The Download Munkey : Download This, Download That :)

Another electronic music toy, Tony-B is the brainchild of a French flash developer with the same name.

You get synthesized melodies, bass and percussion (snares, hi-hats, kickdrums) with some early 90’s techno/electro soundbites (try pressing R for that classic C+C Music Factory’s Everybody Dance Now sample) as well as some nifty EFX which you can activate via Street Fighter like controls (Down,Right,Left,Up) for the Thunder Break snare roll or (Up,Down,Up,Down) for Extreme Danger sirens.

© www.tony-b.org

The Tony-B machine boasts a very well-designed and intuitive interface where everything can be accessed either via the keyboard or the mouse (or both for optimal effect). Switch the instruments on and off by pressing the number keys, play the keyboard via the ASDFGHJKL; keys for the standard QWERTY keyboard layout (it also supports the AZERTY keyboards used in France and Belgium) and trigger the sound samples with the QWERTYUIOP keys.

© www.tony-b.org

Check out my 3 minutes track (2.90 MB) recorded with Audacity. It doesn’t exactly show off the full power of the Tony-B machine since my reflexes suck when attempting to control all the instruments, samples and the EFX simultaneously but it should give you an good idea of the style of audio generated by this marvellous little Flash toy.

Start creating your own track with the Tony-B Machine. You might want to read what each of the sound samples correspond to over at the official site before playing around with it.

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Rebirh RB-338 - Free Drum Machine
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Be Your Own One Man Band
Takuya Kashiwada @ Under Water Bar Praha

If there’s something that puts me in a better mood than listening to beautiful music by previously unknown electronic musicians or feasting my eyes on the artwork of newly-discovered artistic talents, it has to be chancing on glorious eye kandy related to music (and about electronic/club music no less )

Today, I present Andrew Jones who’s better known as Android Jones.

© Andrew Jones

This is my favourite piece - can you believe that Andrew actually did this piece live during Temple San Francisco where the Goddess Alchemy Project performed during the Touch of Truth event on 11 Nov 2007. While I’ve never been to a club, I find it simply quite amazing that anyone can accomplish any productive work in the darkness of a club and with the music blasting from the sound system

© Andrew Jones

Another three favourites - I love the contrast between the cool blue and warm red hues - makes the pictures look more intense and energetic while maintaining the cool, relaxed appearances of these practised, professional turntablists and DJs.

Not everything is about music though - there’s a couple of other non-music related pieces that I quite enjoy, mainly because I’m a big fan of skulls

© Andrew Jones

A more gritty modern re-interpretation of Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

© Andrew Jones

If you care to take a closer look at this piece, you’ll notice that besides the morbid skull and moth (or are those wings?), there’s a Mayan/Inca/Aztec mythological figure on the bottom left - there’s plenty of such intricate nitty-gritty details in his works that reward the careful or patient viewer.

Check out all these works and more in their original high resolution at Andrew’s blog or visit his official site at www.androidjones.com where a pillar of 1000 portraits done in a span of 2 years and 9 months (at the rate of one portrait per day!) is proudly displayed on the left of the website. Massive Black DVDs also sells several Android Jones video tutorials as digital downloads.

© Andrew Jones

And by the way, you might also be interested in visiting DEITRIX ArtWorks - I wouldn’t have discovered Android Jones without dear DEITRIX’s links

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Fabric CD Coverart
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A beautiful orchestral theme from the Xbox 360 RPG Blue Dragon composed by Nobuo Uematsu who also scored the music for the Final Fantasy series.

© Microsoft Game Studios

If the character design of the boy Shu bears more than a passing resemblance to Dragonball Z’s Gohan, it’s because both characters were essentially conceived by the same artist Akira Toriyama.

My favourite character, Zola (below right), the girl wearing the black bandana with the Jolly Roger, reminds me of the violent alternative personality of Lunch/Ranchi in Dragonball Z.

© Microsoft Game Studios

Two wallpapers featuring Zola and the rest of the characters from the fansite kit.

© Microsoft Game Studios

The contents of the entire fansite kit are follows:
4 MP3s
9 Avatar Images in multiple resolutions
3 Banner Images
2 High Resolution Boxart Images
0 Concept Art Images (Really wondering WTH the concept art folder is for )
4 Logo Images (Blue Dragon, Artoon (Developers), Mistwalker Studios (Producers), Microsoft Game Studios (Publishers))
18 Screenshots
12 Wallpapers (800×600, 1024×768, 1280×960, 1600×1200 resolutions)
17 Assorted Images for building a Blue Dragon fansite.

Look in the Approved Music folder for the 4 MP3s - I heartily recommend the magical 04_piacon.mp3. The first track 01_open1.mp3 is essentially a shortened edit of the same track.

Download the 63 MB fansite kit via Xbox.com. (direct link)

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Dragonrain Productions Wallpapers
Warren Louw @GfxArtist.com
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Ibara (鋳薔薇) Desktop Wallpaper

Despite the fact that attempting to load more than five MySpace pages simulatenously is often enough to make my trusty Opera browser gag and sputter, I still find myself browsing to the MySpace pages of electronic music artists simply because it’s still usually the first place to listen to the latest unsigned releases (e.g drum & bass dubplates) as well as bootleg remixes (especially breaks and techno)

In order to download them from MySpace for offline listening, I use the freeware Orbit Downloader which comes with a nifty Grab++ feature which allows you to download embedded media like Flash (more on playing Flash games offline), MP3s and videos from most web pages. Orbit Downloader has a comprehensive list of tutorials for downloading embedded media from other sites such as YouTube, Google Video and MetaCafe.

Simply launch Grab++ - remember to set it to monitor your browser - Opera is not monitored by default under Action > Preferences… > Monitoring (below), wait for the MySpace page and player to load completely before playing the track you wish to download in the MySpace player.

The Grab++ window will refresh automatically when any embedded streaming media files are are loaded. Check the file (all MP3s on MySpace are prefixed with std_), click Download and the file will be transferred to Orbit Downloader for download. For MySpace pages, you do require a sufficiently fast connection as the MP3s are loaded from the cache servers which have quite a short timeout - however cable and DSL users should only occassionally encounter timeouts.

While there can be no doubt that downloading a track commercially available as a physical record or CD or as a MP3 download is S.T.E.A.L.I.N.G, there exists a grey area when lovely tracks like Am De Sa’s unsigned drum & bass track Looking Glass (first heard on Elle Rollo’s Mature Sound Mixtape 3) is neither available as a download or on vinyl. In this case, the only way to get a personal copy (until the MP3 or vinyl version comes out) is to grab it from MySpace.

BTW, tracks in the MySpace player are encoded at 96 kbs, 22050 Hz, stereo MP3s. While they’re definitely not something you want (or should) be playing on a powerful soundsystem, they’re still useful for collectors like me since electronic music tracks come and go very quickly especially for unreleased tracks.

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For those that still confuse Euro-house with proper techno, this post is really not for you

Check out this 1:40 min video clip edited from video footage taken during Japanese DJ Takuya Kashiwada’s two hour set at the Under Water Bar Praha (Niigata) on 03 Nov 2007. I think it perfectly sums up the reasons why I still love techno after listening to this genre since 2000 (although the current minimal craze is slightly distressing )

First track played is fellow Japanese producer Takaaki Itoh’s Shadow Play, followed by Hideyuki Eto’s Permutations and finally two copies of Studio 1’s old skool minimal track Green.

The fact that multiple techno tracks can usually be layered on top of each other coupled with the genre’s suitabilty for turntable and mixer trickery sets it apart from most other electronic music genres which tend to favour either fluid mixing or turntable antics but seldom both (with the exception of perhaps drum n’ bass e.g DJs like DJ Hype)

The full 2 hour set by Takuya Kashiwada which spans multiple genres of techno can be downloaded from Japanese techno/house label Asian Dynasty’s site which happens to be the very same label that homegrown electronic music producers/DJs Angela Flame and Case Woo release their tracks on. Check out the tracklist which includes tracks like Damon Wild’s Avion, Ian O’Brien’s melodic Jarrett’s Blues, Octave One’s lush Detroit classic Blackwater, Fumiya Tanaka’s percussive Talking Drums and of course, Takaaki Itoh’s Shadow Play and Studio 1’s Green.

His earlier 40 Tracks Abuse Mix from 2004 which is also downloadable from Asian Dynasty contains even more funky minimalistic techno - especially the final track : Captain Funk’s O.Y.M.

Also check out the other newer mixes on Asian Dynasty, my firm favourites being Dualtek’s energetic set at the massive Awakenings 2007 festival in Amsterdam and Toshihiro Komine’s digitally mixed house/electro/techno set at Tokyo’s Womb club. Notable tracks in the latter mix include Kei Kohara’s uplifting house track Anklet remixed by Yasu.exe from the Heavenly Reworks EP (below) and Locutus’s shuffling Datch Dragon

© Asian Dynasty

If I’m correct, the artwork for the Heavenly Reworks EP was done by Roy Gerritsen of Boompje Studios who has designed several of the sleeve artworks for Asian Dynasty’s releases such as the Perfect Strangers EP. (below)

© Asian Dynasty

Download Takuya Kashiwada’s Under Water Bar Praha set, other mixes or check out Asian Dynasty releases on Beatport and Juno Records.

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