Another fine J-Rock band, Uplift Spice was formed in 2005 and is best described as Emo-Punk. The first one of this set is Minority Parade, which they played on last weeks J-Melo episode. The next track is Memento, followed by Justice; that should be enough to tell you whether or not this band is worth following. I for one enjoyed the hell out of every track I have heard from them.
Uplift Spice also has a MySpace page you might want to check out for more information.
A lot of people know about the Sci-Fi London film festival, or the 48 hour film challenge, or their many Indi film projects. But did you know they have been collecting Old Time Radio programs and making them available for download? Some are available from other places, but some I have only found there. And they have started building their own, with the first one now available: Rossum’s Universal Robots.
This is absolutely my favorite band out of Korea; they are subtle like a brick wall, and have attitude to spare. They have uploaded over 150 songs and are building still more. Park Bom is the lead singer, but do not get distracted into thinking everyone else is in backup band status; this is a true group effort. So how could I pick a few of my favorites out of this huge library? I couldn’t; these are a few random songs I love and you might like, but they have impressed me!
There is going to be a live streamed Square Enix Music Event on 29 September at 22:00 Tokyo time. Mind you, that is 4AM PST or 7AM EST, so the choices are stay up late, get up early, or set a recording for the SQ Party LEVEL 1 concert. There are no actual live musicians, but rather remixers working from a library of audio captures from the Square Enix sound library.
If you have been playing games for a while, you have no doubt run across the classic platform shooter Metroid, which has been around since 1986. According to the folks a Crunchyroll, in honor of the games 25th anniversary there has been an album recorded of the themes from various versions of it called Harmony of a Hunter, and released as a free download from ShineSparkers. A lot of the music is in what I think of as the 8 Bit Boogie format but some is in Metal, Chiptune, and Dubstep. Thee is currently no physical media you can buy, but if they get enough response on the download they are considering releasing it on disc. Considering how key to the franchise the game music has been since the beginning, I think this is an excellent tribute. Be aware, if you download the whole side files (which shows just how old school the creators are: each “whole side” disk is the normal 16 or so minutes long of the traditional vynal record album), the songs slide from one into the next with a cross fade between them. If you want the songs as stand alone so you need only add the ones you like to your playlist, you will want to download the individual tracks.
The finalists have been announced for the 2011 Parsec Awards. These awards are given out to honor the best in speculative fiction podcasting in each of a number of categories. Part of the requirements to be eligible include being available for free through an RSS feed, so if you are the ind of person who likes a good audio book or radio drama, this is a great source of new programming to add to your mobile player and personal collections. And for each representative program linked on the list you can subscribe to the feeds and get a ton of additional programs. The awards themselves will be handed out in about a month.