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...
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.
I was on Facebook yesterday, doing my usual social media thing when I noticed something unusual -- my friend (who I'll refer to as "Dr. Wormwood," her radio alias) has a new radio show... and it was broadcasting live at that very moment!
She was hosting a program called Modern Donkey on 90.1 FM KZSU Stanford. If you live in the Bay Area, then it's on your dial. Otherwise, you can listen live online.
Anyway, the theme for Dr. Wormwood's radio show was album openers, and she was asking people to send their feedback. So I recorded a quick mp3 of my thoughts on opening tracks. And as I was prepping to email it, I remembered something -- I'd just posted an album opener of my own on Tuesday!
So I attached my thoughts on openers and my own opener, After the Wink, to the email. Less than one hour hour later, I heard this on the KZSU live stream:
I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the entire Modern Donkey radio show yesterday, and I highly recommend that you listen too. It airs every Wednesday from 9AM-12PM PST on KZSU. Here's that link again!
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:
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!
Hi, I'm Nick Marino. I've been writing comics for over 15 years, going from webcomics and self-published minicomics to creator-owned miniseries for the direct market to licensed comics like Transformers and Godzilla. My work has been featured on CBR, WWAC, ComicBook.com, Comics Alliance, Multiversity, Graphic Policy, G-FAN, and many more. You can contact me here.
