It had been a little while since I’d recorded or written any music, and today I had an excuse to do so again for my assignment in music theory. The assignment was to write something that uses an “exotic” scale, mode, quote, tone cluster, or something of that nature that was used a lot in 20th century composition. I sort of did the assignment, if you count writing a Mega Man-esque piece in LSDJ and including a few whole-tone scale runs and random note groupings as “doing the assignment”. I mean it fits the requirements, and nobody else is going to have one that sounds anything like mine (at least I feel like that’s a safe bet). I had intended to get a lot of homework done today, and of course I ended up getting totally caught up in the writing and recording of my Gameboy piece. That’s pretty typical of me – I always leave the work that’s not fun for last. Bad strategy. I still have to write a paper tonight (I know it’s Saturday, don’t worry about it). But check it out; this is the first thing I’ve written EVER to include a guitar track, let alone one played by myself. My guitar skills pretty much limit me to power chords, but that’s exactly what I wanted in this piece. I just finished recording and mixing it a few minutes ago, so here it is. I’m proud of it.
On a totally unrelated note, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the movie “Shogun Assassin”, but if you haven’t, you should probably get on that. It’s a samurai movie that’s actually a compilation of the best parts from the first two movies in the “Lone Wolf and Cub” series; as a result, the plot makes a marginal amount of sense. But it’s got some sweet fight scenes and a lot of awesomeness packed into a small space. It’s all original Japanese dialogue, and dubbed quite badly in English, which adds to its charm. The special effects are totally sweet, mostly the awesomely not-real blood squirts, and there are a lot of good lines. All around good movie. Also, I don’t know if it’s close enough to claim that it’s the “basis” for Kill Bill, but Tarantino sure owes Shogun Assassin a lot – he even acknowledges this at one point in Kill Bill volume 2 when Bill asks his daughter what video she wants to watch before bed. Check it out.