The web home of Kim o the Concrete Jungle, including Kim o the Concrete Jungle, Kinsley Castle, the Mortal Taint, the Mojo Liberation Front, Creighton Keane, and the Blues Convicts.
The web home of Kim o the Concrete Jungle, including Kim o the Concrete Jungle, Kinsley Castle, the Mortal Taint, the Mojo Liberation Front, Creighton Keane, and the Blues Convicts.
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Malarky: June 2012 CarmineAn album by Kim o' the Concrete Jungle. Track List:
1. I Can See It In Your Eyes 
This one came out of my attempt at the Fifty Songs In Ninety Days challenge in 2012. I actually didn't make the fifty song target this year. I'm not too bothered, though, because for this album I was aiming for quality rather than quantity. That's the real challenge for me now, because I've finished the whole fifty songs in previous years. Now that I'm used to recording with Zynewave Podium I wanted to stretch myself, and do something that was: 1) full of VST instruments; 2) eclectic, like a Beatles album; and 3) completely mad. I think I partially succeeded. Birdy Likes a Blue certainly has some mad lyrics, deliberately defying interpretation. The Ghost of Spring features the Sound Bytes Hurdy Gurdy instrument. It's certainly eclectic, with everything from the late night jazz of Satiated Jills to folk, to seven minute long epics, to balls-out rock. Death Of Strangulated Goose introduces my new, real-life saxophone -- I'll certainly be stretching myself learning to play it. This album also features my new Epiphone EB-3 bass on quite a few of the tracks. I also wanted Carmine to be the best sounding album I've ever done, and I spent quite a bit of time mixing the tracks. I'm happy if I can make each new album better than the previous one, and I think I've succeeded in going one better than Monument and Scream Fish. In the meantime, Allans Music in Australia got into a bit of trouble and changed hands. I bought sooo much stuff in liquidation sale it's scary. So my next album after this should be substantially better, now I've got a bunch of new gear. You can download Carmine from my Bandcamp page. The advantage of bandcamp is that you can download mp3s, or you can get high-quality .wav or .flac files. Scream FishAn album by Kim o' the Concrete Jungle. Track List:
1. Study In Red 
This is an album full of songs I wrote a very long time ago. Now that I'm a bit older, a bit wiser, and have better equipment, I've updated and re-recorded them all. There are a few notable tracks on here. The Birth of Liquid Desires is the first track I ever uploaded on the internet, so if you've heard my stuff elsewhere, you might be familiar with my original version. If you compare them side by side, you'll see just how far I've progressed in the art of recording over the past decade. My voice has changed over that time too. Blood On A Portrait Of James Gleeson is notable, because it's a song you will never hear me play live. That's not because I don't like it, but because I cannot physically play the guitar part all the way through. To try it is to cripple myself. On this recording (as on the original demo), I've constructed it one phrase at a time, with plenty of rest in between. If you listen to it, you'll understand. James Gleeson is an Australian expressionist artist who painted some rather disturbing images in his day - hence the theme of the song. The original Scream Fish album, which I still have on a cassette tape, was rather shorter than this present version (because back in those days, you could get away with an album that only had ten tracks). I've combined it with the unfinished project I was doing at the time my Tascam Portastudio died an ignominious death. That album would have been called The Dream, and most of the song titles would have been inspired by Salvador Dali. Tracks 7 through 10 all come from this doomed project. When I Was A Grasshopper Child was a genuine lost track until I recreated it here. That leaves Severed Head as the odd man out. I included it here because its dark subject matter matches the tone of this album. But it's older than the other songs by a good few years. In fact, I wrote it when I was seventeen. But unlike Grasshopper Child, I didn't have to reconstruct it from memory because I still have the original demo. Basically, I've demoed every song I've ever written. The only reason I don't have a demo of the very first song I wrote at the age of seven is because I found it embarrassing as a teenager and wiped the tape. Everything else, apart from a few accidents and lost tapes, I kept. You can download Scream Fish from my Bandcamp page. For now (and while-ever setting up a paypal account is not worth the hassle) it's free to listen to. Kim's Drum SamplesI've made a set of one-shot drum samples of a Pearl MSX kit available here, so all you home-recordists can download them and use them. They're 24 bit samples in the .wav format. They're optimized for the Softdrum LTD VST sampler, because that's what I'm using at home. It's a nice simple drum sampler that gives you twelve slots and lets you use up to four velocity layers, so it's well worth checking out. [continue reading below the fold...] Dynamic Map Loading - A Game Design IdeaI'll start this with a caveat. I am not a professional game designer -- just a general creative type who likes to dabble. But having said that, I've dabbled with quite a bit of game stuff. It started back in the day when I cobbled together a house-rules system for a pencil and paper RPG, because I wasn't very happy with standard D&D rules. In the computer realm, I've messed around with 3d game engines starting with Ken Silverman's Build Engine (used in games like Duke Nukem 3D and Blood). From there I messed with Halflife, Unreal Engine 2, and more recently, Unity 3D. So I like to think I'm not entirely clueless. And the idea of actually making a playable game has always tickled my fancy. I've had this idea for a game design, and I'm going to try and build it in the Unity 3D project I'm currently tinkering with. It's not a complex idea, and may not be particularly clever. I'm no genius, after all. On the other hand, a simple idea -- such as this -- is easy enough to implement, and simple doesn't necessarily mean ineffective... [continue reading below the fold...] Kim o' the Concrete Jungle - MonumentAn album by Kim o' the Concrete Jungle. Track List:
1. The Caveman Likes To Rock
I was quite pleased with the way this album turned out, so I decided put it out there. You can download Monument from my bandcamp page. The SubstituteA short story by Kinsley Castle. For my first addition to the new website, I thought I'd rework and reprint a story I first published online way back in 2005. It did attract a modest smidgeon of interest at the time. It also happens to be a Christmas story. But here in Australia we have this thing called Christmas in July - a tradition invented by the skiing and snowboarding industry. It's a story in the "Infernocrusher" genre, which was a thing back in 2005. Read it below the fold. more... 50 Songs In 90 DaysCome the 4th of July, I'll be over doing the 50 Songs In 90 Days challenge. It's pretty simple really. The idea is to challenge yourself to write fifty new songs in ninety days. Personally, I like to do demos of all those new songs too, because that's the way I roll. I've completed four previous challenges, which means I've written 200 songs for this thing over the past four years. That's a ridiculous number, but hey, you learn a lot doing it. Last year I learned how to use all the new recording equipment I've been collecting. The New CaveAh! So I've finally gone and gotten myself a new website. It's been so long I barely remember how to code HTML anymore. This is going to be the front page for everything I'm into, which at the moment, is mostly music. And this, right here is where I be serving up my rantings and ravings and all that other malarky. Ah... it's been too long since I last stood on a high place and shouted, "Look at me! Look at me!" |
This was my album for