Working Life

Today I discovered Thom Yorke's new release, Tomorrow's Modern Boxes . Thom has a reputation for being surprising. Maybe even startling. This is no exception. The album released digitally through the torrent software/website BitTorrent , in a neat little 'bundle', which is their proprietary term for a package of media released by an artist. Yorke and Nigel Godrich posted an announcement today about their reasoning behind this strategy. They say it's a test. Perhaps they want to use such BitTorrent for future Radiohead releases, or really ANYTHING at all. We will have to wait and see. Downloading the album proved easy enough, although I had to find an older version of the BitTorrent software (available on their website) to match my outdated MacBook. This caused a delay in my listening of the album until late this evening, after getting through with a long day at the office. OK, it's a grocery store, but that's not the point. Tomorrow's Modern Box...

Greetings. It's been a while since I have made an entry into this blog, but I assure you I have not been neglecting the development of my 'Music as a Business' dreams and goals. I'm going to go into a mode of writing that is more like entering into a journal, because this way I can accomplish my goal of linking to all of the material that I'm consuming, and tie myself into a wider network of ideas, resources, and people. NOTE: Please excuse me if this reads like I'm just saying, "me me me me me me ME me me ". So far I'm doing all this 'music business' stuff on my own, and it helps to type it out and chart my progress. I also do it to invite feedback! To begin: I've relocated from BITTER North Dakota, to WET Wisconsin with my partner Jessica. We're really enjoying being closer to more metro areas, and I look forward to making more music connections in the process of getting some gigs in order. So far the Acoustic Cafe in...

This is the beginning of a (sporadic) project that aims at researching the Job Market for Sound Design. This post is going to focus on video-game sound design. I'm completing this (somewhat limited) survey because it's a passion of mine to someday be working within the field of video-games. Why? Because I think that Games are the ultimate medium for storytelling, conveying emotion, and transmitting stimulation that humans have ever discovered, besides roller coasters, books, and real life. That being said, I've had a love/hate relationship with games: they're addicting. As a multimedia artist, I want to spend time making things, not always consuming things. So you could say that I intentionally fall behind the curve when it comes to keeping up with the cutting edge of whatever. But it has consistently kept me grounded, because it saves me the trouble of getting invested in things that age poorly. (Sometimes though, I jump back into gaming at the right time, like whe...

A few days ago, one of my most influential professors died of a heart attack. His name was Joel Jonientz ( blog ), and he was 46. Joel was my teacher for a few projects, starting with an attempt at making a video game. His role was keep a bunch of misfit digital punks inline, and keep them on task with their delegated duties. I was a part of the music team, together with Bernie Thomas. Our job was to compose music for each level. This was pretty important since the game was based around the music, kind of like Dance Dance Revolution or Guitaru Man , where the player had to hit a button or something in-time with the music. But our game was different: it would be like Mario Bro's, a "platformer", where hitting a button in time with the music would give the player a boost to get up to a difficult platform, or some other super awesome power that would help them complete each level. Composing the music meant figuring out how to encode the required series of 'power...

Hello! Nice to meet you, Internet-people! My name is Nick, and I'm here to open up my little world to you. What better way to start than to give a little background about myself and what you should expect to see on my blog? I'm an artist . Should I blush when i say that? Let me be clear that I don't mean that as a way to differentiate myself from all the people who don't call themselves that -people who might feel that I'm trying to say they're all plebeians who don't know how to appreciate the often incoherent messages modern art has placed into the world- because I'm not that special. When I say I'm an artist, it means that when I'm not at my day job, I'm thinking/breathing/obsessing about making something aesthetically interesting, and sometimes I actually am! Its been a year since I graduated from college (the University of North Dakota) and since then, there have been many RUDE awakenings that I've had to face about life outsid...