My Musical History Part 5 -- Fountain AVM, Synthwave, and Industrial Re-born

Hey all! I know Blaugust is going on, but I took inventory of everything going on in my life and came to the conclusion that I'm not participating this year. That said, there were a few posts I wanted to share. It's been four years since I posted about my musical history, and I have more to talk about now!

If you've been keeping up with my blog ever since 2021, you'll already be familiar with most of this information. If not, please enjoy these previous Music History posts I made. (Side note: I edited part 4 a bit, because I felt like some of it really belonged more here in Part 5.)

• Part 1 -- The school years
• Part 2 -- The industrial era
• Part 3-- The early dad years
• Part 4 -- Wizard101 and beyond

Music History Part 5 -- Quarantine, Adam Terry, Synthwave, and Industrial Re-born

The world smacked me upside the head, and my music bug was about ready for a rebirth . . . COVID and a quarantined reality solidly hit everyone in 2020. I was staying home and with extra time on my hands. My buddy at work had a group named Bueno Sueno and they had just released a song called Lost in the Shine. I convinced him to send me the stems and flexed my remixing muscles with a mix I called the Tom Purdue Shimmer Mix. 

That remix set off a bug in me, and I started remixing or remaking some deep cut songs that were meaningful to me in one way or another. Before I knew it, I had a whole playlist of remixes and remakes on YouTube:

• Cetu Javu's Fight Without a Reason (Lifestyle Remix)
• Morrissey's Now My Heart is Full (Bunny Love Remix)
• Cabaret Voltaire's Code (Wah Guitar Mix)
• The Cure's Night Like This (Deeper Still Mix)
• Decussion Council's (yes, my old high school band) Don't Stop (Everyone Hang On Mix)
• Tom Purdue's Bit by Bit (2020 Mix)

I wrote about all of them in this blog post from June 2020. As mentioned in that blog post, I formulated a plan to release a lathe print vinyl record with a very small print run . . . 4-5 copies through a company called American Vinyl. When I got the records back, I thought they sounded horrible. I hadn't mixed the songs considering volume levels and how they would actually play on a record player. I threw them in the garbage can in disgust.

My wife, on the other hand, who is much smarter than me, saved them out of the garbage can and instead stashed them in a secret spot that I would only find later when we were moving from Texas back to Utah. (which . . . is a story all unto itself.) Turns out it was mostly the fault of our bad record player at the time. There were a few sub-bass hits on the Don't Stop mix that were just too low and distorted a bit, but that's it. The record sounds great.

Not the white album, it's a Quarantined Mix Record from Tom Purdue!

For real though, the life as a rock star wannabe had become nothing more than a dusty, distant 30-year-old memory up until 2021 when a great guy named Adam Terry contacted me over Instagram holding both my Darkest America and Freeze tapes from back in 1990. "Are you this Purdue?" 

Now THAT's a rare sight you don't see . . . ever!

It's like everything from back then unlocked all over again, and we had a great conversation about the good old days. With Adam's help, the hope of actually releasing some old music of mine on his label, FountainAVM, was now a possibility! He asked to hear more of my stuff and I flooded his Dropbox with hours upon hours of old music I had recorded on tape.

Adam was fantastic! I've never had anyone dump so many hours of their life just dedicated to listening to my music. Honestly, the real help from Adam has been feeling like someone actually cared about me as an artist enough to reach out and help me dust off the old tapes. While there may be a lot of sadness and regret from the past, his simple act of reaching out kind of unplugged so many things that I had bottled up over the years. That alone was appreciated.

From all that, Adam curated two albums of music.  The first was just released last year. As discussed in this post:

"My new "old" album was released today by FOUNTAINavm. This album titled "An Ant Survives A Rainstorm" is a curated collection of music and sound experiments from 1987-1992. 

• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/48BCYYiga5NhXQazkiEfFg
• YouTube Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXLA48sh7Gc&list=OLAK5uy_mdH2ddwRDk234I3YRfrAGNFCq4f9BCbLk

Back in the late 80's and early 90's, I was writing hundreds of songs on my old Ensoniq EPS, Peavey DPM, and Kurzweil K2000S keyboard synths. A few years ago, I came in contact with Adam Terry from FOUNTAINavm, and he asked if he could listen to my collection of nine, 60-minute-long old audio tapes I had made of unreleased music from my youth.

Adam selected several songs from the collection, and I poured through my old floppy disks to find these tracks and re-record them for this project . . . MOST of them. A couple songs had been lost to time, and we just made do with the old recordings we had. 

Adam curated an interesting selection that's different from my usual sound. I'm happy with the result. I've enjoyed riding around in my car late at night listening to An Ant Survives A Rainstorm and hope you would too.

Thanks to FOUNTAINavm for releasing this music and thanks for listening!"

While discussing old music with Adam, we also started discussing new music (well new music to me), and he turned me on to the Minimalist Wave Tapes project, so I started listening to it plus some old formative, meaningful music to me from the 70's - 90's like Kraftwerk, Boards of Canada, Yaz, Thompson Twins, and the Psychedelic Furs. After baptizing myself in all this music and having recently remade Bit by Bit for my Quarantined Mixes, I realized I could make a synthwave album of my own.

The end result was Red Pinto Hatchback, released in 2021. I actually made two posts about this one. One about the making of the cover art, and one about the album release itself. As I stated in that post:

". . . So many formative "musical" hours were spent driving around in my old Red Pinto Hatchback in the late 80's, listening to music, that it felt very apropos to immortalize it as my spacecraft in comic book form.

A futuristic blast from my musical past

I paid for the distribution of this album through Distrokid, so you can find it on all kinds of sites now, including YouTube, iTunes, Apple Music, Amazon, Tik Tok, and more. That's right, you can make a Tik Toks using my music. CRAZY!

. . . The reactions I've been getting from friends and family have been pretty fun to watch. One of the first people to contact me was my old musical ally, Sean. He played guitar on both of my Industrial albums and I played drums on a few of his tracks.  I hadn't really heard much from him for years and he hit me up in DMs to let me know how fun it was to hear my music again and that it brought back a lot of great memories.

Even my sister-in-law was doing the good work and being proud of me, sharing the music around to her friends, and I have to say . . . promoting music is the hardest part of the process, and probably the part I tiptoe around the most. I know people get tired of hearing artists hype up their latest works because I also get tired of it when I see it myself. Making the music is challenging and fun but promoting it and not being annoying at the same time is a delicate balance that I'm trying to swing."

After a couple years, my music interests had successfully reignited, and I was trying my hand at collaborating and failing at it a bit, save for one special collaboration. Talks with Adam about making Beat Tapes on old school audio tape gave me a great idea for making a collection of songs. As stated in my post about about Rotted Leisure Rooms:

"Over the past year and a half I started amassing a small collection of grooves that needed a wider audience than myself. I had three songs that came out of creative suggestions from my oldest child. Two more that spawned from discussions with old friends. Another that came from chatting with an old underground musical idol of mine from when I was in high school. And a handful of others that were just collecting digital dust. Out of all this comes my latest release titled "Rotted Leisure Rooms."  

Rotted Leisure Rooms is available online for you to listen to and download, but I also went old school and made a handful of audio tapes on beautiful, dungeon-brown-colored cassette. Truly, if you have a Walkman, I'd love to get my music in there for you to enjoy on your new walk down old memory lane.

No school like the old school

I have to talk a bit about the title track to Rotted Leisure Rooms. It's a gritty industrial piece that features the synth work of David Kane. Back in 1988 I was watching 120 minutes on MTV when a song called Baby Doe Rules by David Kane's Decay of the Western Civilization came on, and I recorded it on VHS tape. I asked every record shop I could find in Utah if they had it so I could listen to more, and no one knew what I was talking about. 

Eventually I transferred the song off of VHS tape to audio tape so I could listen to it in my car. It was a rare track that no one knew. I think they played Baby Doe Rules only a handful of times late at night on MTV, but there was something about the raw sampled, industrial goodness of this track that in a way gave me permission to do the same. It was truly an inspirational track for me.

Just a year and a half ago, I found David Kane's website while remembering how influential this song was to me, and I reached out to tell him how much I enjoyed it. We traded several e-mails back and forth and somehow I convinced him to collaborate with me on this track. I've enjoyed our chats and getting to know him better. Truly the best thing to come out of me making this music has already happened, and that was getting to collab with David."

So . . . that catches us up to August 2025 and there's been a lot holding me back once again: Losing my job, moving back to Utah, learning a new career, and being diagnosed with Stage 4 Lung Cancer. I have lots of ideas for music, but haven't pursued them. I'm stuck once again.

I'll snap out of it soon though. Adam Terry has been chatting me up again about releasing another collection of music -- he's just been busy running a local record shop in Salt Lake and pouring his whole life into it.  If you're in Salt Lake, go checkout Fountain Records. It's a great shop. Support local folks like Adam and his wife, who are both simply awesome. It's a cool scene in there for sure.

Here's to the future!

Thanks for reading along with my musical history. There's still a lot of blanks here and things I missed, but I'd need to pen an actual autobiography instead of 5 blog posts to really get it all down. 

Happy Dueling!

What Sounds Come Next?

While I was unemployed, my happy creative life was destroyed and I lost a lot. Slowly by slowly, I'm trying to work my way back into it, but I still haven't felt the pull to create music again.

I've tried to imagine something new that I want to make, but nothing has really stuck yet. I did think through some options the other day:

Option A: Make a redone version of my newly released An Ant Survives a Rainstorm. I have several tracks redone and it would be kind of fun to reimagine all these old songs.

I was kinda Aphex Twin before Aphex Twin

Option B: Make a "soft grooves" album. I love the healing aspect of this thought -- like I've been through a lot here this year, and I need to be kind to myself, why not do it with some beauty and fun.

Option C: Do a bit of percussive minimalism. Half way through last year I discovered a drummer named Tony Verderosa and his song The only way out is in, and I fell in love with it. It's something I kind of always wished I could do back when I was playing on a pure electronic set in my 20's.

Wish I played as well as Tony V.

Option D: I have two VR music programs that I love making music in. One is called Virtuoso and the other is called Paradiddle. The only problem I have with these programs is the output sound quality is pretty garbage compared to what you might get out of a PC . . . and that may be my problem. The sound is coming from video recorded within the Quest 2 headset. That said, I love the concept of using those two programs to make an album of music.

The wavering is my favorite VR instrument!

Option E: French techno -- it'd be kind of fun to do a deep dive into French Techno and see if I can recreate it. I've got the perfect band name for an album of French Techno. That alone makes me want to do it.

Honestly, if I had the drive, I'd do all five projects.  I have about 6 songs that I've already done for Option A and perhaps I could wrap option A and B into one. Option C and D are possible to combine thanks to Paradiddle. Option E is just out there, which is what attracts me most to it.

... and then there's option F: none of the above.

Anyway, thought I'd take this opportunity during Blaugust to just think it through and type a bit.  I don't know if I'm any closer to what I actually want to do. What do you think?

Happy Dueling

Thoughts on Roblox and Music Rights

I'm finding myself the past couple of days thinking, "Hmmm . . . what if I just gave the rights to my music to Roblox?" 

First off, since currently a lot of people are reading my posts for the first time thanks to Blaugust, Hi, I like to write music as well as play video games and write about them. I wrote a whole series of musical posts back in the day for Blaugust that really go into this in detail if you're super curious

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4

Since then I've released two albums through a distribution service known as DistroKid.

• Red Pinto Hatchback
• Rotted Leisure Rooms

And another album of old music through a local distributor named FountainAVM.

• An Ant Survives a Rainstorm (link to a music-specific blog of mine)

Ok, now that we're all caught up on that business. I had an email come through the other day from Distrokid that had an interesting proposition for me.

Deliver my music to Roblox?

Basically what that means is if you want to give rights to your music to Roblox, then kids (and most likely adults) around the world could use your music in their games Royalty free. It's not guaranteed that anyone will ever actually use your music, but it will be available if you check the boxes and grant permission.

I did some minor googling and found a Reddit thread where others were talking about this offer. The responses, while few, run the gambit of my thoughts and various points in my life. Here's a hot take:

Haha! I've felt like this before . . . maybe someday someone will discover my nine 90-minute tapes from my youth and I will have my validation! Until then, NO MUSIC FOR YOU! 

Here's another take:

Oo! Now there's the kicker. I actually do belong to ASCAP. That said, I've never uploaded my music to ASCAP, just the fact that I'm a songwriter. I don't think it'd be discoverable even if I checked the box.

And finally, we come to this gem:

Yup, and that's where I sit . . . pretty cool if you ask me.  I'd love to offer a couple albums of music to Roblox for developer use!

Either way, it's been an interesting thought.  If I were to do it, I'd probably make a second DistroKid account and put all my musical meme music on it without any kind of ASCAP tie-back.

Yeah, it's probably not worth the 20-40 bucks a year to even think about it. I don't know, what do you all think? 

Personally, I'd love to see more of my songs being made into rhythm game music! One of my favorite people in the world, Tipa from Chasing Dings, once bought a song of mine off Bandcamp and made a level in Audiosurf. I've also sequenced a song of mine and put it to a level in Synth Riders. Just imagine what those crazy kids in Roblox could do!

Happy Dueling!

Checking out Beck's Summer Odyssey Tour

Last night my wife surprised me with concert tickets for us to go see Beck and Phoenix on their Summer Odyssey Tour stop here in Austin. The show also included performances by Sir Chloe and Weyes Blood. Unfortunately it took us a bit to get to the venue, park, and then hoof it to the Moody Center, so we missed Sir Chloe, but we did manage to catch most of Weyes Blood's set. All-in-all it was a great show! Since I have to write a blog post for Blaugust today anyway, thought I'd just detail my thoughts and share a few pictures from the concert.

Bathed in Pink during Weyes Blood

First off, let me just say that I don't get out to go to concerts quite as much as I would love to, especially here in Austin where a lot of talent rolls through and you can see them in more intimate venues like Antone's, which is where we last went when Joey Valence and Brae rolled through town. Before that we were able to hit up ACL Fest last year and really go crazy with three days of music outdoors in the sun. Before this, however, we really had a dry spell and didn't see any live music for a while -- not only because of Covid scares, but also because we're mostly homebodies.

Seriously, Bathed in pinkish purple light!

We support our local public radio and Weyes Blood gets played there from time to time, so while I don't own any of their music, we are familiar. Every time I've heard the lead singer (Natalie Laura Mering), I'm instantly reminded of something that could be a cross between Karen Carpenter and Mazzie Star. She has an incredible voice and the music of Weyes Blood is enchanting and beautiful. 

Natalie kept making jokes in between songs about the next one being a real rave party or a mosh pit song and then delivering something completely different. Most likely this was because she knew that the energy from Phoenix and Beck is something completely different. It might be part of the reason why the crowd was much thinner during her performance.

The ethereal sounds of Weyes Blood like a calm sea of stars.

She had on a beautiful thick white gown that occasionally the lights would flood through and you'd get shadowed hints of her body underneath. Tucked into the gown's chest was a red lighted circle that was briefly used during one of the songs when it got dark, and then simultaneously two smaller laser spotlights hit the crowd in a couple of spots, and it made the singer/audience connection come alive. Great moment.

For me I couldn't help but think about how much I would love to be on stage playing somewhere myself. Being a performer I think is a lost calling on me, and playing to a crowd this size would be absolutely amazing. It's kind of weird how thoughts like that roll through my head while watching a live concert. I'm there in the moment, but also somewhere else at times. I've only had the chance to play a larger crowd a couple of times. I miss it but it is anxiety inducing as well.

Anyway, after the Weyes Blood set we had some time to get up and walk around, so we headed out to the one merchandise vendor booth and waited a long time in line to buy a couple of shirts. For a venue this size, you'd think they'd have a couple of booths at least, but with four lines, it went relatively quickly. Probably the best comment I heard while waiting in line was a guy who joked with a friend that he stopped buying music around 1994. There were in fact, a lot of older folks like myself and my wife there who mostly just knew Beck's music.

Where the real money is made on tour

Next up was Phoenix. This is another band that I'm familiar with through radio, but haven't really owned any of their music. That should change. From what I'm now reading, we missed them at ACL last year (hangs head). There's just too many great acts at ACL and not enough time.

Probably the most notable songs from the set were Alpha Zulu, 1901, and I believe they played If I Ever Feel Better. You know, all the danceable, four on the floor hits. There were a lot of people there ONLY to see Phoenix and dance around outside of their assigned seating. They knew all the songs by heart and sang the words in perfect unison.

Phoenix rebirthing their hits on stage

Amidst all those happy dance jams, there was a pretty intense experience where the guys in the band played an instrumental song known as Sunskrupt and the screens behind them showed a guy sunbathing with his hand on his heart, listening to music. Then the camera panned outward to a simulation of 1000 million light years away and then panned back in to the guy . .  and then zoomed inward to a simulation of 1000 million microns into the sun bather's hand over his heart. That collective reminder of the infinite space around us when we're all crowded around with people at a public venue was kinda nice.

Possibly the most Rock Star moment of the whole night happened at the end of Phoenix's set when the lead singer (Thomas Mars), was handed a mic with a HUGE extension cord and he went into the audience making his way through all the way to the back and up into the stands to say thank you and hello to people, giving them fives along the way. In the end, he dumped the mic, and it all culminated into him being lifted up off the floor in the middle of GA with a little bit of crowd surfing while the band went nuts.

Thomas Mars, our champion for the night!

There was another break after Phoenix's set and we were able to get a bottle of overpriced water and chill before Beck took the stage. Uber Wife and I threw on our new Beck T-shirts that we purchased and waited for the Rock Star we were most familiar with.

I love this Dia De Los Meurtos styled Llama shirt . . . also my wife!

It's funny because I clearly remember going to see Beck at a venue, and Uber Wife clearly remembers going to see PJ Harvey at the same venue. Did they play together? Is one of us wrong?  We're talking like 1993-1996 range. Uber Wife tells me that I should just make up a story that Beck was the first concert we ever saw together after being married (it could be true!) and here we are now about to celebrate our 30th anniversary together and seeing Beck once again to celebrate. The concert was an early anniversary gift from my wife after all. I'll go with it!

I didn't really know what to expect when Beck's made, what, 35 albums or so? I remember in the late 90's being impressed with how prolific he was back then. There's whole swaths of Beck music that I'm unfamiliar with. On the way to the show I kept joking that really all I wanted to hear was Devil's Haircut sometime during the show and that would be enough. Guess what his opener was? I just looked over at my wife and laughed. There it was! The song I wanted! As the drunk guy a row away from us kept yelling, "When you're hot, you're hot!" (Seriously, he yelled it like six times throughout the night like it was his war cry.)

I had a Devil's Haircut on my mind

And really that set the vibe for the whole set list from Beck. He played the classics, the popular party music, and the familiar songs we aged to: The New Pollution, Wow, Nicotine & Gravy, Sexx Laws, Loser, Where It's At . . . all the jams. Mid set, Beck slowed it down and played a couple from arguably his most known slow heartbreak album (and my personal favorite) Sea Change. When he slowed it down, he played The Golden Age and Lost Cause -- both fantastic songs. The one I was hoping to hear was Lonesome Tears since I have a thing about that song, but alas, not played.

The band Beck was playing with last night is the same one he's been playing with since Odelay, and he explained this and made sure to call them out individually, which is nice. I imagine being a skilled musician backing a big front name like Beck, you tend to not get the spotlight. His praise for them didn't go unnoticed.

Near the end of the set, Beck was joined on Stage by Phoenix and they played the song they wrote together specifically for this tour: Odyssey. I was unfamiliar with it, but it was super danceable and was a great song I'd like to hear a few times again, felt like a very summer song.

At the very end of the show, all the bands got together on the stage while Beck sung about two turntables and a microphone and the audience was given a supply of giant balloons to toss around in one giant party moment. Spectacular to watch and provided my best photo moment of the night.

It was a huge party and a great way to end the night

Happy we were able to go to this show. We spent too much money and had a lot of fun. Ultimately it was a great escape and a great celebration. You have to love how music can bring us all together as we feel the bass in our chest and the drums in our feet while beautiful chord progressions can take us out of ourselves 1000 million miles above the earth.

Happy Dueling! 

Creator Appreciation -- Low

You knew it was a good CD when you'd listen to the whole thing several times in a row or it would just sit in your car turning your vehicle into a week-long, repeating musical experience. The band Low was one of those bands for me.  

Worn, well-listened to and beautiful

Life changed for me, and I imagine pretty much everyone, when CDs went out of style and streaming services and YouTube came online. I stopped buying music. I only own two Low CDs, and I was quite shocked to find out they had made 28 albums in total.

that's . . . a lot

I wouldn't mind getting to know a few more of those albums, but looking at the list now, it seems pretty intimidating. I do love how prolific they are . . . or were. Oh man, I hate saying that, but to be honest my interest was only reignited this past year when I heard the news that the beautiful angelic voice and drummer for the band Mimi Parker died on November 5th, 2022. Cancer.

Sometimes I'll just go on YouTube and listen to a random song from their catalog and more often than not it delivers that melancholy beauty I'm craving. For some reason Words by Low keeps being fed to me and I don't mind relistening to it a few times.

I have my favorite songs of course, like Trust. It's a warm, candles burning in a quiet house type of song.

Over the Ocean is another favorite. 

It's interesting because Low isn't one of those bands that I would have typically gravitated to, but my old buddy Sean tipped me off to them, and I was hooked . . . at least to the tune of two CD purchases.

So, for creator appreciation week during Blaugust, I humbly offer the band Low as one of those that I'm happy I've cumulatively given many hours of listening time. Thanks for the music!

Happy Dueling!

Red Pinto Hatchback - Launched and Missiles on Target!

Tada! Two days ago, I launched a brand new collection of my new synthwave music! Check it out! 

As I discussed on other social media, I think my guy from Fiverr nailed the cover art based on my absolutely strange request. 

So many formative "musical" hours were spent driving around in my old Red Pinto Hatchback in the late 80's, listening to music, that it felt very apropos to immortalize it as my spacecraft in comic book form.

Recently I detailed a lot of my musical history last month with four posts:

• The school years
• The industrial era
• The early dad years
• Wizard101 and beyond

In that last post, I kind of hinted at more to come!

"Who knows . . . I may just have another tape or two of music inside me still. I don't think my musical journey is quite done yet, regardless of any outcomes."

In fact, when I wrote that I was already knee deep finishing up this collection of music I'm called "Red Pinto Hatchback."

I paid for the distribution of this album through Distrokid, so you can find it on all kinds of sites now, including YouTube, Itunes, Apple Music, Amazon, Tik Tok, and more. That's right, you can make a Tik Toks using my music. CRAZY!

Thoughout the entire process, I've been getting a lot of great advice from my new musical ally, Adam Terry from the FountainAVM Record Label. I approached him early with my music still in draft form and tried to pick his brain on various aspects. I mean, I haven't put out a collection of my own music since the early 2000's, so there's quite a bit to catch up on for me. A LOT of things have changed. 

So, a new release from me has been a long time coming! In fact, I don't know if I even saw this in my future just a short while ago. The reactions I've been getting from friends and family have been pretty fun to watch.

One of the first people to contact me was my old musical ally, Sean. He played guitar on both of my Industrial albums and I played drums on a few of his tracks.  I hadn't really heard much from him for years and he hit me up in DMs to let me know how fun it was to hear my music again and that it brought back a lot of great memories.

Even my sister-in-law was doing the good work and being proud of me, sharing the music around to her friends, and I have to say . . . promoting music is the hardest part of the process, and probably the part I tiptoe around the most. I know people get tired of hearing artists hype up their latest works because I also get tired of it when I see it myself. Making the music is challenging and fun, but promoting it and not being annoying at the same time is a delicate balance that I'm trying to swing. 

Maybe eventually I could get some kind of mailing list / discord channel / something-like-that so I can spam the people that care the most. Until then, I have a lot more to share here on my blog with liner notes and lyrics and more. 

I'll be updating y'all when I get the music also loaded up on Bandcamp, but if you like the music, I really appreciate your support, your retweets, and your ears! I feel like I've slipped into a new era of music in my life and there's still more to come with me. I appreciate all the kind feedback and time spent considering the tracks that I'm laying down.

If you have any thoughts or just want to say hello, feel free to drop me a line in the comments!

Happy Dueling!

My Musical History Part 4 -- #Blaugust2021 Day 13

Part 4 -- Enter the MMO, the Elixirists, and the Future

~~

Playing several years of Everquest and World of Warcraft kind of changed everything for me. Video Games became king in my life. Who had time to write music when there were giant virtual worlds that would gladly absorb every last ounce of spare time I had? You mean I can be social and play games at the same time? Yes please! 

How to explain? I don't know if I can fully explain it. At the time I was writing emails and forum posts about games and then journaling my adventures became kind of a big deal to me. It was absolutely revolutionary. Yes, I would still mess around on my music software, but now writing about playing video games kind of . . . just . . . took over. 

The year before I started playing Wizard101 I also started to learn how to beatbox, and I was beatboxing like crazy all the time. I think people at work were pretty sick of me beatboxing in the hallways. whoops. I tried incorporating beatbox into electronic music, but it wasn't really working out. Perhaps that's because I never really was that good at it. Jus' sayin'. (I think the very first wizard101 theme remix I did had some beatboxing in it -- but that wasn't MY beatboxing, it was sampled from someone else.)

I made a whole string of videos that showcased me beatboxing and playing around with my kids called the "Saturday Morning Crazy Stuff Show." These were all done at 2x speed to amplify the crazy part of the crazy stuff show. Every once in a while, I'll still pull out the DVD I made back in 2007 of our Saturday Morning Crazy Stuff Show, and the kids and I will get a kick from the 20 or so 3-minute-long segments we made together.

Then 2008 happened! I started playing Wizard101 and writing about the game on this very blog and the words just came pouring out of me. I threw myself into the community and started writing little podcast segments for a Wizard101-themed podcast known as Ravenwood Radio -- hosted by none other than Steve and Leala (Yes, THAT Leala)!  These segments often turned musical with my background in music, and I ended up making a number of strange parody songs about Wizard101. I even wrote the theme song for Ravenwood Radio! I was all in.

My greatest parody song shall always be A Day Without 101. 

It's hard to believe this is approaching 140k views. I still have people mention this parody to me on Twitter to this day. Crazy. And really, this just started out as being a segment for Ravenwood Radio when Selena Gomez was added to the game, but I made a full video, and it kind of took off.

I have a folder on my cloud storage with a bunch of old wizzy jams. Maybe someday I'll make a collection of them and put them up on Bandcamp as well in a Wizard101 themed album. In the meantime, you can always check out my Parody Playlist on YouTube. This Katy Perry parody never got the love it deserved. Jus' sayin.  Uber Wife's rap at the end is fire.

One of my favorite moments as a Wizard101 player was when my Grizzleheim remix was put up on the ringtone page of Wizard101 for all players to download. It felt epic. That link no longer exists on the webpage, but still . . . it was pretty great at the time. I love putting energy into video game communities and doing this with music is right up my ally.

But it wasn't only about videogames and parodies . . . Around 2010-2011, I was contacted by a guy that was in a band that I opened up for one time back in the 90s during my industrial phase.  This was was my old friend Brian Jenson. We met for lunch and had a great time talking about the old days. He was looking to collaborate, so we formed a little virtual band together and wrote songs and back and forth very slowly for several years under the band name "The Elixirists."  

My favorite song from The Elixirists: Time Creeps Up

The Elixirists aimed to be be in a genre somewhere near the feeling of trip hop, electro funk, industrial and generally in the Electronic music world.  One person described our sound as a newer version of Severed Heads. That's actually not a bad comparison. I used to listen to Severed Heads in high school.

It was Brian that convinced me to switch from Acid Music to Ableton, and the hope was that we would be able to collaborate more closely together. We made a full album's worth of music but never released those songs as a collection for some reason. I went ahead and uploaded them to Bandcamp as a collection.

Unfortunately Brian would end up taking his life on January 1st, 2018. Brian wanted a recording contract more than anything in the world. He tried for several years with no success. I remember one time he told me that if he didn't have a recording contract by the time he was 45, that was it, he was going to take his life. He didn't want to be old and, I suppose, unsuccessful in his eyes.

An old picture of Brian standing with Howard Jones and Howard Jones' Daughter

I tried my best to be a good friend and a positive influence in his life, but his mind was made up. We had emailed weekly back and forth to each other for 8 years and talked about all our hopes and dreams. No amount of talking on my part was going to change his mind, and he avoided the topic whenever I'd bring it up. He took his own life. It was tragic, and I was devastated. He never said goodbye to me, and I had a hard time finding music inside me after that. 

Of course, there was more to come . . . in part 5!

Happy Dueling!