If the captain announces the weather in Valencia is glorious although pretty much windy, and that there are going to be quite a few, mostly unpredictable turbulences and everything is probably going to be a little bit shaky until the plane lands, one should not decide to eat her sandwich at that very moment, even if the idea of flying over Valencia’s port in a roller coaster fashion sounds very innovative.

If you know what I’m talking about you’ll be überhappy when I tell you I just found about a project called opentyrian whose aim is to build a C port of the original Tyrian¹.

There are more details in its wikipedia entry; the key aspect is that I tested a Mac port called CocoaTyrian and it works even with the music and everything, so I can use the adjective I was reserving for special occasions: AWESOME!

The mac port is done by someone called simx, he intends to have a dmg version always here (dmg) and you’ll need the data files which are here or here (the mirror).

I have extremely good memories of this game. I remember I got it from some shareware cd, and it being the shareware version, had only one level. It wasn’t until some years later that I got the full version somewhere (I can’t quite remember if it was an abandonware site, another magazine or even if I bought it in some computer sale or something) and could enjoy all the levels.

What also delighted me was the ability to improve and customize the spaceship: how to configure it so that we could fight the next enemy and kill as many enemies as we could so as to obtain more coins to customize our ship even more!

Simx, I hate you!!!

No, really, thanks! A lot, actually :-)

¹ The game was originally developed with Pascal and didn’t run with modern versions of windows.

As the description reads, it is An auditive painting of a journey through South Iceland and back.

Generally slowly paced, as Iceland’s scenery, it also has its moments of sonic cruelty, disparities – and weirdness, too. I probably have indulged a little bit too much in some crescendo excesses but I had the feeling that I was going to make them anyway, so there was no point in trying to constrain myself to a given structure.

A couple of songs were already made public, although they were not yet the definitive versions. I’m referring to the long, and distorted at times, Reyjkavík-Höfn, which I released at the high quality music compo at past bcnparty111, and Glacier, which I released at the high quality music compo for past flashparty in Argentina. None of them were winners, but one could listen to crazy comments such as It sounds as if one is moving furniture around, for five minutes!!, or This is really creepy and you’re scaring me, etc…

Download and listen (or listen and download)

You can listen to the songs before downloading them with this nifty player from last.fm:

The EP is available in last.fm, just in case you want to tag it with something nice such as “great free music you ought to listen”, “Love it”, etc (hint! hint!).

People with exquisite listening skills will appreciate the immediate availability of a 320 kbps mp3 download, including the cover (last.fm downloads are only 128kbps).

Thanks

Big thanks go to Mr.doob for creating such a nice and abstract cover in record time, and of course, to David Corral for inviting us to his Reykjavík flat.

If you haven’t been to Iceland, go there as soon as you can. Even if I tried very hard, these songs can’t make justice to the greatness of that mighty country, and even more, each person will find Iceland very different. It’s a great place. No wonder musicians such as Björk and Sígur Ros and lots more that I can’t remember right now came from there!

And if you listen to the EP… please leave your comments here too! Thanks!

Cog is a minimalistic player for MacOsX, in pretty much the same spirit than foobar2000 or the first versions of Winamp. So if you’re annoyed by iTunes’ One Library To Rule Them All, this is what you were looking for!

It’s still in early stages but the features list is pretty impressive, considering its version number is only 0.06 and can already play formats traditionally neglected in Mac such as FLAC or modules. Admittedly you could play them using VLC or mplayer but the interface isn’t that nice.

Last.fm support is also in the bag, via calls to the last.fm client (which is not iScrobbler, and I was slightly confused as to what was what).

Enjoy!

I stumbled upon the Sharity concept recently while reading several music blogs. It really demonstrates an idea which I have had insistently in mind for some months already: the power of technology for preserving and spreading pieces of culture which would otherwise be destroyed or completely forgotten forever. I somehow link it with Negroponte’s words about distribution of atoms and bits, and it’s really a very good application of the advantages of the digital age he wrote about in his Being Digital book.

There isn’t a definition in wikipedia or anything for this word but it’s pretty immediate to come out with its etymology: Sharity = Sharing + Charity. Basically it’s about music lovers sharing music they like, so that more people get to know about it.

I have found lots of these pages – and I wish I had time for browsing all of them!

Most of them are entire digital samplings of old vinyl records which have been out of print for years: you can perfectly hear those pop’s and clicks that unequivocally speak about those recordings origin. Some are carefully cleaned prior to being ripped; even so, it looks so delicately done than one feels somehow aggressive about using rip for describing that process. Most of them include a cover scan, or maybe if it’s lost or damaged, new cover art is specially handcrafted for each release.

Some blogs specialize in boot sales music, or horror movies music, to say some bizarre examples which come to mind. And all of them denote big love for music, a passion which is not seen on record labels too often, more focused on maximizing the benefits of their current, easy to consume music inversions.

Labels might not be too keen on their back back back catalogue being shamelessly ripped and freely distributed, and that is pretty stupid, I think, and even obstructive, because if those recordings weren’t patiently rescued from the realms of oblivion, they would never get played again. EVER.

So I personally can’t but applaud their hard work, which allows us to hear unexpected little jewels covering music genres that you wouldn’t ever dream of, and pay somehow a late tribute to those (sometimes) unknown composers.

But – there’s always a but! Because these works have been out of print for years but they are not yet in the public domain they can’t be uploaded to archive.org or any of the decent hosting sites which would allow us to preserve culture in a less annoying way than volatile sites such as rapidshare, megaupload, etc, which is where these guys have to upload their jewels (or risk being prosecuted by jealous labels). And the best of all is that the labels aren’t interested in reprinting these works. They would lose money for sure and even if these people are not doing them any financial harm, I bet they would absolutely try to stop and destroy these blogs as soon as they could.

And now, time to form yourself an opinion by having a look at some of these sites:

• Orgy in rhythm – focusing in jazz and rare jazz records fundamentally
• That truncheon thing – they write about lots of styles but focusing around rock & decent pop. Has access to an amazing collection of bootlegs and I found some early, quasi pirate and unofficial, works of superstars such as REM here
• Universal Horror Sounds – if I have to choose a niche sharity blog, I must link to this page, dedicated to 30’s – 40’s horror movies and music. They might look naive but they mean a lot for nowadays culture!
• Vinyl Room – an amazing compilation of instrumental music with the vinyl warmth featuring even oddities such an album entirely played with an early ARP synthesizer.

All these pages link to dozens more which I guess am right in assuming that in fact link to dozens more; I haven’t had time yet to explore all of them so maybe I am missing something super! Let me know in that case; comments are free! :-)

I hope you enjoy this Sharity concept. It makes me wish I had some old vinyls or recordings to share!