Gaming, Music, The Internet, Whatever….

One of my favourite sites of the year has arguably been SoundCloud, one of the ever growing number of “targeted” networking sites. Where as the quite well known YouTube and slightly less well known Vimeo deals with video and it’s various forms, SoundCloud deals with Music but as opposed to the likes of Spotify or Last.fm that help established artists, SoundCloud is there for some of the more “experimental” or “legally dubious” pieces that 20 years ago would have been passed on White Label vinyls or 10 years ago on unmarked CD-Rs.

There are many, many well known electronic artists on there and my current personal favourite is West Country legend, legally denied Jedi Knight and all round genius Tom Middleton who’s uploaded many of his remixes, both official and unofficial to the site. But two of my favourite pieces up on the site at the moment are at both ends of the musical spectrum and show just how much variety there is on the site.

First up is something done by my friend Tim Maughan over at his eponymous site Tim Maughan Books. Here he’s done a mix under his pseudonym Shinohara Heavy Industries, which I’m sure is a reference to a particular company from an Anime. Better ask him, he’s the expert after all, something you’ll realise after a visit to his site. He’s put together a deep house techno mix with just a hint of minimal here and there, so gets a solid thumbs up from me.

Girls and Mechs and 909s – Part 1 by Shinohara H-Industries

The second one is perhaps slightly more well known in that it’s been linked by every man and his dog on Twitter but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worthy of even more exposure.

Here’s a thought. What if we took this guy and slowed him down to 1/8th of the speed so that one of his songs took 35 minutes to play? Would sound awful, no? Surprisingly not. The whole track was stretched using a program called PaulStretch, something that was used to create the 9 Beet Stretch project, one which played Beethoven’s 9th Symphony stretched out over a 24 hour period. Which I’ve heard and is an odd experience, I can tell you. This however, is beautiful and just about the right length.

J. BIEBZ – U SMILE 800% SLOWER by Shamantis

The bit around the 21 minute mark pretty much stopped me in my tracks. Well, it would have if I hadn’t been sitting down but it’s still pretty epic.

So there we are. A wide world of music out there and all of it free to listen without adverts. One in the eye for Spotify I think. And Mr. Tim Maughan shares a blog post with that Beiber Boy. He’ll be so thrilled.

Probably.

The MCM expo is bi-annual event held at the Excel arena in London. It is billed as an event for Movie, Comic and Anime fans but it should probably add cosplayers to that list too, given how a good half of the the people there were dressed up for the occasion.

It had a rather interesting atmosphere to it, not being too focused on one aspect or another and having that rather British feeling of being “cobbled” together and trying to fill as much of the exhibition hall with as many things as they could find. I’m sure that certainly wasn’t the case and the organizers spent many months trying to get as many people to exhibit and appear there as possible, but that wonderfully British feeling was still there. And I liked it.

The day itself was a bit of a blur and while at the time I wasn’t keen on staying there too long, I would go back there without too much hesitation. Probably not as a cosplayer though. Certainly whets my appetite for going to something like E3 in the States but not any time soon.

I would just like to say a big thanks to Tim Maughan over at his eponymous site for getting me in on a press pass. Didn’t perhaps get me anywhere “behind the scenes”, mainly cause there weren’t any, but it meant that I had a hassle free time getting in. Which given how many people were there and the line for the queue to get in, is definitely a good thing. I’m pretty sure a few of the pics in this set will appear over on his site in due course. And rightly so.

To view the full set yourself, please follow this link go to the Flickr set. Enjoy.

There is a problem I seem to have. No, this isn’t more about my bladder concerns (something else I can thankfully banish to 2008) but more to do with here.

Throughout the day I have a seemingly never ending supply of thoughts going through my head. Anything and everything usually; some stuff I’d like to share, some stuff I probably shouldn’t and some things that are technically illegal in 47 of the 50 US states. Though quite why I spend my days thinking about MDF, I’ve no idea. Or however that joke from I’m Alan Partridge goes.

Problem is, I have a never ending supply of things to say, but never a way to say them.  On a basic level it’s a form of writers block but it seems to go a bit beyond that; some other kind of mental block that I could really do with sorting out cause it does seem to extend to my everyday life as well as this humble little interweb home. For example at the moment I seem to have plenty of thoughts on Liverpool’s form in the Premier League and Rafa’s apparently remarkable rant against Sir Alex, which was neither remarkable or a rant; the wonderments of Fallout 3 and why it’s inspiring me to visit Washington this year; and in turn why resurrecting beloved franchises from the past can be a dangerous thing for anyone to do (partly inspired by my mate Tim’s review of the update of the Ghost in The Shell) as well as countless other things such as politics, the economy, gaming, travelling and the world at large.

I suppose I could do with getting my head round it fairly soon. Not cause I seriously believe that what I have to say is important, more that the longer I let these things lie, the more they annoy and frustrate you (one thing I did learn from last year, but I’m not getting into that here and now.) And I’m certainly not concerned with coming as sounding childish and amateurish, as if I was I certainly wouldn’t have imported all my old Blogger posts.

A start would be to touch on the thoughts raised above but simply devoting some time here would enough of a catalyst to get the mind up and running properly for 2009, and a properly running mind something that was sorely missing in 2008. And I think with that, we can put 2008 firmly in the back of our minds and move onto bigger and hopefully better things. Or at the very least one of the two, anyroad.