I was listening to my first "Bleemix" megamix/mashup today and decided that in the spirit of getting archived fabric dorsum online and up to current standards I'd upload them to Mixcloud, so the first three are over on my new mixes folio now.

Properly tagging the tracklists is rather time consuming, made moreso by the Mixcloud UI which was clearly designed towards mixes with xv-twenty tracks equally opposed to 110+ overlapping in my Bleemix series.  Also, I somehow lost the continuous mix for Bleemix 3 and had to patch it dorsum together from the individual MP3s.  Fun fact, I tried four different solutions to this, all of which failed to provide a smooth and gapless continuous file, until I remembered Winamp's "unmarried file" Disk Output fashion.  Winamp is still good for something!

Anyhow I'll have to salvage the final Bleemix 4 for tomorrow.

Over the years I've received occasional requests to put my old music upwardly on YouTube, so today I finally set aside some time to make it happen.  I took all my former mods (generally from 1996 to 2000), converted to 320kbps mp3 with foobar2k and encoded to video with ffmpeg.  The idea of using a video streaming service as a music sharing customs didn't sit right with me for many years, but I retrieve it'due south finally time I went with the flow.  YouTube'due south ease of access is way beyond getting listeners to download a proper xm rendering player, to the point where the huge inefficiency of converting a 400kb mod into a 19mb video no longer bothers me.

So I've organized them into a playlist in chronological order equally best I could remember.  I'k planning to do the aforementioned for my older MP3s that aren't available on bandcamp or soundcloud before long as well.

Too intentionally found some garish former art I did in the tardily 90s as a properties, for added nostalgia.

Happy new year's day!

I'g in the process of transferring my site abroad from a slow older server to wordpress.com.  Later it got striking with some automated chemist's shop web-malware a couple of months ago I decided I didn't want to be a "webmaster" anymore and would rather pay for a professional person service to manage that stuff for me.

There's a fair corporeality of piece of work to practice and obviously tons of things to fix.  I'chiliad considering removing my gallery because it's full of outdated piece of work, though like most busy artists with families the majority of my creative artistic output goes into professional piece of work now.  Anyway, got my onetime posts transferred simply looks like all the images are going to have to exist updated manually.

A piffling live pulsate&bass mix I did over the weekend. I'm a bit rusty but I had a lot of fun and then decided to put it up on mixcloud anyway.

Bask!

Happy to announce that my new LP, "Allure" is now available for download and streaming. I finally got around to setting upward a bandcamp business relationship and uploading my final four releases (excluding "Shroud", which was signed) so if you missed any they can all be downloaded in loftier quality in that location for the price of your choosing.

Anyway, about the LP. One of my primary inspirations for these tracks was plant in a cross-department I kept noticing between my married woman's taste in music and mine – particularly the half-tempo overlap between R&B and pulsate&bass (much more than 170/autonomic pulsate&bass than poppy chart drivel). Ultimately that led to the uniting theme: viewing R&B's predominating themes of love, sex, and relationships through a futuristic, electronic eye.

Exploring that intersection struck a chord with me also, as in it I institute overlap with some of my favorite concepts from cyberpunk fiction. The idea of humanoid robot companions, for instance, is fascinating to me, and I find information technology specially interesting to consider the point at which the human feelings of desire and loneliness would surpass the strangeness of companionship with an artificial, constructed "person". It is essentially a common use for engineering science, I think – overcoming the limitations of our biology and evolutionary legacy to our own selfish ends, sometimes with long-term detrimental effects. So, to that end, I appropriated and distorted some R&B acapellas with the intent of extracting some of the essence of their emotion – removing them from lyrical context and incorporating them with an intentional, produced artificiality.

Cyberpunk'southward heyday lies squarely in the 80s, and so I also wanted to explore a more gimmicky approach to using 80s-way synths. It's certainly seems to be been en vogue in the 2010s – incorporating or even prominently featuring classic, analog synths in most all genres, but I feel the approach is too often relegated to the realm of intentionally lo-fi nostalgia. Although I enjoy and appreciate the retro-future style, I feel that at this point it's a road well-traveled, and not something I'm interested in doing myself. Instead, I tried to bring the near out of those sounds, making heavy utilise of the more neglected FM and wavetable synths and pipe them through gimmicky DSPs.

So I wanted to encapsulate those ideas (and many more) into the album fine art. Initially I considered 3D modeling and sculpting a head, merely felt that it would have been too much of a time investment to arrive at something with the quality I wanted. Instead, I opted for a photo shoot with Sporkii. I explained (as all-time I could) my concepts behind the album and she not only modeled, but came upward with hair, makeup and lighting looks that matched only about exactly what I was going for. We worked on the photo manipulation together and somewhen came up with a cover I'm very satisfied with.

transistorlogoslow0059

Wow, it'southward been over a year since my last post. A detailed update is overdue, but showtime I'm excited to say that Transistor is out today! I joined Supergiant Games in June last year every bit artist #3, primarily responsible for VFX/motion graphics and UI art. Subsequently a decorated xi months, the game was released today on PS4 and Steam. Check out the Launch Trailer nosotros put up concluding Friday too!

The following is a personal post. I don't usually update this site with details of my personal life only felt the demand to vent and I'k not certain where else to do it.

Six days ago Mars and I were at the pediatrician's office for Penelope'south 1.5 year routine checkup. Equally I was entering Penelope's next appointment into my google calendar, I received a daunting all-caps e-mail from our new CEO: *** TIME SENSITIVE COMMUNICATIONS *** – please go out the office by 3:15 today, savour the rest of the 24-hour interval. I had a sinking awareness in my tum, based on a few other foreshadowing recent departures at Gaia, that it was going to be a heavy-handed fix of layoffs. We went out for a snack afterwards, and Marissa told me her phone wasn't able to receive whatsoever of her work e-mails; 2d sinking sensation. After we put Penelope to bed that dark, I tried logging her into her account via web and that didn't work either. A few secondhand letters on facebook and a closer look at the divide e-mails we received earlier in the afternoon pretty much confirmed my fearfulness – she was laid off while nosotros were at the pediatrician'south office, and I was kept on.

The next morning nosotros went in to collect her things and sign paperwork. I felt a heavy sense of finality, sadness, and personal failure as we sabbatum down with the new Hour managing director and quickly went over what she missed the day before.

Seeing the original copy of our terms of employment, the signature she signed on our start day 6 years ago and the original insurance forms dated 2007 actually brought back a overflowing of memories and feelings. I remember the both of u.s. being so happy and excited at the rare gold opportunity we'd been offered – to work together and collaborate equally we had previously been doing freelance, simply with the benefits of job stability, a nice bacon, stock options, health insurance, complimentary lunches, and the prospect of working with an inspired group of talented peers who nosotros really understood and clicked with. Mars was a member of Gaia almost since its inception and the civilization and sense of humor and inspirations behind it matched our own; the idea of working for such a community and environment was so much more inspiring than the dry out freelance work we had been doing for record labels and military subcontractors. On top of that, we were living practically dorsum in my hometown, an surface area I'm comfortable and familiar with, with the support of my parents close by. Suddenly new opportunities opened up everywhere – buying bicycles and getting regular exercise, upgrading our computers and furniture, visiting my family for awesome home-cooked meals, Mars crafting and going to the salon for her hair. My parents had also invited united states on an all-expenses-paid trip to Maui that happened to be two weeks after our employment started. Shortly after that, nosotros also hired two of our closest friends from art school, who ended up living in the same apartment edifice we were. It was a golden time, and it felt like we were finally in the correct place, excited to work and live together.

The arrangement of working with one's spouse is a double-edged sword though, and adds another level of commitment and upkeep to the relationship. I struggled with that from the beginning – the pull betwixt wanting to work together in the ways nosotros complement each other well and playing to the best of our strengths, and wanting to work independently and exist recognized for my own skills and hard work as an individual. The workplace provided enough of challenges for that struggle to manifest itself, and Mars fought emotionally and passionately to continue our collaboration alive. At the time I didn't have an appreciation for what she was trying to do – she has an excellent sense of the big picture, of seeing the woods for the copse, and I often didn't recognize that. She had another reason to fight for it though – the work I do is like shooting fish in a barrel to see, it'southward quantifiable and objective, information technology has a requirement, and when the requirement has been fulfilled it is complete. Her piece of work is frequently more than ephemeral in many ways – like I mentioned, it's the big pic, it's the spirit of the thing – sometimes that can be direction, sometimes storyboards, sometimes tweaks during evolution to fit the vision. That kind of sense is invaluable to me, since I focus much of my energy into polishing details and getting things finished. The end effect is that I was often the i recognized and credited for the fruits of our equal labor.

Getting all of her work together to update her portfolio over the past calendar week was a cornball and poignant feel. Looking back on the early work we did for Gaia – the battle animations, cars renderings, summer olympic games, aquariums, towns emotes, and game prototyping, I realized all of those projects really played to our strengths and were all products the both of u.s.a. were securely involved in. In retrospect, it felt similar over the by couple of years our ability and/or opportunities to collaborate dwindled, and eventually our role shifted to one more suited to a solo artist. That is, completing a list of assets necessary to develop visual portions of a game. As the detail and execution half of our unit, more ofttimes than non those responsibilities fell to me. Left with nothing else, we tried to carve up those tasks – I did my best to funnel the more big picture ones to Marissa and take the nitty-gritty stuff I prefer for myself. But I think the passion she felt was gone – the magic of working together and showing off the fruits of our labor, of having created something greater than the sum of its parts, was no longer function of our duty.

I know that a part of that shift in direction has to practise with the rapidly changing manufacture, with the constantly shifting nature of the company itself and the overarching choices that were fabricated, only I also tin't assistance but feel a sense of personal failure on that front, and that's possibly what bothers me the most about this. A sense that I didn't value our collaborative relationship enough, our once golden opportunity, and in my relentless push to be recognized independently it slipped from my hands, a dead dream. That maybe if I'd worked with her more than closely we would accept been recognized as an inseparable unit of measurement and not rent asunder as we were.

As I mentioned, I'm a item person, and it's as like shooting fish in a barrel for me to go tunnel vision working on the details of a project as it is to get caught up in daily duties and leisure. And mayhap that'due south why I didn't really see it coming. I may have had a very vague background feeling but never expected it would happen. Only my ameliorate one-half is the reverse.

I was surprised at how well she kept it together when we went to pick up her things the day after. I felt terrible sitting in an all-hands meeting and the following creative team debriefing while she saturday at my desk, excluded from even logging on to her quondam workstation of vi years. To me, it nigh felt like a final insult-to-injury to her from all of the times I'd been approached by a colleague to accept function in a meeting or requite feedback or been thanked or rewarded for a job well washed without credit going to Marissa; a terminal exclusion. When that was all done and I saw how well she was taking it, part of me wondered if it was because she had known and accustomed the eventuality of the situation long earlier. I remembered all of the passionate arguments we'd had and realized all that fourth dimension she was but fighting for u.s. to work better as a unit, and it occurred to me that maybe things hadn't gotten better in the past couple of years, but rather that she'd resigned and accepted that this was how information technology had turned out.

The realization that this was the terminal time we'd come in to work together brought a sudden retrospection, a flood of memories of our nervous and excited first mean solar day, of vacations, friends and coworkers come and gone, of past successes, my matrimony proposal to her at a Gaia Fanime panel, of happier times when it felt like we were unstoppable. As Mars said her final goodbyes, I couldn't hold it together anymore. I concluded upwardly taking the rest of the solar day off; we decided to go to one of her old favorite restaurants for lunch, for quondam times sake, and starting time mentally projecting what the future might hold.

Sad as the situation feels, I too know information technology's just the end of i chapter and the kickoff of some other. In a sense, I feel it'south brought us a bit closer again – I definitely feel more motivated to help and collaborate with her on our personal fourth dimension. Since nosotros've had Penelope information technology feels like most of our collaboration has manifested in the mundanity of running a smoothen household; in a sense it's been a motivation to affirm that the possibility of our artistic collaboration is non bound to our employment. Seems obvious, only in practice it's ended up that mode and the idea of breaking out of that is a motivation in itself. And knowing that we won't have just about every waking (and sleeping) moment together lends a new sense of appreciation of her.

Six years is a fairly long time to stay in one place in this manufacture. It was a wonderful opportunity and I'm glad we seized information technology, and I'm thankful for all of the experiences it provided us together. I'd like to contentedly look back and say we took total advantage of it, but I'll always wonder if I really did.

New EP with some deep pulsate&bass and, dare I say, mail service-dubstep?  This time around I wanted to focus on subtlety and understatement a piffling more than, push a petty further towards minimalism while withal keeping things interesting.  I call back I'm still in a similar phase as my previous EP; there are definitely some similarities, simply I wanted to explore a deeper audio this time, focusing more than on bass and ambience than percussion to emphasize the hush-hush/stealth/subconscious motif.

Downloads coming before long only full tracks are available on soundcloud for now anyhow.

berserk

Decided to learn ZBrush after learning well-nigh some fancy features it's got over mudbox like dynamesh and insert multi mesh. I'd been reading the berserk manga so idea it'd exist a expert first exam project to make Gatts' berserker armor. I liked the scene where Schierke's trying to get him back under control and then idea it'd be fun to sort of recreate. I really had it in mind to do some furnishings animation to become with it, and so here'south a piddling gif of it (and by little i hateful like 3mb) .

I spent a little too much fourth dimension trying to brand a perfect loop and ended up getting lazy about some of the particles so it's kind of the worst of both worlds; oh well. Guess I'll count it in as a little scene for my next demo reel update where I won't need to worry about information technology looping.