Nick Marino

Brilliant Shower artwork by Shawn Atkins

After all these years, I still haven't found an easy way to describe Essential.

This song was made to be used as a rap beat. From 2004-2006, almost every instrumental song I made was constructed with that purpose in mind. But I soon discovered that most of my original instrumentals were a bit too intricate and busy to make good backing tracks for hip hop tracks. So I started treating them like instrumentals, meant to be consumed without vocals.

Essential is maybe the best example of my musical evolution from that time. The drums were crafted to hit heavy and deliver knock. The bass was meant to growl. Then the synth and guitar were added on top to give the rhythm section some flavor. But somewhere within that process, melody and structure took over.

So I ended up with a hybrid of electronic drums, raw slap bass, heavy synth, and flamenco guitar. Sometimes I wonder if the combination of those disparate styles makes this song sound as if it were built from the kind of pre-recorded loops and samples that come default with music creation software. However, nothing could be further from the reality of Essential. All of the instrumentation you hear are original performances, consciously written for this specific song.

Essential on YouTube...

...and Essential on SoundCloud.

You may have listened to Essential before. It's the end theme on the AudioShocker family of podcasts. And eventually, I did record some rhymes over it. But that song isn't done yet... so I'm gonna keep my mouth shut until it's ready to drop.

Finally, if you were wondering, the answer is yes -- the title "Essential" is inspired by Marvel's Essential comics reprints. At the time I made this song, I was reading Luke Cage v1 and X-Men v5.

NEXT TUESDAY: A personal favorite of mine that was written and recorded as an Xmas present for my girlfriend.

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.

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 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:

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!

...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.

Groundscore is "sitting on the couch in your basement"...

The basement reference in this song is very literal. Conrad's basement was the home of Groundscore. It was our practice space. It was our hang out space. And it's where we recorded this song.

We regarded this song as our "single" -- if we ever had the chance to put one out, that is. We thought it was the most well-rounded and attractive song in our set. In retrospect, I'm not sure that it's any better or worse than our other tracks... just a bit more of the times (late 90s pop punk before the emo explosion).

This song is notable for being our one truly collaborative composition. Typically, we worked in a more individual fashion, bringing pre-written songs to the table and tweaking them for the band. Upstairs, however, was written collaboratively -- appropriately enough -- upstairs in Conrad's bedroom (our secondary hang out spot).

On this recording, Conrad plays drums, Zach plays guitar and sings the choruses, and I play bass and sing the verses and bridge.

Honestly, my vocals kinda suck on this. Zach should have sung the whole song. I'm not tone-deaf, but I have an extremely difficult time making my voice replicate the notes I hear. I spent a lot of my youth in musical theater and experienced all kinds of vocal training, and it's never made much of a difference!

As for the lyrics themselves, I'm still quite fond of them. I think they have a nice degree of ambiguity, along with enough recognizable phrasing to make them both familiar and strange at the same time, leaving lots of room for personal interpretation.

Next up is the final Groundscore recording, our most emotional outing... a track titled "Zach's New Song."

Groundscore is in the driveway, ready to take some pictures because...

...we're going to the prom with your mom! Actually, driveways are really relevant to this song because that's where I came up with the concept and most of the lyrics.

We used to hang out in Conrad's driveway a lot. Which is odd considering that the place where we lived was cold for eight months out of the year and Conrad's driveway was also a steep hill.

But back to the song! It was originally titled "I Went To The Prom With Your Mom" and later shortened to "Prom Mom." And as the years have past, it's become progressively more lude and rude.

Groundscore was the first band that played this tune, but not the last. In fact, I've played this song pretty frequently over the past decade or so, most notably with Dirty Weekend (check out a lyrically NSFW performance of it here).

On this Groundscore version, Conrad plays drums, Zach plays guitar and sings back up, I'm on bass and lead vocals, and I also play the fuzzy guitar solo.

I love playing Prom Mom and I think it's a lot of fun. In fact, I've been playing and recording it more consistently than any other song I've ever written. Here's a solo acoustic version (also NSFW) from a few years ago.

EDIT: And I almost forgot... today is Conrad's birthday! Happy bday, Con!!!

Next up is Groundscore's signature song (and the only one we all wrote together)... a little ditty called "Upstairs."

I normally stick to instrumental music, but something compelled me to try and update Herman's original performance.

OH... MY... GOD... I fell off hard on my Groundscore music posts. But I'm back and I'm ready to finish the series. SO LET'S DO THIS!

Today's song is an ode to Jamie, Conrad's sister. You might hear the lyrics and think that we hated Jamie, but nothing could be further from the truth!

In fact, Jamie was awesome to us! She used to drive us places, let us use her stuff, invite us to hang out with her older cool friends, and she was super supportive of all of our insane creative pursuits.

So what did we do to repay all that kindness? Conrad wrote a song called "Pigface" and we dedicated it to her.

Conrad's on vocals and guitar, Zach's on bass, and I'm on drums.

Structurally, this is a really interesting track. It's a fusion of a bunch of Conrad's inspirations at the time, from punk to metal to classic rock to oldies (around 0:25 we quote an old rock n' roll tune... I forget the name of the song).

As Groundscore songs go, this is one of my favorites. I like the heavy garage sound, Conrad's guitar work on the breakdown (especially the opening riff at 0:50), and I've always enjoyed my raw drum work from the same section.

EDIT: Conrad adds, "Now I should say this, the song isn't necessarily ABOUT my sister, we were hanging out when I wrote it. So I guess it kind of reminds me of her? I should have written a cooler song...."

Next, I share my perennial teen anthem, "I Went to the Prom with Your Mom."