It is yours now, free.

Please, please, please show your support for the producer, Ed Glaser, and buy the film for yourself and your loved ones. It’s not something you have to be an internet meme nerd to “get”, it’s simply an awesome dubbed foreign action film. There are many reasons to get the DVD: amazing box art, a collectible poster, commentary tracks, and interviews with me and the actors. It will put all of these cues in context, but I felt it was important to get the music out there — I put a lot of work into it and wanted to share it with all of you. Enjoy!

BRAINSTORM: TRACKED IN TIME

Some background, for anyone who is scratching their head: I’m in a demo group called Brainstorm along with a bunch of incredible musicians, programmers, and artists. We make cool demos and enter in demo party contests and talk about boobies and human-goat relations and alcoholic beverages.

A musicdisk is essentially an album or EP of music released for free in the demo scene, often packaged as an executable file with a display / visualization program written specifically for the album. Tracked in Time (TiT for short, obviously) is one such musicdisk, with a very unique distinction.

In the late 80s and early 90s, tracking software exploded onto the scene following the release of Ultimate Soundtracker on the Commodore Amiga computer in 1987. There was an official disk of instrument / percussion samples distributed alongside it, called ST-01. We have taken that pack of samples, and nothing else, and written a collection of brand new songs.

This production is many years in the making — if you’re unfamiliar with musicdisks or demos, you’ll want to click on the “Info” button to get a scrolling text file while you listen to the songs. It will explain more about the disk and, at times, the “keyboard” will be “handed over” to each participant, myself included, to say a little something.

My tracks are “Keep Shreddin’, Little Man” (4 channel) and “Nightfall over the City” (multichannel), but do yourself a favor and listen to everything; there’s a TON of great music in there. Enjoy!

First off, a new song: Sock Patterns, An unapologetically cheesy early-90s pop song in the style of Janet/Michael Jackson, and other Teddy Riley new jack swing-style stuff. If you don’t like sugary indulgent pop, you should avoid it. But you also should go die.

I made this using only sounds on my new Motif XS6, as the “demo song” I’m obligated to write when I get new gear. Keyfax’s Motifator site is even featuring it as one of their unofficial demo tracks for the XS series! I’m loving this synth so much – using it heavily in Press Start, for all sorts of pianos and pads and drums and stuff. About time I got a new main keyboard. The XP-30 treated me well, but by now it’s “vintage”.

NOW for the big news: I’m officially a free agent. Working at Gameloft was fun and a stable paycheck, but I reached a point where I had to decide between becoming a “company man” and abandoning my freelancing career, or going full-time independent. It was getting to the point where I was working 20 hours a day, health and sanity slipping away, and something had to give.

So, I decided to risk it all: I resigned, and spent 3 weeks going all-out on 8 different projects. I have more lined up, and it looks like I’m going to succeed as long as I keep networking and making friends. If you want to be on my STREET TEAM and support your neighborhood badmen, pass along jake.vgmix – word of mouth matters, so if you like what I do, you can help a lot by linking, blogging, and spreading buzz. Thanks so much to you dudes who already do. I’ll make burritos for you when you come visit.

As for the future, I’d like to move out west (San Francisco or LA) and build a studio where I can work outside of my apartment, and hang out more with local game developers, filmmakers, animators, and whoever else makes pretty stuff that goes well with music. There’s a lot of planning involved, so I probably won’t do anything drastic for at least a few months.