Last year San Diego-based games developer Psyonix got in touch about licensing a couple of tracks in a tech demo/game called Whizzle, showcasing the Unreal Development Kit. Being a demo, it’s just a single level (for now, at least), but I’m glad it came to fruition nonetheless. Here’s a short vid of Whizzle in action:
If you’re interested in learning more about the UDK and fancy dipping your toes into the world of game development, then this video of Dave at Psyonix gives you a quick intro to the platform. The UDK is free to download too, so given a little free time there’s nothing stopping you from crafting your own titles.
Nothing quite like opening your front door, wearing your dressing gown and slippers, to be met with disdain by a burly delivery man already four hours into his working day. Nice. Shortly after he’d finished looking me up and down with barely-disguised contempt, and informing me of eight boxes with my name on it, I was proudly standing in my hallway wondering where I could store 800 CDs.
I’ve already annoyed the staff and patrons in the local Post Office by shipping the dozen or so pre-orders, so they are now well on their way to their new homes! A big thanks is in order to everyone who pre-ordered — I hope you received your instant downloads trouble-free (you’ve got to love Bandcamp!).
As usual, I’ve also sent a bundle of Lemodies to CD Baby, to make the postal fees a little easier on the pocket for US fans. I’ve added them to my Amazon seller account too, so if you’d prefer to order through Amazon’s checkout you’re free to do that (though you’ll have to put up with a slightly higher price and no download). Speaking of Amazon, if anyone wouldn’t mind dropping a quick review there, I’d hugely appreciate it (for any of my releases, not just Lemodie).
Anyway, I’ve ceremoniously updated the html in my shop to mark this momentous occasion, and hereby declare Lemodie in stock and on sale.
No doubt you’re all recovering from your festive excesses, possibly even suffering from some post-holiday blues. Well, some good news—Lemodie CDs will soon be back on the shelf.
At long last, after being out of print for over two years, I’ve finally managed to scrape together enough cash to organise a re-press of my 2006 sophomore album. It’s being manufactured as I type by DMS, and shouldn’t be longer than two or three weeks away, fingers crossed.
In preparation of its arrival, I’m taking pre-orders via Bandcamp here, which also covers an instant download in a variety of formats (I’ve also thrown in the CD hidden track as a bonus).
Now, I’m under no illusions as to how the market has changed in the past three/four years, and so have set the price at £6 plus P&P, which seems to me like the sweet-spot for CDs sans middleman.
Just a quick note to let you know I’ve added my meagre inventory of Like Dust copies to my shop, to help ease me through the Xmas period, and help fund more skydiving jumps.
And it needs you! Yes, I know you may have already done this (and I do apologise for the inconvenience), but it’d be awfully nice of you to click on it again.
Following my traditional of sporadic and occasionally regrettable social media suicides, I had removed my Facebook profile after inadvertently hosing the Ochre page (I thought it would be ‘hibernating’ along with my personal profile, but I guess not!). Now while I’m not missing MySpace, Facebook was a much handier means of getting snippets of news updates out there, and although Twitter has become increasingly useful for this, there’s no denying Facebook’s convenience and popularity.
I think it’d probably be a good idea for me to install some admin other than myself though, just in case I get trigger happy while aiming at my feet again.
Oh, and I am working on some new music by the way too, if I may self-consciously steer this post towards something a little more newsworthy. More details to come soon (demo track deleted from post).
If you’ve been following Bandcamp’s Twitter/blog updates you’ll have probably noticed a rather major update: the ability to sell physical products alongside your downloads. Needless to say, I sorted out a bundle for my remaining Midsummer Nice Dream vinyl, pairing up the double vinyl and an instant download for the current sale price of £5. I’ll keep it at that price until next week, so if you were thinking about either purchasing it on FLAC or picking up the vinyl, now’s the time to act. Consequently, I’ll probably retire the Ochre shop in its current state, and divert traffic to Bandcamp for sales.
I’ve also sent some vinyl to CD Baby, enabling stateside fans to get a better deal on shipping than ordering from me, although at the current sale price it’s probably still cheaper to buy direct.
Just a quick note to let you all know that my Benbecula releases are now on Spotify; I’ve added direct links for each release on the music page. ‘Midsummer’ will hopefully follow once Emubands hammer out a deal with Spotify.
Yes, actually. Time for an autumnal sale! The AMND double 12″ will be half-price, at just a fiver plus P&P, at the Ochre shop. For a limited period of around a week, until I thereafter hopefully remember to put the prices up again.
All proceeds will go towards a CD repress of either AMND or Lemodie. Not sure which yet!
There’s been a spate of plugins that have impressed me recently, and I’ve been demoing some of these to see if they’d replace any of my current software workhorses.
Softube's emulation of the Tube-Tech CL 1B
One of these is the virtual incarnation of Tube-Tech’s CL-1B compressor, coded by Swedish VST house Softube. The hardware version is very much a boutique piece of equipment costing a couple of thousand pounds, and while we’ve seen DSP emulations of specific outboard before from the likes of Universal Audio with their series of UAD-1 (and now UAD-2) plugins, convincing native emulations have been fairly thin on the ground, with only Waves really having a good go at pilfering the vintage audio ‘classics’ archive. Other plugins evoke vague vintage aesthetics with their ‘warm’ or ‘analogue’ switches, their careful virtual tarnishes, scratched and stained GUIs, but few have had the audacity to directly compete with their physical (and readily available) counterparts. But all this seems to be changing.
Say hello to a one-off Whispers/Dustlands 'Spectre' EP
I shared this on Twitter last week, but I thought I’d leave a note about it on the blog too (given I don’t have a ton of other news right now).
A happy Ochre, last week.
I recently got a one-off vinyl dubplate carved up for a certain designer who’s been helping me out a lot lately. Can’t say I’ve ever held or played one before, but it’s quite interesting—a bit different from your garden-variety vinyl. I don’t know how it compares to a lacquer dubplate, apart from being much more resilient, but it does resemble a slab of perspex quite a bit—certainly thicker and more transparent than any ‘clear’ vinyl I’ve seen before.
It’d be nice to be able to sell odd one-offs like this, as they really are quite unique. Maybe start a line of Ochre ‘Auratic Artefacts’…
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