Posts tagged: Ramble
Jazz is fun.
I have discovered this mainly through the listening suggestions of another composer friend of mine, Robin Jessome, whose work with his jazz ensemble Blunt Object I highly encourage everyone to check out. It’s wild. It’s also inspired me to try my hand at some jazz too…if you’re interested in hearing my own entertaining pastiche on the genre, you’ll find a fresh track entitled “Restless” in the Demo Reel section of the Portfolio (or just below, if you’re lazy). I warn you in advance: it contains some unbelievably cheesy scat vocals which may cause involuntary head-shaking and or laughter:
I read a very interesting article the other day which I thought I should mention. Apparently, a team from Northwestern University have found some biological evidence to prove that musicians’ brains are more adept at picking up emotional content in sounds — musical or, in this case, speech. When you sit and think about it, I suppose it makes a lot of sense, since musicians tend to train themselves to identify precise variations in pitch and timbre and so on, but I hadn’t actually thought about the significance that training might have on applications outside of music. Anyway, I won’t paraphrase the whole article, but suffice it to say that I was intrigued and I think it’s well worth looking over for those who are musically inclined: http://www.physorg.com/news155309993.html.
I am happy to report that I have a number of awesome projects coming up, one of which actually involves the Blunt Object ensemble I mentioned above. All very exciting. I will also say that I hope to continue coaxing my website frogs to polish up the remaining missing elements of the site — the video section of the Portfolio page, the stylesheet for this Journal, etc.
It’s coming, not to worry. In the meantime, take a listen to my foray into the jazz world, subscribe to the RSS feed if you haven’t already, check out that article, and please send me chocolates. Anything but mint or fruit. Nuts are fine.
…What? It’s worth a shot.
Flu = 1, Marius = 2
It was a bit of a struggle, but between an good antibiotic treatment and awesome willpower, I can now happily admit to having vanquished my illness. Actually I vanquished it a week ago, but it’s been a busy intervening few days. Lots to catch up on, so here goes!
I decided recently that I was going to go down to Michigan to visit an old composer friend of mine, Nico. Nico, besides being a fantastic composer of classical concert music, is also a great friend and a fun character. I think it’s probably a bit dangerous to have more than one crazy composer in close proximity to each other for more than a few hours, but we managed the whole weekend without breaking anything significant in the universe (I think…maybe I should go check).
I live near Toronto, Ontario, which is quite close to the Canada/USA border. Michigan is basically the closest state to us, and so in my naiveté, I figured that it should be easy to find a way to get down there. Due to some annoying complications, I don’t yet have my full driver’s license so I couldn’t just drive, which meant that I was stuck choosing between plane, train, and bus. Plane was too pricey, so I opted for train. Interestingly enough, there is no direct train route from Toronto to this particular suburb near Detroit.
Not one.
Perhaps I should have expected that the automobile state would reject such antiquated travel means as trains, but I still find it curious that there is not a single simple method to get where I wanted to go by train. Damn you, Amtrak. VIA Rail, you suck too.
By bus, it turns out, there is a fairly direct route, which was good news; and it’s comparatively cheap, which is great news. The bad news is that the travel time each way is about 8 hours, which is more or less the same amount of time it would take me to fly to Europe, were I so inclined. Alas, no friendship is complete without a few sacrifices and so, iPod in hand, I decided that the bus it would be. This was on Friday.
Now, when I bought the tickets, I had two options: I could either leave at 1AM from downtown Toronto and arrive in the morning, or leave at 8:30AM and arrive in the afternoon. I decided that the 8:30 one was slightly more humane, and so myself and my bag boarded the bus promptly on Friday morning, aching for coffee, sleep, and music.
For those of you in the know regarding the general area I live in, we came up to Milton and then across, stopping in 3 small towns on the way to London (Ontario). After a brief stop there, we carried on all the way to Windsor.
Things I discovered along the way:
- Greyhound buses are quite comfortable when they’re not too crowded.
- Canadians couldn’t match the colour of their scarf to the colour of their clothing outside of a major city area if their lives depended on it.
- Not one of my bus-mates seemed acquainted with the idea of using the bathroom before boarding the bus. Thankfully, there’s a small coffin- er, bathroom, at the back of the bus. Halfway to Windsor, I began to genuinely worry that it couldn’t possibly contain all the waste it was being fed.
- Speaking of feeding, granola bars make great bus meals.
- If you’re not into pretty natural landscapes (which I am, so it wasn’t an issue) the only entertaining thing to look at out the window on the stretch from London to Windsor is a series of incredibly suggestive road names — Longwood, Ripe Bush, etc. The intersections get particularly racy. It seems road makers get bored in rural Canada.
So…Windsor. One of the prettiest cities I’ve seen in the area. Really quite a comfortable, and charismatic sort of place; I got great vibes driving through and stopping over for a bit in the bus terminal. But all good things must come to an end, of course, and so we then continued on through the Windsor tunnel and ended up in the United States of America in the unwholesome failure of a metropolis known as Detroit.
The contrast between Detroit and Windsor is like night and day, and whereas in Windsor I felt quite comfortable, in Detroit I was fairly certain that I was going to get shot if I sneezed particularly loudly or exhibited bad posture or something. What a place. Oh, and the smell. An interesting mix of exhaust fumes, drugs, garbage, and poverty. And piss. With all due respect to its hypothetical nice portions, I have to say that Detroit is the single most abhorrent city I’ve ever had the misfortune of visiting. Did I mention it’s smelly? Just making sure.
After a fairly tense hour and a half sitting in a bus terminal nestled somewhere between the left and right ass cheeks of the city, I boarded another bus which took me to a little suburb about twenty minutes from Nico’s place, from where he picked me up. Thus began my weekend sojourn.
Without going into unnecessary details, it was a lot of fun and I hope to do it again sometime soon. Here’s a shot of the two of us from the trip. I am the taller and more evil-looking of the two:
My return to the world of school and work brought with it a brand new project! A student from the UK contacted me hoping for a couple of tracks for a university assignment for which he’d been working on an exciting little military arcade-style game called Spitfire. I was only too happy to flex my retro muscles a bit and put out some tracks for him, but it turned out that what he was looking for was less of a classic “retro” sound and more of a cinematic one that would fit in the retro setting. As far as I’m concerned, that’s even more exciting because it means I got the chance to work on blending the two styles together and seeing what I could come up with.
Some screenshots and descriptions later, I had two tracks done and I’d like to include them in here because I’m very happy with how they turned out:
Anyway, I hope you enjoy them! Now to catch up on some missed work from my little sick-leave…
I feel like I should introduce all the new little changes and improvements to the site with some sort of abracadabrian magical utterance worthy of their coolness. But then, it occurs to me that their appearance wasn’t really magical, although it certainly seemed like it. I guess this is what I get for having a brilliant coder and a team of hard-working frogs to run this place from behind the scenes.
Of course, considering the fact that I’ve been sick for the past couple of days (which is very rare indeed in Marius Land), I’ve been focusing more on getting rested and swallowing pills using the correct orifice rather than paying attention to the ongoing construction of the site’s guts. I went to see a doctor yesterday because I ended up missing classes on account of this stupid bug, and he told me that he didn’t like the sound of my left lung.
Now, my immediate reaction, of course, was to make a music joke. Something about the lung being out of tune. But I decided to keep that to myself, figuring I shouldn’t spurt out everything that my fever-addled brain boils up.
As a brief aside, you know that dumb little joke about humans only using 10% of our brain and the other 90% being used to make sure we don’t figure out what the rest is for? Besides making no mathematical sense, I have to disagree with that conclusion because it has recently come to my attention, having collected copious amounts of evidence during my suffering, that most of our brain must be used for storing mucus when we have a cold/flu/out of tune left lung.
Seriously, I am amazed at how many times I can blow my nose and not exhaust the supply of boogers. Is no one else impressed and slightly worried by this? Are there scientists out there working on re-allocating my brain space from snot storage to things like mathematical ability or understanding women? I sure hope so.
Maybe this is common knowledge among people who’ve been sick more often and I’m just behind the times.
Oh well.
Anyway, back to the site. Besides the fancy coverflow on the front page, which will henceforth highlight all the most notable projects from my portfolio, you may also notice the addition of several new portfolio pages for various recent (and not so recent) projects. All of this translates into more music to listen to, so don’t forget to drop by the Portfolio page and take a listen on your way out. Soon, I hope to have the video section of the portfolio up and running too so that some of my film scoring work can have its showcase, so keep your eyes peeled for that.
If you want an easy way to keep track of updates and news from Mathazzar Studios, the best way to do it is to subscribe to the RSS feed which is now active. If you haven’t done so already, feel free to sign yourself up to get all Journal updates delivered straight to your inbox as soon as they go live.
In the meantime, enjoy the updates in the portfolio and wish me luck fighting off this bloody flu and getting my lung re-tuned!
It’s been just four days and look at the progress already!
The website’s skin is more or less up (though several of the coolest special features are still coming together) and it’s grown a Portfolio and Contact page! Both are fairly self-explanatory, but in case you wander over and visit the Portfolio, you will notice that as of right now it only has the one project listed in the left panel. I could have waited until everything was fully functional before having the Portfolio up, but I wanted to get some music on here ASAP, and I happen to have the most amazing coder ever who is working extremely diligently to make as many features of the final site active as soon as they’re available rather than prolonging the wait.
If you haven’t already taken a look there, I recommend you do since I’ve put up a demo reel consisting of a number of recent works that showcase a variety of styles of music that I’ve written over the past little while. The rest will arrive soon, and at this rate you should literally check in every day or two because chances are a new tweak will be in place or a new feature will have gone live — it’s very exciting me to see it all finally come together.
In the meantime, thanks for checking back, keep your eyes peeled for more mutations and additions and wondrous things, and feel free to drop me a line with any comments/questions/etc.
Hello, world! Welcome to Mathazzar Studios.
My name is Marius Masalar and I’m a composer for media. I’m also the owner of this place and your honoured host during your stay. As you can tell, it looks fairly skeletal around here at the moment, but behind the scenes, in the space between the internet and the screen, magical things are happening. I promise. Everything will be up and running in its spiffy final form soon enough.
In the meantime, there isn’t a whole lot to see around here so sit tight and flex those patience muscles just a little longer while I try and get everything assembled. It’s kind of like moving, you know? Moving into a new place. Getting this site up has required a switch to a brand new (and excellent) host, so I feel a bit like someone unpacking after a big move. Anyone seen the remote?
Which reminds me of the other fun part about switching hosts: I get to spend some time finding my way around the new control panel. It’s like trying to walk through your new house in the dark — before you really have a feel for where everything is. You’re walking along and suddenly *THWACK* — who put that fridge there?
What I’m trying to say is, if you happen to come back and visit over the next couple of weeks and you see some errors or random floating code fragments or aliens or whatever, I apologize: it’s probably me bumping into metaphorical refrigerators as I stumble my way through the new control panel in the dark.
That said, I do expect the site to be fully operational by mid- to late February, but new pages and the actual final skin of the site (which looks approximately like this, by the way) will likely start appearing randomly between now and then. So things might get a little Frankensteinean, but don’t worry. The only thing around here likely to bite you is me, and I’m a whole internet away from you.
For now.
