Nick Marino

Originally drawn for Sequential Underground's Strip Club v1.

Brilliant Shower artwork by Shawn Atkins

There's something very unusual about Bacon -- it was written and recorded in about 45 minutes.

Most of the songs on Brilliant Shower took hours to compose and perform, evolving with every new layer and morphing into something far different than what I'd originally intended for them.

Bacon, however, was written on a lark and recorded in a pinch. And it came out sounding exactly like I'd intended.

Intermission!!! For your sharing pleasure, here's Bacon on YouTube...

...and on SoundCloud.

Bacon by Nik Furious

Okay, back to the history of this song. My friend and co-creator of the AudioShocker, Neal, was visiting me in Pittsburgh. We wanted to lay down some tracks for my offensive hip hop project, the Unlicensed Attorneys at Law.

Improvising, I was playing my acoustic guitar while he was coming up with goofy innuendo for the hook. I wrote the riff for Bacon, while he came up with the idea for a "pork and beans" themed chorus.

I busted out my drum machine, added some quick keyboard bass, tossed in a couple of acoustic guitar tracks, added some keys and percussion and VOILA! The track was complete. It was just that quick.

Consequently, this beat has been used for the past two UAL releases, the 20 Minute Sex Soundtrack and The Bacon and Eggs EP (both very NSFW). Also, an alternate version of Bacon will appear on my next album, 7 Star Sky Flash Kick.

NEXT TUESDAY: Super synth meets smooth acoustic guitar and thick slap bass.

I'm part of a group on Facebook called Pittsburgh Comic Talk. It's kind of like a private message board for comics fans and creators in the Pittsburgh area, as well the hosts and fans of the YIBR podcast and webcomic (which isn't a Pittsburgh specific thing by any means... but, uhh, look... it's complicated, okay?).

Point is, we were discussing some New 52 art and the Heroes Reborn initiative came up. Most people didn't have fond memories of the late 90s attempt to revive the Fantastic Four and the Avengers. But me? I did!

I'd stopped voraciously reading current superhero comic books in 1993, around the time I finally realized Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld weren't coming back to draw the X-Men (I was young... it took me a while to piece things together). I still followed X-Factor and Excalibur, but most of my efforts turned towards digging up books printed in 88-92, back when the Image founders still drew for Marvel.

So I was shocked when I stumbled into my local Fairport, NY comic shop in 1996 and saw a Captain America cardboard cutout drawn by Rob Liefeld. I bought Captain America #1 on the spot and loved it.

Around the same time, my sister was living in New York City and working in-house for a graphic design firm. She knew how much I loved comic books, and she'd saved a ton of posters and promotional materials for me.

Among the jewels she gave me were these beauties:

I was smitten! Up until this time, I'd never even seen what a Marvel Comics art board looked like. But now I had three glossy mini-posters by my art heroes, printed out as mock art boards, just with a little added color and text.

Now let me bring things back to the present. A couple of hours ago on Pittsburgh Comic Talk, I was gushing about these posters in our Heroes Reborn talk. I went to Google to try and find some pics of them... but I couldn't find a single image!

So I took pics of my own. And now here we are. Please forgive the crappy quality of the pics and poor condition of the posters. I hung these on my walls through out most of high school and college, so they've seen a lot of action.

I don't know if these ever made it out to the general public or if these were just prototypes. I've never seen them hanging up in comic book stores, and I've never seen them at a comic book convention. If you know what their deal is, fill me in!

I was on Facebook yesterday, doing my usual social media thing when I noticed something unusual -- my friend (who I'll refer to as "Dr. Wormwood," her radio alias) has a new radio show... and it was broadcasting live at that very moment!

She was hosting a program called Modern Donkey on 90.1 FM KZSU Stanford. If you live in the Bay Area, then it's on your dial. Otherwise, you can listen live online.

Anyway, the theme for Dr. Wormwood's radio show was album openers, and she was asking people to send their feedback. So I recorded a quick mp3 of my thoughts on opening tracks. And as I was prepping to email it, I remembered something -- I'd just posted an album opener of my own on Tuesday!

So I attached my thoughts on openers and my own opener, After the Wink, to the email. Less than one hour hour later, I heard this on the KZSU live stream:

Thanks, Dr. Wormwood!!! You're the best!

I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the entire Modern Donkey radio show yesterday, and I highly recommend that you listen too. It airs every Wednesday from 9AM-12PM PST on KZSU. Here's that link again!

Brilliant Shower artwork by Shawn Atkins

It's been eight months since I halted my (somewhat) weekly Nik Furious music posts. But now the jams have officially returned!

Let's kick off the celebration with After the Wink, the first track from my instrumental album, Brilliant Shower:

Up until now, my free music downloads were strictly limited to my mixtape cuts (a.k.a. songs with samples in them). The only way to get my 100% original instrumental music was to buy Brilliant Shower from iTunes, etc. But as I explained a couple of weeks ago, I've taken Nik Furious off of those sites and now ALL of my original songs will be available here on my blog.

For the foreseeable future, all of these new Nik Furious posts will also contain a YouTube video of the song:

...and a SoundCloud version:

After the Wink by Nik Furious

Well, at least until I get sick of embedding both of them

OKAY! Now let's talk about After the Wink. It was originally composed in 2004 as part of a 10-minute soundtrack for a student film of the same name by Claudia Duran and Jonathan Martofel.

We had a bit of a miscommunication somewhere along the way... they were expecting a plain guitar soundtrack, while I was aching to experiment with synth-heavy electronic sounds. I'd only recently begun producing hip hop beats, and I was hype to fuse my new hop hop style with my experience in performing rock music.

They hated the result. I wasn't sure how I felt. At the time, I guess I hated it too. At their request, I went back in and redid everything as a single track of acoustic guitar. And the electronic soundtrack was scrapped.

About a year later, I was going back through some of my shelved recordings to mine them for beats (or, at the very least, ideas). I relistened to the entire electronic After the Wink soundtrack. Of the 10-minute recording, a single minute stood out. I decided to hack off the dead weight and VOILA! This song was born.

Genre-wise, I think it tends to confuse people. It's not exactly rock. It's not exactly electronic. It's certainly not funky like my most of my other songs. And there's no way it could sit comfortably alongside my hip hop productions. No, it's a beast of its own and I love it for that.

NEXT TUESDAY: A song written and recorded in 45 minutes becomes a Nik Furious funk classic!

I got this tattoo in 2005, I think. I guess I'm a little hazy on the exact date. But that's not very important. What's important is that: 1. this was something my cousins and I did together as a commemoration of our bond, 2. we designed them together, and then 3. I got to draws the tats!

If you're already familiar with my art style, it should be pretty easy for you to tell this is my handiwork. The line weights, shapes, and angles are distinctly mine. The tattoo artist* did a killer job. Frankly, I think it looks like I drew it on my own arm.

My cousins -- Ben and Josh -- have similar-yet-different tattoos, all featuring the same skull character, as well as the same tablet** marked with the letters K and M (for our family names, Kobylarz and Marino).

In Ben's tattoo, the skull is surrounded by billowing smoke. It has red eyes and the tablet has a red inner line. Josh's skull sports a huge top hat with a lime green band. His skull has matching green eyes and there's a green inner line on the tablet.

For mine, I decided to go with a spider, a web, and the color purple. Why? To me, my spider represents Anansi and his storytelling tradition. It also represents a creature that's both a predator and a protector, gentle yet lethal. And I see a spider's web as living, functioning art. As for purple? I'm sure I could come up with some kind of poetic reasoning, but honestly I just like purple.

You can see all three of our tattoos here.

Currently, this is the only tattoo I have. I've thought about getting more over the years, but nothing has spoken to me like this one. This tattoo is about more than just a cool image... it's about the experience my cousins and I shared by getting them together, the strong bond we share to this day, and the symbolic qualities of the design. Plus, I like having one of my drawings forever etched into my arm.

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*I'm no tattoo expert, so forgive me if I say something that sounds implausible... but from what I remember, our tattoo artist put together some kind of thicker-than-usual needle when we brought in our designs. Whatever he did, I know he was working with a much thicker point to try and mimic the thick lines I used in the drawings.

**The shape was originally supposed to be a playing card, as suggested by Ben. But the shading I added ended up far too thick, almost like a stone tablet. We dug the look and decided to go with it.

Over the next few weeks, I'm crafting a new "Comics" page here on NickMarino.net. Once completed, it'll list out just about everything you could ever want to know about all of the comics I've made throughout the years.

While it's under construction, this image is my placeholder on that page:

The picture was taken at the 2011 N.E. Geek Expo, which was a cozy affair that went down in early November in northeastern Ohio.

From left to right, you can see a ton of my self-published comics -- Time Log, Super Haters, Zombie Palin, Stick Cats (with the theme song!), as well as some other minicomics in the top left.

Here's a doodle of mine that was nearly lost to time:

I drew this back in 2006, when I first started dating Justique. She dug the Harry Potter books, and I wanted to sketch something that'd be familiar to her.

So I fused my love of antiquated, macho, gun-toting action heroes with her love of magical, modern, sensitive teen heroes... and voila! Arnold meets Radcliffe to birth a "Badass Bloodbath."

Justique unearthed this gem the other day when she was flipping through one of her old journals. And, as you can see, the ink from my Paper Mate Flair pen has bled a little bit, giving the drawing a nice extra sloppy effect in places.

Share this on: Facebook -- Tumblr -- deviantART -- Flickr -- Google+

...and posting all of his music HERE. And it's all going to be free.

Why? Lemme break it down for you with some statistics. Here are my total sales on iTunes, Amazon, and other mass-market MP3 channels from December 2009 thru August 2011:

Wow. I don't know what to say. I mean, I didn't do any online advertising and my self-promotion was mostly social media. I guess I didn't do enough!

On the flip, here are my listening stats from the podPress plugin on this blog. Note that these stats are only from the past 13 months because I lost all my previous podPress stats when I switched webhosts at the end of 2010 (that explains why Windrider and Superior Tech only have 8 plays a piece):

Now that's more like it! What a difference free makes, right? Those numbers are much closer to what I expected from online sales.

Not long before I started selling my music through TuneCore, I was ranking on the first page of Google for "instrumental songs." Why? Because I had an old link on the Nik Furious MySpace account that linked directly (i.e. NOT a nofollow link) to my nikfurious.htm webpage. Like a fool, I didn't realize the potency of that link and I took it down when I transitioned NickMarino.net into a blog. Whooops!

Anyway, to sum it up, it's not worth $50 a year to sell $2.50 worth of music. I'd rather give it away for free and know that at least a couple hundred people are enjoying my music rather than making 3 people pay for it.

My Nik Furious music posts will return in 2012, starting with my album Brilliant Shower. I'll post all of the songs individually first, and then post the entire album as a .ZIP file, just like my mixtapes I've been sharing for the past couple of years. And later in 2012, I'll release my next 100% original album, 7 Star Sky Flash Kick.

In the meantime, you can download the AudioShocker podcast theme songs, including songs from both Brilliant Shower and 7 Star Sky Flash Kick. And you can listen to my instrumentals under the extremely NSFW and offensive rhymes of the Unlicensed Attorneys at Law:

See you in 2012!

Groundscore is sad.

Why sad? Because this is the final Groundscore song I have to share with you!! Also, because this is a sad song.

See, back in 1999, there were sad teenagers across America who were starting to spend a lot of time gelling and brushing their hair. They didn't completely connect with the goth mentality, nor did they entirely reject the peppy energy of punk. No, they were proud pioneers were a new breed... a blend of hard rock and emotion... they were the forefathers of emotional rock! Which later became known as emo.

Anyway, point is that we did our own proto-emo thing with Zach's New Song. Zach was always a hopeless romantic and it was only a matter of time before he busted out the acoustic guitar and tempted the waterworks with an original tune.

On this song, Conrad plays drums, I play bass and keyboard, and Zach plays guitar and sings.

If we had to do this one over again, I would make the vocals louder in the mix. Sometimes they get a bit swallowed up by the instruments.

So... that's it for Groundscore! Sometime in the near future, I'll post all of these songs as one .ZIP for you to download. Thx for listening and taking this trip down memory lane with me. And if you're aching for new music, then you'll be glad to know that I'll be back soon with some very special Nik Furious news.