Some backstory: Polka Glocks is a hip-hop group comprised of three people living in entirely different parts of the country: Davy Hamburgers (Pittsburgh), Jason Sabbides (Tennessee) and Three Ninjas (Seattle). They also have some kinda members who live in Wales and Virginia. Their collaborations happen over the internets.
After Three Ninjas did some collaboration with them (and was then formally inducted into the group) I started listening to them and became internet-friendly with Davy Hamburgers. During that time I was ramping up my 8-bit chiptune Saucecore project.
I had composed a chiptune song that I liked but I had no idea what to do with it because it didn’t really fit the style that I was going for. So I thought, hey, I’ll send it to Davy Hamburgers; maybe he can figure out something to do with it. Gosh, that musta been about a year ago. And honestly I completely forgot that I’d done that.
And then last week to my delight a song suddenly materialized as if by magic out of the internets! Take a wissen:
I wrote the chiptune musics for that! It’s going to be on their next album, Secret Land of the Monkey Man. I am excite!
Remember when I posted about how famous my pal Jason is? Well, he just keeps gettin’ more and more famouser.
After his appearance on the Today Show, that TV show 20/20 flew him back to New York to interview him. And they lubbed him so much they actually agreed to fly a film crew out to Seattle to film him performing his musics as Three Ninjas.
So @NatheLawver and @tacomachickadee and picked me up and we drove the 40 minutes up to West Seattle to see Three Ninjas & Tangentbot (and special guest Pop Star Shannon O’Brien) perform their tiny open-mic set at the Skylark Café with a 20/20 film crew filming it, then we drove all the way back to Tacoma.
From left: Tangentbot, Three Ninjas, Pop Star Shannon O'Brien
Total drive time was 1hr 20min. Total show time was approx 20 minutes.
TOTALLY WORTH IT.
So there’s a slim chance that I might appear on a soon-to-air episode of 20/20 in an audience reaction shot. No biggie.
Link of the Month: Tee Fury
It seems like there are a handful of websites that offer one daily t-shirt for sale every 24 hours, but I tend to like Tee Fury’s geekish offerings more often than any others’ designs. I follow their feed for easy updates!
Album of the Month: Blue Scholars: Cinemetropolis
A damnably catchy album with an equally wonderful origin story: The local Seattleite duo of MC Geologic and DJ Sabzi funded the entire album through their fans via a Kickstarter campaign that ended up bringing in more than double the money they asked for! Geo has one of my favorite flows in all of hip-hop right now, and his lyrics are intelligent and clever. Sabzi pulls out some head-shakingly-good music for this project. Here, watch this video for “Fou Lee” (which is an Asian market on Beacon Hill in Seattle):
Game of the Month: A Boy and His Blob
This is a gorgeous, soothing, adorable game. It’s a re-imagining of the insanely frustrating ’80s video game. In remaking it they removed all of the things that made the first game so difficult to actually play. The result is a strangely pastoral experience, like walking through a beautiful forest… with puzzle-solving. My favorite part: there’s a button whose sole purpose is to make the boy hug the blob. It’s so frikkin’ cute, and it serves no purpose other than to be cute.
Tee Fury
Blue Scholars: Cinemetropolis
A Boy and His Blob
