Nick Marino

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

I put this quick beat together last Labor Day using the Flash drum machine on the Silber Records website:

The drum machine's playback is a little laggy, so what you hear is actually just one phrase of the beat looped over and over. I played a slap pop riff on my new fretless Yamaha to the looped beat, and that was that.

You can recreate this song's drum pattern by using the image from the video.

On the latest episode of Naked Jews and Neo-Hippies podcast, Dustin said that you can find a copy of this song by Googling "nik furious da bounce"... well, sadly, that's not true. Because I've never posted the full song until now!

In fact, this completed version of Da Bounce has heretofore only been heard on earlier episodes of the Naked Jews podcast.

However, I did post some stages of this song's construction as a part of my abandoned Building Da Beat series on the AudioShocker. There's even a special scrapped version of the track with a ton of crunchy electric guitar on it.

This song will be included on my upcoming album 7 Star Sky Flash Kick. I'm only a few songs away from being done with that collection of tracks, so hopefully I'll release the full thing around the end of the year.

ALSO:
- Da Bounce on SoundCloud
- Da Bounce on MySpace
- Da Bounce on PodOMatic

I recently guested on my new favorite podcast, Naked Jew and Neo-Hippies. And Dustin was awesome enough to ask me if I had a song I'd like to play as an outro. I leapt at the opportunity to share some Nik Furious music, and I selected a track that's been nearly two years in the making!

It's called Da Bounce, and the Naked Jews podcast is the first place to have the entire polished version. You can listen to it at the end of this short episode:

The above music player is Flash, so if you can't access it maybe you'll have better luck by going directly to the two episodes where the song's been played -- Re: The Shocker and More Announcements. And Dustin plans on playing the song on future episodes, so also keep an ear out for that!

Naked Jews and Neo-Hippies joins a short list of some of my favorite podcasts that feature Nik Furious music on their shows! There's the AudioShocker family of shows, as well as Comic Book Pitt and 3 Chicks Review Comics. If you're interested in getting some Nik Furious tunes on your podcast, drop me a line and let me know.

It's been awhile but I'm back with a fresh new Mixtape Mix, this time compiled from my Proton Cannon beats. It's posted over on PodOMatic, so go check it out.

But if you're not on PodOMatic and don't give two shits about the site, it's all gravy cause you can listen to it right here:

But if you do dig that site, you can friend my Nik Furious PodOMatic profile. Hell, while you're at it, go LIKE Nik Furious on Facebook too!

Anyway, back to the music. For those of you who don't already know, Proton Cannon is my rock-themed mixtape, packed with lots of punch and crunch alongside my usual cosmic metronome funk. I think the mix really hits its stride around 12:23.

My Nik Furious song Essential* was included in the new promotional video for the upcoming Pittsburgh Zine Fair. This event is happening on the evening of Sept 1st at AIR in Pittsburgh.

Also watch the video to check out some of my art! You can see my fishbowl collabo with Justique Wooldridge @ 0:22, and @ 0:27 you can see me flipping through an old copy of my zine, NoPants.

*From my album, Brilliant Shower. You can listen to the full song using the Flash player here.

NIK FURIOUS IS BACK! I've been laying low for the past few months, working hard on my comics and mostly ignoring my music.

But the drought is over! I've got two new music videos, one for an old beat and one for a new beat.

Let's get the old stuff out of the way first. Silver Centurion is smooth-house-meets-mellow-funk track off of the Superior Tech mixtape:

And Sunday Best is a brand new beat with an old school funk flavor:

For each of these beats, I created original digital paintings to accompany them. And I would be remiss if I didn't share those with you right now!!!

Here's the painting for Sunday Best, inspired by the sound of the song and light of the rising sun:

And here's the painting for Silver Centurion, inspired by both of its namesakes -- the song and the armor:

Thx for listening and hopefully I'll have more Furious for you soon.