In honor of the 5oth anniversary, the folks at Future Publishing are hosting a competition for AudioGO, formerly BBC Audiobooks, and they are giving away 50 Doctor Who audio presentations, 25 CDs and 25 digital downloads. These are actually Audiobooks, with a single person reading a novelization, Radio Plays, with a full cast, sound effects, interlude music, and the whole nine yards, Soundtracks from the original TV series with narration to fill in the missing visuals, and several other formats. Some of the soundtracks are from episodes that have only survived in audio form, with the full original cast. They have literally hundreds of them, they have been doing Doctor Who audio stories from the beginning and are still cranking them out. To get and idea what kind of things they involve, you can download the free sampler and listen to 45 minutes worth of excerpts from all the different kinds of programs they produce. The only bad news for this contest is it is only open to residents of the UK (if I was reading the rules correctly), but even if you don’t live there you should grab the free sampler and check out some of the amazing stories you can collect.
There was a Discworld game that came out way back in 1995, and as such games do, it had a collection of 8 bit music. It also had Eric Idle doing the voice of Rincewind, which I think is a brilliant bit of casting, and Jon Pertwee doing a whole lot of the other voices. It was based on Terry Pratchett’s book Guards, Guards! but somehow wound up with Rincewind instead of Vimes in charge. If you still have the game you no doubt need a legacy system to play it on, but thanks to Sorek142 you can still listen to the soundtrack, or at least the incidental music, from the various scenes. Note that does not include Eric Idle’s song That’s Death, ranked by PC Gamer as among The best songs in PC gaming in 2010, because that was on the Discworld II game.
Sounding a bit like everybody’s favorite virtual idol, Passepied just released a new CD this week, and the first track is a song called S.S from that release. They have been around since 2009, getting their major label deal with Warner Bros. Japan in 2012, doing some great music fusing a lot of different styles, but centered around pop and impressionistic. The fact they named themselves after the last movement in Debussy’s Bergamasque Suite pretty much says it all. Their music videos are also a treat, the lead singer having graduated art school influences them all, and I just had to grin about the Power Rangers in this one. The second track I included is an older song of theirs Yūyake wa inochi no umi, which makes their impressionist influences more obvious. And yes, that third video is from them as well, originally posted in December of 2012.
This is too funny; an A Capella version of the Game of Thrones theme song done as 5 part harmony. It was put together by The Warp Zone, and they have a lot of other hysterical stuff on their channel. It was about an hour before I could pull myself away from watching their videos and do this post. Thanks to Topless Robot for the heads up on this one.
If you are not already a fan of this Australian Indi band you should check them out, because Operator Please has some tasty music. My favorite track by them is Song About Ping Pong, but all their songs are good. Their official home page seems to have evaporated so they may not be a band any more, and the one time I know of they appeared on US TV was in season 4 of Chuck, in the episode Chuck Vs. The Fear Of Death.
The song is from Simple Plan, the song Summer Paradise, featuring the vocal work of Taka from One OK Rock, one of the best Alt Rock bands from Japan. This is one of the more interesting songs since The Lazy Song sung by Bruno Mars and featuring Leonard Nimoy in the video. Come to think of it, it sounds a lot like Summer Paradise. And then, just because I can, a recent track from Rip Slyme, who’s music I can only describe as Punk/Rap/Lounge, however that actually works.