"Afterlife" by Bolt Thrower - From "War Master" (Full Dynamic Range Edition) (1991)

raven & lloyd in l.c. leyendecker's "couple descending a staircase". why not!

I woke up wondering if I could use my Taiko no Tatsujin drum game peripheral as a MIDI controller for recording actual taiko drum sounds

Turns out, I can!! 🪘🥁💥

FFS I've just realised the full video didn't upload. Rest is on YouTube if you want more.

It's absolutely wild tbh, and now I'm wondering what other game controllers I can do cool MIDI stuff with

Btw if you like the music in this, it's on my new album, Home for Hitodama - I'd love you to check it out

François Bayle - Les Couleurs de la Nuit (INA-GRM,1985)

Todays rip: 10/03/2024

Character Select BGM (KFAD2 Mode)

Season 4 Episode 1 Featured on: SiIva Direct Presents

Ripped by deogenerate, New Guy Visuals by Harmony Friends, deogenerate, dante

Requested by delilahs-pumpkin-patch! (@delilahs-pumpkin-patch)

Today's rip was requested for coverage on the blog due to one very simple reason. Because for all the coverage I've done on the King for Another Day Tournament in Season 4 Episode 1 with rips like Thank You, Everybody!, Unhealed and NIGHTMARESCAPE 〜Unrestrained HyperCam 2〜 (Final Boss Phase 2), there's one part of the project that I've effectively ignored entirely up until now. Indeed, though the excitement of the tournament itself, and its post-contest celebrations in Season 4 Episode 2, are both remembered very fondly, there's a period surrounding the tournament that's yet to be covered. We've covered this story's middle, its end, and its epilogue - now, its time to discuss its beginnings.

I've said before that Season 4 Episode 1 is kind of defined wholly by the tournament event itself, but given that it only took up around 2 months of actual channel time that may come off as a bit strange. That's because, much like the video game series that most directly inspired it, the King for Another Day Tournament did an incredible job in maintaining hype up until its release though reveals and trailers. These being the reveals of, of course, the new contestants - with a roster size doubled from Season 3's King for a Day Tournament, it left 16 characters to be revealed piecemeal in the buildup to the event. Channel creator Chaze the Chat described that he wanted Season 4 to be the most unpredictable and surprising Season yet, and we of course saw that outside of KFAD in rips like Sex - Steve Harvey and the entirety of Chain of Memories II Day - but the way the character reveals were done also played part in this element of surprise! The rip of today, Character Select BGM (KFAD2 Mode), is one of many other rips that contain a secret character reveal trailer within - hidden in the sea of normal channel uploads, these secret character reveals would be shown only to those who truly kept an eye out on every rip the channel uploaded.

Better yet, all these trailers were hidden at the very end of rips - and just like Chaze the Chat had warned, there was no telling what to expect from these rips even if they contained character reveals (shoutouts to Stronger than Mr Krab for being actually deranged). It was the hunt for the character reveals that made me click on rips like Character Select BGM (KFAD2 Mode) to begin with back in the day, as I have little to no connection to rhythm games like REFLEC BEAT VOLZZA, and yet it absolutely paid off in just how solid of a rip this is. This is a no-nonsense quality rip across the board, a high-octane melody swap medley with an energetic and fun sound derived from the source track. Creatively yet seamlessly, it begins by including themes relating to the Christmas Comeback Crisis such as The Noble Haltmann and Wood Man's theme, before pivoting to focus on music broadly categorizable as ones more known within Japan's online remix communities - including music featured in other rhythm games, but also music such as that made by Yosuke Yasui. In effect, Character Select BGM (KFAD2 Mode) was just about the perfect rip to reveal Rhythm Masters in, as a perfect blend of SiIva's own set of jokes and the potential kinds of rips the contestant itself could offer.

Excitement for KFAD was in the air for most of 2019, and it was through rips just like this that said excitement was maintained. And even though I myself lacked the connection needed to rhythm games to really have their reveal and place in the tournament hit home, experiencing that reveal in the way the channel did kept me excited all the same.

Someone Help The Ghost by Young Rapids from the album Pretty Ugly

Ron Morelli - Rhythm Master

Marc Masters — High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape (University of North Carolina Press)

There’s a popular theory, advanced with varying degrees of seriousness, that the best kind of music is whatever was released when you were about 16. There’s also a fairly well-known Brian Eno quotation about the way we tend to romanticize forms of media just as they fall out of currency, eventually becoming loved even for their shortcomings. One of the biggest strengths of Marc Masters’ High Bias, a new history of the compact cassette (as it was originally known), is that it refuses both the personally biased special pleading of the former and the possibly distorting format nostalgia of the latter. Instead Masters brings together a fascinating technical history of the creation, limits, and virtues of the cassette tape, an overview of some of the areas where the medium has been most richly used and adopted, and a reflection on its continued vitality.

That last aspect, which is reflected on throughout High Bias and forms the focus of the book’s last chapter, is one example of the balance Masters manages to strike. It would be easy to fall into a kind of strenuous insistence on the most optimistic vision of the cassette’s future, to tell us that it could or should regain a level of prominence it hasn’t seen in decades. But to do so would require a… selective choice of data, and would probably fall into a kind of “protesting too much” register for many readers. Masters instead has the confidence and knowledge of the actual current (vital, but subcultural) role of cassette tapes to make the more modest but resonant point that the ‘cassette revival,’ such as it is, is already with us and shows no signs of going away. And he both puts this in its proper, inspiring context and makes a persuasive case for its importance because of the book’s continual emphasis on the democratizing and personalizing aspects of cassette tape as a medium.

The opening chapters, which include relatively brief looks at the context of recording technology prior to and at the time of the cassette’s introduction, set the stage well. Masters doesn’t shy away from acknowledging the social, marketing and profit motives impinging on the development and success of the medium (and the sometimes panicked response of the music industry to it, “home taping is killing music” and all), and points out how those aren’t totally separable from the explosion in personal expression that tapes allow. From there, High Bias branches out, looking at various places and times cassettes have helped or even allowed particular peoples, scenes or genres to be heard and spread in ways other media haven’t managed. From Deadheads to the early days of hiphop, Awesome Tapes From Africa to some of the more extremely personal examples that sometimes overlap with those covered in Michael Tau’s recent Extreme Music (reviewed on Dusted here), this slim volume doesn’t pretend to be exhaustive but does manage to illuminate enough different areas most readers may find themselves surprised by at least one of the many little pockets Masters looks into.

The second-last chapter, “The Tape Makers,” may be where High Bias hits many of its intended audience in an even more personal place. Here the book shifts slightly from people making music onto, or then distributed via, cassette, and instead delves into the personal mixtape. The balance between creation and curation is never that clearcut, of course, and the chapter doesn’t pretend it is. But whereas after the cassette we have burned CDs and playlists, before the team at Philips first brought the compact cassette to the world there was simply no mass-available form that offered the particular form of expression that a mixtape does. As with the rest of High Bias, here Masters uses a blend of interviews, secondary sources and direct experience to convey the unique role and impact of the cassette, both in its historical moment and persisting into the current day.

It’s not that the cassette tape is a “better” medium than vinyl, CD, DAT, or saved or streamed digital files (what would “better” even mean in anything other than a subjective sense?), and it’s not that High Bias, despite its doubly accurate title (both a desired quality in a cassette and an implicit acknowledgment that this a very pro-tapes book), tries to make that claim. But Masters clearly had in his sights a compelling portrait of the strengths of the format, and what makes it different from those other media, and here he convincingly portrays it as a special and worthy one. He’s even set up a, well, mixtape for the book on Bandcamp (linked at the beginning of this review), 12 tracks all sourced from current tape labels he discusses in the book. Notably, you can buy that mix on a cassette.

Ian Mathers

splinters, esp summer (1995, 2023).

i'm drinking down your laughter i put my ear to a crack in the floor

"80386" by Master Boot Record - From "Personal Computer" (2023)

Master // Funeral Bitch

Bitch until he's dead Funeral bitch Bitch until you're dead You fuckin' bitch

Primordial Serpent | Enlightenment Through Impurity | 2023

Canadian Black Metal