, it's a beast of its own and I love it for that.

NEXT TUESDAY: A song written and recorded in 45 minutes becomes a Nik Furious funk classic!

UPDATE 02/19/2013 - Now you can download all of Brilliant Shower for free. I re-released the album in 2012, detailing the creation of each song through a series of blog posts. Check 'em out at the link!

UPDATE 01/27/2011 - Listen to the full album!!! (I thought all of Brilliant Shower was streaming below, but it was just 30 second snippets. Whoops! My bad. But now that's fixed and you can listen to the full album in all its glory.)

Brilliant Shower Tracklist:
01. After the Wink
02. Bacon
03. Essential
04. In Vert Head
05. Invisible
06. Purple Suite
07. RAW
08. Remix the Phoenix
09. Speechless
10. Street Drums
11. Summers
12. Uncanny
13. Wallcrawler

If you want to get a feel for the full album without listening to the whole thing, here's a 6.5 minute sampler featuring 30 seconds from each of the 13 songs:

Brilliant Shower album sampler by Nik Furious [ 6:29 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download