It was the massive annual Assembly gathering last week. Traditionally its a place for the demo scene to gather and present their demos and to hack out new ones.
For those not in the know the demo scene or “scene” is where a team of people come together and compete to make a music video. Except that they arent videos in the traditional sense as its all generated using code and runs in realtime. This means that you have to be super efficient with your code. Some of the competitions are “64k” or even “4k” competitions which means that the whole demo must fit in 64kb or 4kb! The music is also produced by the groups and often excellent.
I have been checking out some of the demos produced by the teams this year and they are simply stunning. Every year they get better and better.
This one from CNCD and Fairlight particularly caught my eye as it has massive numbers of particles and a stunning soundtrack kinda reminiscent of glitchy Radiohead. Therefore I thought it essential I share it here.
Enjoy:
Oh while im at it check out this one from last year:
Had this little idea a while back, thought I would spend an hour tonight and bash it out.
I love the Trance Around The World radio show by Above and Beyond, downloading it for listening later is very annoying however and involves some fiddling with browser source and other things, so to make life easier I built this little tool. What it does is grab the HTML from the above and beyond page then parse it for the MP3 file, then it uses the FileReference class in flash to download it to your HD.
Anyways, enough jibber jabber. Source is enabled:
Please upgrade your Flash Player This is the content that would be shown if the user does not have Flash Player 9.0.115 or higher installed.
Wow! Well this one was a hell of alot easier to make than the last one.
Instead of trying to tell a story with film samples and a large overarching theme I have instead just let this one naturally progress and take its course. The consequence of this, I think anyway, the transitions are alot softer and more natural giving a good easy listen.
I have called this one “Coalescence” as it contains a rather different mixture of tracks that I have coalesced together. It still has that chilled-downtempo IDM-esq sound that I love so much at the moment with tracks by Jon Hopkins, Trifonic but I have also included some other tracks I have acquired on my eclectic audio adventures.
Anyways I hope you enjoy it, I think its probably my best mix since my Harmonics 1 and 2.
Finally, finally I have decided to say sod it and stop tinkering with this god damn mix! I have been making and remaking this thing for the best part of a year but I can still see the rough edges. Its been driving me quite literally mad! Having said that however I have enjoyed making it, else I wouldn’t do it… right?
Anyway the idea was to have a two part mix, a more downtempo one and this one (coming soon). I have tried to tell a story with this mix, using both samples from a certain famous movie and through the track selection and progression. I have gone for a deeper darker sound than my usualharmonicslight and easy to listen to sound. I dont imagine this one will be as popular with most people but I hope some will enjoy it!
Michael is a Professional Flash Developer currently based in Manchester UK. His passion is all things programming, particularly Games and Particle Systems.