Month: April 2024

The TJC Challenge

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Readers, I’m issuing you a challenge:  The TJC Challenge.

The TJC Challenge

The TJC Challenge

What is The TJC Challenge, you ask?  It’s simple:  undertake a marathon stream of every release I have on Apple Music (or your streaming service of choice).

Apple Music Method

If you’re an Apple Music user, it’s pretty easy.  Here are three simple steps:

  1. Click or tap this link to my artist profile (preferably on your phone)
  2. Hit “play”
  3. Listen to my tunes!

If you don’t select shuffle, it will play through each of my albums in alphabetic order by title.  That means you’ll start with Contest Winner EP and end with Spooky Season II: Rise of the Cryptids.

YouTube Method

Don’t use Apple Music?  No problem.  The cheapest method (no monthly subscription to a streaming service) is via YouTube.  The only downside is that there’s no way to play through all albums without having to select individual releases.

Still, here’s the YouTube method:

  1. Follow this link to my “Releases” on my YouTube channel
  2. Hover over one the album you’d like to listen to first and click “Play All”
  3. Rinse and repeat for each album

The entire challenge will take about 185 minutes—give or take a few seconds and/or minutes—to complete, or around three hours and change.

The beauty is that if you’re doing laundry or household chores, it’ll breeze by, and you’ll enjoy some great tunes in the process!  If you need to turn the volume down a bit to focus on another task, that’s fine, too.

One-Hour Variation

If you’d rather take on a shorter challenge, consider listening to Leftovers II, Epistemology, Firefly Dance, and Spooky Season II: Rise of the Cryptids (YouTube links here, here, here, and here, respectively).  They come out to almost exactly one hour when played consecutively.  These are also my four most recent releases.

Time for Just One Release?

If that or the one-hour challenge are too daunting, and you can only pick one release, I recommend Contest Winner – EP (YouTube link here).  The entire EP is only twenty-one (21) minutes long, roughly the length of a television show without commercials.  It’s my only release that isn’t instrumental, and it consists of six of the best songs I’ve ever written (well, at least four of them are really good).

Time for One (or Two) Instrumental Releases?

If lyrics are distracting and you want one good instrumental release, I’ll make two recommendations:  Epistemology and/or Firefly Dance (YouTube:  here and here, respectively).  Both are about fifteen minutes long; you could listen to both over a lunch break, or listen to one while driving to work.

Conclusion

If you listen to my entire discography, you’ll travel from my early MIDI compositions in 2006 all the way to last week (1 April 2024).  That’s eighteen years of musical growth and development (hopefully not musical regression—gulp!).  You’ll also be doing yours portly a huge favor.

If you do the challenge—or even part of it—let me know!  What were your favorite releases?  Which ones didn’t “do it” for you?  What would you like to hear in the future?

Happy Listening!

—TPP

Open Mic Adventures LXXVI: “Black Mage”

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I’m still promoting my latest release, Leftovers II, but I’m also excited for my next album, Four Mages, which releases Thursday, 2 May 2024.  Of course, if you’d like to hear Leftovers II, you can do so at the following places (and probably more):

Today, however, I’d like to look at the fourth of the Four Mages, the dreaded “Black Mage.”

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Monday Morning Movie Review: Southern Comfort (1981)

The Portly Politico8 Comments

Shudder serves up some strange dishes sometimes, including a good bit of non-horror fare.  For a service that is ostensibly dedicated to horror, it’s always interesting when something outside of that genre pops up.

Of course, “horror” is a pretty broad category, and there is horror in many situations.  Perhaps that is the rationale for the inclusion of Southern Comfort (1981) to its slate of films.

Southern Comfort follows the foibles of a Louisiana National Guard unit on a weekend bivouac into the swamps of Cajun country.  After a truly stupid act, the weekend warriors find themselves embroiled in a guerrilla war with murderous Cajuns.

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Lazy Sunday CXLIV: Four Mages, Part I

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Last week I released Leftovers II, and in just a few weeks I’ll release my next album, Four Mages (2 May 2024).  If you’d like to hear my latest release, you can do so here:

Readers might have noticed some of the colorful mages popping up over the last few weeks on this blog.  I’ve posted three of the Four Mages so far (“Black Mage” is coming this Tuesday, 9 April 2024—stay tuned!), so I thought I’d share them with y’all this Lazy Sunday:

  • “Open Mic Adventures LXXIII: ‘Blue Mage’” – “Blue Mage” is a duet for oboe and bassoon, built upon a mysterious whole tone scale. The piece is written in 5/8 time, further lending to the mystical feel of this magical journey.
  • “Open Mic Adventures LXXIV: ‘Red Mage’” – “Red Mage” is a mischievous and playful duet for oboe and bassoon. It is the companion piece to “Blue Mage.” The piece has a playful, mischievous feel, and I love how it sounds very much like it’s from a fantasy JRPG soundtrack.
  • “Open Mic Adventures LXXV: ‘White Mage’” – “White Mage” is a bright but flowing solo for flute with celesta accompaniment. A piano could be substituted in place of the celesta. It has a delightful Final Fantasy vibe.

Happy Sunday—and Happy Listening!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

SubscribeStar Saturday: The King in Yellow Review

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

The artwork for today’s post is the cover of the instrumental piece “Yellow Knight,” from my upcoming release Four Mages.  The album releases on 2 May 2024, and a YouTube video for “Yellow Knight” (linked above) will go live on 14 May 2024.

Recently I purchased a copy of Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow, a classic work of “weird fiction” that would inspire writers like H.P. Lovecraft.  It’s a book I’ve wanted to read for sometime, especially with the idea of a malevolent play that is so terrible and beautiful, it drives anyone who reads it mad.  That play, of course, is the titular The King in Yellow, the text of which—beyond a couple of snippets—is never quoted in the book.

The book is a collection of ten stories, the first four of which share the thread of the infamous play.  The rest of the book consists of stories that take place mostly in Paris, specifically the Latin Quarter, and revolves around the lives of young American art students in the City of Light.  Indeed, Chambers published In the Quarter, a collection of stories about the Bohemian lives of the Latin Quarter’s residents, a year prior to the publication of The King in Yellow.

The four proper TKiY stories are quite good, and succeed as horror stories that unsettle, more than they scare.  The hidden gems of this collection, however, are the Latin Quarter stories, which depict a freewheeling, fun-loving period in French history before the unhappy days of the First World War ruined France and the West forever.

I reviewed one of those stories, “The Street of the First Shell,” earlier this week.  Today, I’d like to examine the entire book, which really is two shorter books in one.  There are the stories clearly connected to the “Yellow King” mythos.  The rest are all stories that take place in the Latin Quarter.  Unlike “The Street of the First Shell,” however, most of the rest are comedic romances, though some are a bit heavier than others.

To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

This post contains Amazon Affiliate links.  Any purchases made through those link result in a bit of additional revenue for yours portly, at no additional cost to you.

April 2024 Bandcamp Friday

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Today is Bandcamp Friday!  That means Bandcamp waives their share of any purchases made on my Bandcamp page today (Friday, 5 April 2024), so it’s the best possible time to buy my music if you want to support yours portly.

Earlier this week I released my sixteenth Bandcamp album, Leftovers II.  It consists of tracks leftover from other composing projects, as well as two older pieces (“Robobop” and “Pwrblld [Ballad II]“) and a lo-fi organ piece I recorded using an old computer microphone sometime in 2007.

You can listen to the full thing on Bandcamp for free a few times before Bandcamp locks out full track playback.  However, if funds are tight and you’d rather not pay $5 for the album (which you should totally do anyway—it’s just five bucks!), you can listen to the album through the following services:

Thanks for listening!  Even just streaming helps me out a great deal.

—TPP

TBT: Spring Break Short Story Recommendation 2023: “The Bottle Imp”

The Portly Politico4 Comments

One of my favorite short stories from last year’s Spring Break Short Story Recommendations was Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Bottle Imp.”  It tells the story of a Hawaiian sailor who finds a bottle.  Inside the bottle is a terrifying imp, one that will grant wishes, but the owner of the bottle is doomed to Hell.  The only way to avoid that fate is to sell the bottle, but the bottle must be sold for a price lower than what they paid for it.

It’s a fun little story that, despite some heavier moments and some genuine suspense, warns against quick riches and deals with the infernal.  The Hawaiian setting is also unique, and gives the whole story a quirky bent.

With that, here is 12 April 2023’s “Spring Break Short Story Recommendation 2023: ‘The Bottle Imp’“:

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Spring Break Short Story Recommendation 2024: “The Street of the First Shell”

The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Recently I purchased a copy of Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow, a classic work of “weird fiction” that would inspire writers like H.P. Lovecraft.  It’s a book I’ve wanted to read for sometime, especially with the idea of a malevolent play that is so terrible and beautiful, it drives anyone who reads it mad.  That play, of course, is the titular The King in Yellow, the text of which—beyond a couple of snippets—is never quoted in the book.

The book is a collection of ten stories, the first four of which share the thread of the infamous play.  The rest of the book consists of stories that take place mostly in Paris, specifically the Latin Quarter, and revolves around the lives of young American art students in the City of Light.  Indeed, Chambers published In the Quarter, a collection of stories about the Bohemian lives of the Latin Quarter’s residents, a year prior to the publication of The King in Yellow.

The four proper TKiY stories are quite good, and succeed as horror stories that unsettle, more than they scare.  The hidden gems of this collection, however, are the Latin Quarter stories, which depict a freewheeling, fun-loving period in French history before the unhappy days of the First World War ruined France and the West forever.

Of those stories, my favorite is “The Street of the First Shell,” which takes place during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71.  It is a thrilling depiction of the privation and struggle of that conflict, and of the doomed Parisian defense against the Prussian siege.

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Leftovers II Out Now

The Portly Politico4 Comments

My third release of the year, Leftovers II, is out today.  It consists of two previously-released tracks; four new pieces “leftover” from other projects; and an eight-minute organ solo I played on a keyboard and recorded using a crummy computer microphone seventeen years ago.

I have two other releases in the pipeline, Four Mages (releasing 2 May 2024) and Advanced Funkification (releasing 7 June 2024).  Four Mages is a collection of fantasy-inspired pieces, and Advanced Funkification is a funk album.  Some of the tracks on Leftovers II were composed while I was working on these other two releases, but they didn’t fit the “vibe” of either, so I decided to put together this collection.

In addition to Bandcamp, you can listen to Leftovers II on most every streaming platform, except for Spotify.  I’ll have full links up this Friday for Bandcamp Friday‘s post (I’m writing this post before the album hits streaming platforms, so I don’t have full links yet), but here are links to the relevant pages; you can navigate to Leftovers II from there:

Again, I’ll have a more complete list of streaming links Friday.

In the meantime, happy listening!

—TPP