Here is a recent track that I composed along with my friend and fellow artist Brian Betancourt. It’s an electronic jazz funk piece. In the initial stages of composing I was imagining the baseline to be akin to the slap bass sound from ToeJam and Earl in Panic on Funkotron (the awesome soundtrack of which was composed by John Baker.) So I felt compelled to use the SEGA Genesis for this jazzy funk-like song, but mostly I wanted to use it because of my deep love for the ToeJam and Earl soundtrack.

After tracking the drums and recording the guitar section with Brian, I set to work programming the Genesis bass line and other synth parts. First, I went through my SEGA game library and found the ToeJam and Earl ROM. Rummaging through the ROM, I ripped the information for the instruments I desired and imported them into my Mega Drive tracker. Then, after the tedious tracking and transferring of information from the tracker to the actual Genesis hardware (and subsequent recording of YM2612 sounds), I decided to add  another voice in to the mix to spice things up a bit. So I set to work programming a solo section and some other supporting motifs on my NES.

This track took a little over a year to complete, from composition to mixing and mastering, so listen well and enjoy! This song, along with other chip-genre-colliding music, will be released on an upcoming Positive Infinity album.

And for some nineties nostalgia  enjoyment, watch Big Earl and ToeJam dance as the music plays…

Two pieces from my classic Sonic art series were featured on insanelygaming.tumblr.com. (Going Super Sonic and Original Sonic Heroes.) InsanelyGaming is a fantastic tumblr site run by an über cool gamer girl named Mallory; she describes herself as “highly addicted to gaming.” And she’s not just into the gaming experience, she also has a particular fondness for the aesthetics of gaming culture and video game art. If there’s any site to be featured on, her site takes the cake! (And no, the cake is not a lie in this case. Hah!) Browse her site and you’re sure to find some awesome gaming art. InsanelyGaming is definitely one of my top bookmarks now.

Thanks for the feature, Mallory!

Since I started this site I’ve been posting my visual artwork, my music, and my poetry – which is fine, I suppose; that’s this site’s main purpose, to be a repository for my creativity. Yes, a lot of time and effort has gone into this site and my work, but I don’t just wake up with a fully formed piece of art in my head, ready to be made a reality (most often.) Most of the time I need some form of inspiration. So I wanted to take a post to reference some of my recent inspiration. This list contains the current contenders for “cream of the crop” in my creative, artistic view. It’s just a short list of what has inspired me as of late, and I would love to share it with you (in hopes that you will be inspired as well.)

Frank with two of his buddies.

Congress of the Animals – Jim Woodring

I absolutely love these visual stories from Jim Woodring. They are the most engrossing things and yet they are entirely wordless. That’s right, no words, but still oh so deep. They’re a perfect blend of dark humor, political and social satire/commentary, and just plain wackiness.

I admire Jim’s painstakingly rendered images, with precision lines and perfect curves. I also love the whole black-and-white aesthetic, which gives his work that quasi old-time cartoon feel.

Com Truise's latest album, "Galactic Melt"

The Music of Com Truise

Recently I have been listening to a lot of this “chillwave” music, as it is called. I love the Ghostly label, with their affinity for avant-pop music (music that is not-too-pop and not-too-avant-garde; it’s just right.) And while looking through their artist catalog recently, I came across this fellow called Com Truise. While I really never was a fan of excessive side-chaining before (apart from some French house/dance music), Com Truise has made me a convert – a full fledged believer in ducking and pumping synth lines under heavy beats. His perfect blend of nostalgic synth (analog synth, I presume – perhaps some Moog) and pulsing, drawn-out, beautifully iterating melodies have captured me. Below is one of my particular favorites, and the visuals are also very fitting:

Sparkster, the Opossum protagonist, striking a pose for the North American cover of Rocket Knight Adventures

The Soundtrack from Rocket Knight Adventures – Konami, SEGA Genesis

This is one of my most favorite 90s’ video game soundtracks, from a very challenging and unique side-scrolling game by Konami (circa 1993). I recently rediscovered the game, and ripped the music tracks directly from the SEGA game ROM, for some high quality listening. This soundtrack combines bluesy and jazzy riffs with some more classical feeling motifs, all using the Yamaha YM2612, (no drum samples like in the Sonic soundtracks.) From a musical standpoint it is fun to listen to, even with the tracks repeating. It goes from urgent, to marching, to playful and suspenseful – it’s a great musical ride. From a technical standpoint it is a surprisingly full and dynamic soundtrack for only having six FM channels to work with. I applaud the artists who worked on this soundtrack: Masanori Ohuchi, Aki Hata, Michiru Yamane (of Castlevania fame), Masanori Adachi, and Hiroshi Kobayashi.

The Music of Mason Bates

Of all the places to find an electronic musician, I find him on a classical radio station. I heard his piece “White Lies for Lomax” and I was hooked. And the funny thing is, I assumed he was some experimental neoclassical artist from the late twentieth century, along the lines of John Cage – because I heard his piece on the Classical station here in Miami (Classical South Florida.) But Mason Bates is actually an active musician who writes symphonies fused with electronic music in this post post modern era, (i.e. today.) Since he started his musical endeavors in the classical realm he has quite an interesting relationship with electronic music, and with such a relationship he produces a very interesting brand of electro-classical music. He also has range of other pieces – like his piano work.

Here is Keisuke Nakagoshi playing Mason Bates’ “White Lies for Lomax”

I hope my small list of recent inspiration was intriguing and, well, inspiring. I’m told that my taste tends to skirt the fringes of (and often stray from) what is popular and known. This is mainly why I wanted to create a list of this type, just to give you a small look into the window of my creative world outside my own work and maybe introduce you to something you haven’t heard or seen before.

Final Cut Pro has one. Why can’t Adobe step up and set up a dang encoding server? I mean when I encode it’s at minimum an hour wait, and the whole time I’m hoping the extra memory allotted to the process doesn’t cause all my other running adobe programs to crash. Seriously! Then after the hour of wait I’ll find one little error in the video and it’s back to the drawing board (so to speak) – after the corrections, another hour to encode again.

Oh well. I shall press on, then, towards the goal… of not losing the other files I’m working on as I encode several Premier videos into mp4 simultaneously.

Once that initial shock wears off, the crushing reality solidifies. One moment you’re strolling along, not a care in this world or the next. Then, thwack! It was so fast. I didn’t see it coming.

Exactly.

And now the reality: it’s game over, bub! Hand the controller over, it’s my turn!

Here we have a lovely Moot dude at the moment he should have pressed A, or at least pressed down on the directional pad. But he didn’t. He just stood there and let Bullet Bill furnish a new pathway right through his abdomen. If you have not seen my Moot Arté yet you can click on that link there to see a range of work in that particular style.

The other thing worth mentioning about this piece is that it is pixel art. It’s comprised of roughly 64 colors, and was created by painting in pure pixels. Everything was done by hand (with the mouse, that is), from the lines to the dithering. I did a little experimenting with pattern splicing and such for the backdrop. You may want to zoom in to see it up close, for all you pixel junkies out there.

Check out the piece below, in all its pixelated glory!

So why not have Mario jumping, with all his super might, after a throbbing 8-bit heart! That’s what I’ve decided to depict for my Valentine’s Day poster. Hope you all enjoy it!

If you’re waiting for prints of any of my posters, you’re wait may be coming to a swift end. This poster and the others will be available within days of this post. I’d also like to apologize for my propensity to use French phrases in this post, but it is the language of love, n’est-ce pas?

Happy Valentine’s Day! Adieu!

If you haven’t been introduced to the world of Tron yet, well, you have very little excuse at this point. Since they released the sequel to the 1982 Sci-Fi classic in late 2010, it’s been everywhere. I’ve always been a fan of the original Tron. I’ll never forget the whole feel of the movie, the stark colors, sounds, and music.

All of the excitement of Tron came back to me when a co-worker recently introduced me to an awesome, addicting multiplayer game: Armagetron Advanced. It’s based on one of the games played in Tron; Light Cycles.

For those of you not familiar with the Light Cycles game, here is a description – it’s genius in it’s simplicity: You (the User – if you buy into such religious fanaticism) play a cyclist set out in constant motion on a gird. You begin with the other players at opposite ends of said grid. As you move (at right angles only), your Light Cycle creates a wall of light (jet walls) in the path you take. The object of the game is to box in, or otherwise outwit, other players and cause them to run into your jet walls (also their jet walls and other players jet walls) or the bounding box of the grid. Oh, and all of this is done at breakneck speed.

The game requires lightning-fast reflexes, and the ability to formulate strategies at a fast pace. It embodies everything that makes a video game amazing – not to mention, addicting.

Here is a look at what a typical game entails. This is a clip from the original Tron – if you haven’t seen the movie yet, you really should!

So, it’s easy to see how insane the game can get. Now imagine the setup where it’s every player for himself, and everyone starts at different positions on the grid. That’s how I play in Armagetron Advanced. Things can get out of control very fast, and it’s magnificent. I can literally play the game for hours, and it feels like only minutes have passed.

Kind of like being in the system, where time elapsed is not proportional to time in the real world. Or drugs; it's like being on drugs. (Insert PSA here.)

Armagetron Advanced is hours of non-stop fun. And within the game there are so many settings that can be changed, the replay value reaches toward infinite.

If you are looking for a great game with the simplest of controls (just two keys to press), then Armagetron Advanced is your game! It’s a multi-platform game, as well; whether you’re on PC, Mac, or Linux, it will work for you.

I give it two User thumbs up, and four out of four identity disks.

Now the question stands: do you have what it takes to make it on the grid? We know how Jimmy Johnson would answer… can you say the same?

Here is another piece from my retro Sonic poster series. This one features the Super Sonic sprite in all his golden glowing  glory. The poster is set in landscape layout, rather than the usual portrait setup.

I was going for a muted Metropolis Zone color scheme. I kept the color palette relatively dark so that Sonic’s glow could stand out against the backdrop. Oh, and don’t be concerned, Sonic isn’t bathing in blood; that’s just Sonic Pasta splattered everywhere… of course. Below is a nice detail of the splatters and ring sprites: