Last Orders!!

I'm going to start removing the links to my free downloads tomorrow so please feel free to take advantage of my genourosity while you have the chance.

some will stay, most will go.

most will probably make a reappearance, some will not.



I've just got back from 5 days in France, so perhaps when normal blogging resumes there may be a glut of Disney or Theme Park related posts before the reality of normal life causes the magic to fade.

2008: Year of the Bat. part 2

Thanks to Hollywood, it seems to me that geek is a lot more fashionable than it ever used to be, perhaps actually being a geek still carries the same stigmatisms but with so many comics being appropriated by film studios and sold back to a wider demographic, it certainly seems acceptable to dig superheroes.

In the last year alone I’ve accumulated 3 pairs of Batman boxer shorts, 3 Batman t-shirts (at the beginning of 2008 I had none of either), I am also the proud owner of a Lego Batman key-ring and the Lego Batman video game, seen The Dark Knight at the IMAX twice (and they still haven’t stopped screening it there yet, even tho the DVD is out now) and treated myself to a number of graphic novels. My Dad even found my old Batman key-ring down the back of his sofa that I had lost as a kid and gave it back to me.

I remember the re-runs of the old ‘60’s Batman, possibly my first exposure to the character, as I progressed from the Beano I remember picking up the Fleetway Editions reprints of the American Batman comics, possibly around the same time as the first Tim Burton film was hitting the cinema, I remember the first American imports I found, as Knightfall was just getting started as Mr Zsasz was holding hostages in an all girls school, as Batman was feeling weary and run down by a mass breakout from Arkham Asylum, orchestrated by Bane, a dark and shadowy figure that I had no knowledge of. These American comics seemed so dark and their bleak slant was a whole world away from what I had been used to reading.



this post is shown in full on the myspace blog
if anyone has any issues viewing myspace (work blocks, etc) then please leave a comment if you'd prefer longer blogs posted in their entirety.

blood splashing

had afew computer issues yesterday, i thought i mite have posted about the fact that although everyone had been whinging about it for ages, the recession is now official (some boring statistic about the rate of something or other dropping for the blah blah blah...) or that i'm still reading Bill Bryson.

Alas, this post is about neither, as obsessed as i am about music, this shall be about music. I'm not gonna become another of the many multiplying music blogs, i just wanna share a little enthusiasm.

I could have posted about Littles, his new mixtape that i was listening to this morning and the amazing new track 'Skank Out' but instead i felt compelled to blog about the mysterious Fake Blood who smashed it last year with 'Mars', 'Blood Splashing' and a smattering of remixes.

Compelled, since last night on Xfm, i heard Eddy TM mention that Fake Blood is none other than DJ Touche, perhaps this is common knowledge that had passed me by, I loved his previous work such as 'The Paddle' and even way back further than that to his days in 'The Wiseguys' ('ooh la la' was ten years ago??)

I'd love to share A Fake Blood track with you but i see a handful of other forums have had tracks removed by request, and i don't wanna step on no-ones toes.

Their ain't even any official videos to check out, so maybe jus check his myspace and if you like what you hear, shell out for it on i-tunes or something

getting the hang of it

I've been posting on Myspace for a long while now but this Blogspot is a lil new to me, so bear with me while i spruce the place up and change lay-outs and add info.

one thing i've realised is that the room to post in appears quite narrow, which makes my previous posts look quite long and perhaps a little tedious to read, hence, why this post has a (slightly) relavant picture heading it and is rather brief.

any suggestions you think might help, just leave a comment

thanks

Sound Art Experiment Number 1

Why must I start so many blogs by mentioning how I meant to actually post this or that a while ago? Same applies here I’m afraid, been a busy January and even though I’m determined to commit myself to keeping my blog updated it is taking a long while for me to find the time to sit myself down and cover what needs to be covered.

And now onto today’s subject:

Sound Art

I guess this is quite a broad term and can mean different things to different people, it could also mean nothing to a lot of people but as far as I am concerned it is open to interpretaion.

The Wikipedia entry that tries to define it says that ‘there are often distinct relationships forged between the visual and aural domains of art and perception by sound artists’, which I guess goes a little way to describe my own venture into the boundless area of Sound Art.

Over the years I have seen my little brother growing more accomplished as an artist and have often used him to produce artwork for tracks or remixes that I have produced, call me old fashioned, but simply because most music these days is distributed digitally doesn’t mean that it does not need a ‘cover’, some form of artwork to identify the music with, even if it simply makes your i-pod’s display look a little prettier.

I enjoy seeing the works that my brother produces and am proud to associate them with my music, and in most cases he prefers to listen to the track before, or sometimes while, working on the artwork that will accompany it.

This is, I suppose questionably, already a form of Sound Art, but for the latest project I am undertaking the roles have been reversed, with the Artwork leading the music.

The first track was unveiled on Christmas Day last year, the artwork has a title, the track I produced also has a title, but for the purpose of the project both pieces are referred to as SoundArt1 and I honestly think it is one of the best pieces of music I have produced.

It was hard to keep my mind clear and wait for the artwork to arrive, it is so easy to take influence from all manner of things or to have a pre-concieved notion of the direction a track may take but upon opening the file on my brother had emailed me, it stirred something inside me and played on my mind until it was complete.

For your consideration, SoundArt1 is available to download until the end of January



If everything goes to plan then a new track should be available as we head into February but following the first track is daunting and having far too little time to dedicate myself properly this month may push me behind schedule but stay tuned for a second installment in the not too distant future.

2008: Year of the Bat. part 1

I usually like to start the year in such a clichéd fashion as to look back over the previous year that has just passed, and as usual I’m running late.

But to be honest I think I covered a lot of ground in my previous blog that recapped all my tracks I’ve got available to download right now, so this may be a brief overview of what has come and gone and which, by all accounts has been a bloody good year for me.

I managed to have my most productive year to date. Producing remixes of The Enemy, Radiohead, Marvin, The Freewheelin’ Troubadour and Akira the Don (twice) and also finally finishing the remix of Komakino that I started way back in sumfin silly like summer ’07.

In terms of my original tracks, I completed ‘teen-aging’ to a demo standard that I am happy with, finished another new track, made a start on another one and also found the time to record my very own ‘christmas single’.

Perhaps the project I’m most excited about is the new Sound/Art experiment I have started with my little brother, the first of which is available to download til the end of January and which I still intend to dedicate a whole blog entry to.

Been a good year in terms of exposure too, considering I have previously had none. In a rather short space of time I’d had my remix of The Enemy featured on Keep Hope Inside, played by Eddy TM on Xfm and also played on radio in New Zealand. The Joint in NZ were also good enough to play out another one of my older tracks too and Saam at Keep Hope Inside blogged about my Radiohead remix which probably sent my music around the world afew more times, cos everyone loves new Radiohead material, and the track was even picked up and spread around by a handful of other blogs.

Also giving me a little extra push last year were Marvin and Akira The Don. Marvin also found a lil space for my Enemy remix on his own blog and then gave me the chance to remix his latest single and Akira featured one of the two remixes I produced of his tracks on his latest mixtape.

So, huge thanks to Saam, Eddy TM, the folks at The Joint, Marvin and Akira The Don, and anyone else who has given my music a chance this past year

Hunchbakk’s Selection Box

OK, so you’ve been gorging yourself on chocolate over Christmas and you swore you’d start a diet and resist temptation, but you shouldn’t resist this…

Available at the crazy, knock down price of absolutely nothing at all…

Even better than that, it contains ZERO calories…

I present to you…

The Hunchbakk Selection Box





It’s not quite like your normal selection box, because it doesn’t actually contain any chocolate at all, but it is a bumper selection of Hunchbakk tracks and remixes to download…

I’m afraid the ‘christmas single’, www.xmas.com, is past it’s sell-by-date now so the collection has been rounded off with a couple of additions that weren’t available pre-christmas, just as a little extra treat.


So stick with me for artwork, download links and brief descriptions

First up

HUNCHBAKK PROMO EP



The first material to see the light of day, originally given away on CD also containing an exclusive mix to promote the Bubblegum Stomp club night I was involved in way back in 2005, it was later re-packaged, with a cover provided my little brother, to send out to radio and just to promote my own music.

A PUNISMENT TO FIT EP



A second collection of four tracks, one of which was the mutant re-jigged final track of the Promo EP taking on a new identity and direction as Felix 2.0 (which has even made it to air on New Zealand radio). This EP closed a chapter of my music making, acting as a companion piece to the first EP and allowing me to move on to more advanced methods and music creation software.

THE ENEMY – THIS SONG (HUNCHBAKK’S YOUTH OF TODAY REMIX)




The track that kicked off my flirtations with not being such an unknown, created for a remix competition but not chosen as one of the final winners, I felt passionately enough about the track that I would share it with the wider world to co-incide with the official single release. I passed it along to a couple of people and sent afew copies to radio, and the results were more than I ever expected, culminating with a play from Eddy TM on Xfm’s The Remix and also, bizarrely picked up by a radio show in New Zealand and played out on a Saturday afternoon (the play of Felix 2.0, mentioned above, came after).

KOMAKINO – KID FEAR (HUNCHBAKK’S AWAKE NOW REMIX)




Possibly the runt of the litter, this was my first stab at remixing while I was getting to grips with new software (the remix of The Enemy came later, but was still finished before this one) and actually took me so long to complete that the band had split up before I was even done. Despite getting in touch with the remnants of the band in their new guise, I’ve never received any feedback on what they actually thought of it.

RADIOHEAD – NUDE (HUNCHBAKK’S TOWERBLOCK DUB REMIX)



How do you get people to listen to your music? Remix Radiohead. The gauntlet was thrown down in another remix competition was participants offerings uploaded to a site in which was essentially an overblown (and over subscribed) popularity contest. I never really had any intention of entering and I don’t think I even started tinkering with it until the deadline had already passed, but again, this time with a ‘less is more’ approach, I’d found myself with a remix I didn’t want to keep to myself.

And a good job too. Cos once I’d passed it onto Saam, who had been kind enough to feature my Enemy remix on his blog, it kinda got everywhere, picked up by a number of other blogs and downloaded by a troubling number of people, and it still crops up in those audio tracker things that I have never cared to understand as being listened to, and appreciated, by people all over the world.

MARVIN – THAT ONE TIME (HUNCHBAKK 2 SKOOL BOOTLEG MIX)




Marvin is an artist I’ve gotta lotta love for and I was proud when he featured my remix of The Enemy on his blog. He liked it so much that he sent me the accapella of his forthcoming single for me to play around with, and he released the track as a little internet exclusive.

THE FREEWHEELIN’ TROUBADOUR – THE NIGHT THAT I DIE (HUNCHBAKK REMIX)



Another one that strikes me as a rather mis-understood creature, it seems to have been ignored by it’s original owner, and even my girlfriend didn’t seem to like it an awful lot. A little disappointing when you have put a lot of time and heart into a new creation but you can’t please everyone all of the time. I’m hoping a few other people might have a different opinion of it.

AKIRA THE DON FEAT. LITTLES – NO MATTER WHAT (HUNCHBAKK REMIX)



More remix comp fare. The entire month of November was spent toiling over this as it slowly but surely took shape. This was my chance to be included on an Akira The Don mixtape, I’m a fan of the man himself, I’m a fan of his music and of his mixtapes. Sadly it wasn’t to be, it didn’t quite make the final cut, instead trumped by the magnificent pydos in spydos.

AKIRA THE DON FEAT. MARY TURNER – MUSIC OF THE SPHERES (HUNCHBAKK’S DIRTY ELBOWS MIX)



I struck gold with this one tho, ‘No matter what’ troubled me for a month, this lil miraculous gem was conceived in a couple of hours, purely by chance. I’d had a crack at a number of other Akira The Don remixes but this one just fell together perfectly and secured a place on the ATD remixtape.

HUNCHBAKK / IAN BYFORD ART – SOUND / ART TRACK 1



The first track to come to fruition as part of a new collaborative venture. Ian Byford is an artistand he is my little brother and he quite often provides artwork for my tracks and remixes, at my suggestion we flipped the script and he created a new piece of art that I then produced the music for.



Since you managed to pick up this selection box at such a massively discounted price, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that it is near the end of it’s shelf life, all the tracks listed above will be taken offline after their expiry date: 31 January 2009. So indulge while you’ve still got a chance, as unlike the wispa bar, it’s doubtful the remixes of Komakino and The Freewheelin’ troubadour will ever make a comeback.


*all artwork designed by Ian Byford. Except: ‘Punishment..’ EP, This Song and That One Time designed by Hunchbakk. May contain nuts.