Month: April 2005

Danse de Deimos

My friend Kevin Blom just put together a new CD of his synth fun under the Nom de Midi “Warlord of Marz.” I enjoy his work and I never get near my Dreamhost bandwidth quota, so I thought I’d offer it to the world in an open directory until such time as I get around to helping him put together a music web page.

His older album, Mars Rocks! 2004, is there too. There’s yet a third album which I don’t have online yet for some reason.

Here’s my little micro-review-summary-thingy I sent him after listening to the tracks, as a guideline for what is what in case you want to check it out. Inbetween each track is a short spoken word thingy in a synthesized voice.

Beat All —
I would describe this as “deep murky club groove”

Chainsaw —

I remember the original version of this, and I think the choral voices that have been added to it give it some more interest & depth. Beat struck me as awkward in places, giving the song a kind of deranged quality.

Chimera —

I would describe this as “slick and intense interwoven beatwork.” If this were a soundtrack it’d be to a montage sequence in a science fiction movie that included lander pods descending from starships and emitting battle-armored which scout around to and fro searching for something… but their prey is much stealthier and faster than they are and eludes them.

Danse de Deimos —

This has a style that’s familiar to me but I can’t quite place it. I would describe it as “frenzied, dense buzzy dub.” Maybe sounds kinda Keith Leblancky. Yeah, a lot like Major Malfunction or Stranger Than Fiction.

Shield of Heracles —

Trippy. The female robot voice alone would be kind of boring, but the one with the English accent makes it freaky.

Martian Groovin’ —

I’d describe this as: “Hip-hop beat moving into rhythmically spastic piano loops and goofball robot voices”. Most light-hearted track so far. Fun/funny. :)

Net of Hephaestus —

This starts with some buzzy frenetic bippetty boppety stuff and then gets all orchestral — is this the bit with the Vangelis-synth-clone stuff maybe? Shoots off from funky beats into trippy 80s synthland, and then back again.

Pain Panic Famine Oblivion —

Orchestral, Classical-sounding segments alternating and interweaving with synthy loopy piano and drums. Lots of really majestic sounding long buildups, moving smoothly back and forth between grandiose and funky.

Rendezvous on Phobos —

Feet back firmly on the dance floor. Pleasantly dense, groovin like “Beat All” but with a lot more melody and tone, where Beat All is mostly percussive. Longest song on the CD. Gets rather cosmic before the end.

Two Robots On Mars —

Peppy funky percussion and old-school “robot beep” music, thickly interweaved with effect-enhanced samples.

Water On Mars —

Opens as if it were a movie soundtrack, with ambient “rain” effects and moody, slower tunes without the usual beat… a meditative track.

Bonus Track
Renedzvous on Phobos — Piano Version — A pleasant minimally electronicized human performance. Hard to believe this is behind the hyper-techno Rendezvous track!

Tucker Carlson On Fat People

Tucker Carlson Shows Himself Able to be Rational, Open-Minded, Thoughtful, Tolerant — In Other News, Sun Rises in West, Chomsky Becomes Rush Limbaugh Fan

Via Big Fat Blog:

Obesity is an epidemic in this country. At least four hundred thousand Americans die of it every year. Soon, being fat will overtake smoking as the leading cause of preventable death in the United States.

That’s what the Centers for Disease Control told us just last year. Politicians, celebrities and other public scolds immediately set about lecturing the rest of us about our chronic, repulsive weight problems.

Well, guess what? It was all a lie. According to a new federal study released this week, moderately fat people live longer than those of normal weight. In other words, being fashionably thin isn’t the same as being healthy. As for those hundreds of thousands of overweight dead people, they don’t exist. Obesity actually kills only about 26,000 Americans a year. Far fewer than alcohol and car crashes.

But don’t expect the government to tell you any of this. Although the CDC concedes its original numbers were completely bogus – inflated by a factor of 15 – it does not plan to correct them in its public awareness campaigns.

But wait. Shouldn’t scientists confine themselves to the facts? Sure. But the campaign against obesity was never just about science. It was about religion. And social class. And pure, old fashioned snobbery. In America, being fat isn’t simply a health concern. It’s a faux pas, an offense against good taste. Possibly even a sin.

Fat people have no self control. No self-respect. They’re lazy and shiftless and dumb. They shop at WalMart and live in unfashionable places.

These are the things that every upper-middle class opinion maker knows about fat people. Attacking them is a guilt-free exercise in moral superiority.

But it looks like fat people will have the last laugh. They’ll live longer. And good for them. After all the abuse they’ve taken, they deserve it.

Rock on, Tucker! It’s a good when people I don’t think highly of force me to change my opinion of them!