Espers-Remastered Version Release as well as Other Related News

This post is probably a month late, but 12 Followers/Meteo Xavier's debut album "Espers", the album that Met and myself had reviewed last summer during our first podcast, has now been remastered and re-released for our enjoyment.  The link to this new version can be found here, so feel free to have a listen.

Currently we are still in the process of creating our second podcast, which is a review of Meteo Xavier's album "Meteocrity" (we had promised to work on a review for it in late 2011, so it is about time, right?).  However, while I have been trying to find the time to work on this podcast with Xanthurian, especially during the last couple of weeks, the project will be on a temporary stand-by on my part for the next month or so while I am away on business.  This podcast will happen, even if it takes another couple months.  We'll need plenty of cooperation, coordination, and time.

We will continue to post updates on the podcast and any other happenings or events as the days go by.  For now though, be patient.  The podcast will come.

This is also twenty-three days late, but I'll say it now.  Happy New Year! We hope to spend this year moving into our own website, releasing a few podcasts, and moving forward in the best way that we can with posting and podcast releases.  I feel honored to be a part of it, so let's make 2013 a memorable and productive year for A Rather Pleasant Site.  

Identity Sequence is Released!

This album is the culmination of a little over 5 years of original work by an artist who has impacted my life to the point that I would not be listening to music right now if not for him (thank you zircon). Please check it out; Identity Sequence has been well worth the wait. True to form, it embraces organica electronica in the context of abstract cyberpunk storytelling. I am proud to say I chipped in a few bucks for the wildly successful Kickstarter that's producing some great results.

We will give this album a full review...

It could take a couple years, but it'll happen; hopefully sooner rather than later.

Wasn't Something Supposed to Happen?

Well it was... sort of.

If you listened to our first podcast, you probably picked up on the fact that while we're excited for the future of this site, we were also pretty vague. All those changes we talked about, including a regular posting schedule, haven't materialized just yet and I'm here to explain about that... sort of.

It is my understanding that the Meteocrity podcast has been delayed several times now by last minute schedule changes and feeble attempts that aren't worthy of anyone's ears. I do get to hear all the works in progress so rest assured I will breathe down the necks of those doing all the hard work likely to no effect (*sigh*).

The administrators podcast that we also mentioned in the first podcast has been delayed, this time not by me, but it was my fault that we didn't finish all the recording on one day as I didn't really prepare for anything and now only have about 7 or 8 minutes of complete audio. That being said, I'm quite sure this podcast won't run any longer than 40 minutes. In fact, it might end up being more in the 15-20 minute range. Given the current content and the circumstances surrounding the development and production of that podcast, it's probably a good thing it isn't going to be that long.

Finally, about the posting schedule we mentioned in the podcast.

The one where we post once each week.

The one where we maintain a consistent rate of posting.

The one that actually makes things interesting because there is new and better content.

Yeah.

I'm pretty sure that isn't going to go into effect until we're done with the two podcasts we're currently working on as those have come to demand most of the free time we have. Also, I'm under the impression right now that while certain authors could maintain it, others won't be able to. Therefore, I'm holding off on implementing it until the podcasts are released. It might be a while, I'm really hoping it isn't until 2013. Don't get your hopes up, but you'll know it's here when the first post that isn't an announcement shows up.


One last thing.
We now own and control http://www.aratherpleasantsite.org/
So..................
I can say with almost absolute certainty that nothing will be happening on that site for a while, but we've set it up, it's there, but it isn't really anything. We'll let you know when we plan to do a total transition over, even if it takes 5 years, it'll happen.
Since we now own that domain, we also have custom email addresses now. So, if you wish to contact us, please use the new email addresses (-insert author name here-@aratherpleasantsite.org if you wish to contact a specific author, and contact@aratherpleasantsite.org for general questions/submissions/whatever.


That's all for now, just stay tuned for next two podcasts and once those are out, we have no excuse for consistent posting on this site.

Back Up and Running

a.rather.pleasant.site@gmail.com is back up and running again. Our podcast releases in a few hours, stay tuned to any of our sites for more information. Our currently planned release platforms are SoundCloud, Bandcamp, YouTube, and iTunes. This site is suddenly about to become a lot more active.

Oops... Sorry...

I just broke our email address.

a.rather.pleasant.site@gmail.com is no longer available.

If you still wish to contact us, send us a PM over twitter or message Met through the blogger messaging system.

Sorry.

Shameless Plug

Depending on how you look at it, this is either overdue or not due at all.

Shameless Plug

In other news the podcast is coming along rather well and right now I'd say we're looking at a length of at least an hour. It's too early to estimate a release date, but this should be out by the end of July and it will be accompanied by a gradual posting of all of our previously written reviews of 12 Followers/Meteo Xavier's albums Espers and Meteocrity.

Unearthed

New album out from the artist who hooked me on electronic music. Unearthed by zircon is sitting on Bandcamp for an insanely good price (especially for physical copies). I'm leaving for a few weeks tomorrow so I'm very glad this came out before I left. Check it out. Trust me, it's worth the money.

Maybe we'll review some tracks from this album.

After Espers...

After Meteocrity...

After projects that have been planned for some time that aren't known to the public yet...

Then...

We'll let you know when we get there :(

What's Going On 3/21/2012

I realize this is long overdue, but here's the official announcement:

All projects associated with this site are on indefinite hold.

The 12 Followers/Meteo Xavier album project (reviews of Espers and Meteocrity) is one review (my responsibility) short of technical competition (I'm planning for prelude and postlude posts for each album). The next time you see us posting frequently, it'll be this.

So long folks.

I'd Like to Call Attention to...

Our official Facebook page.
Our official Twitter page.
Our official email.

Please like, subscribe, follow, message, etc.

If you are an artist who has been featured on A Rather Pleasant Site and we don't follow you on Twitter yet, please let us know. We're currently in the process of following all the people/groups we've featured or mentioned. Our Twitter feed will primarily consist of links to current posts and shoutouts to featured artists.

Happy New Year 2012!

It's really sad when I have this many consecutive announcement posts. Happy New Year! This is going to change though. We've got a massive project going to be released sometime in the next two weeks that'll fill the blog likely until March. This is on a planned posting schedule shooting for at least twice a week (Wednesdays and Saturdays are the days for the project). I'm aware that last year we did something of a recap and moving forward post outlining the past and future. I'm going to do just that in a much less organized manner.

2011
Not a terrible year, but obviously not our best. Things are moved constantly in transition for a lot of our main contributors, including myself. I guess the beginning of '11 was helped a lot by a strong and flexible schedule and many eager contributors who were eager to make a mark. We saw Arkive emerge briefly as an author and craft one of our most visited post "Newspaper Puns" (I contribute this to all those people Googling... newspaper puns? Is there seriously that much humor lacking in that department on the internet? I guess so). In May I tried to start a posting initiative that... sort of worked; I contributed to 9 out of 30 or so posts. Summer was pretty bad though, we were kept busy by a lot of different things in our respective personal lives. It also appears that Reogan began his "departure" or whatever you want to call it during this period, effectively leaving me running the place. The problem is: I'm lazy. As much as I love sharing my thoughts on music and video games and shedding new light on things that I believe deserve more attention, I spend an awful lot of time doing other things. I recently upgraded my computer so I could play Battlefield 3 (which I've spent a fair amount of time doing lately). I'm also something of a regular on a certain Counter-Strike: Source server and I found time to beat both Crysis and Crysis Warhead for the first time in December. Other than video games, I volunteer doing statistics for a lot of different sports and I still spend a decent amount of time recording or crunching numbers for newspapers to report. I'm also working on composing a few more tracks, although this isn't something I force myself into (which explains why I finish about 1 track every 3 months). All in all, I enjoy blogging, but right now I'm not forcing it with a schedule like I've done in the past. I feel less accountable, which can be a nice burden to not worry about, but it can really hamper motivation. Anyway, the latter half of 2011 was mediocre to terrible as for as this site goes. Our last song of the week came in August, something I desperately wanted to fix, but not by myself (remember, lazy). So needless to say, not a very strong year and I think the blogger statistics reflect this when I see a line graph of page hits steadily going down (plus, who looks at these sorts of posts, reads them all, and finds them remotely appealing?).

2012
I don't consider myself super ambitious for 2012 on this site. I will try to deliver at least 1 or 2 posts each week from any contributor. Our massive project should handle that for a while and hopefully bring in more readers from links I'll be posting. I'm looking at a lot of future options for this site, domain changes, servers, people, stuff... There's a good chance we'll end up booting up a Twitter account this year that'll link back to every new post and inform followers of current events that concern us (which in my case is mostly music related: yes, I'm highly interested in economics and politics, but I'd rather not pit the ideas of John Meynard Kenyes against Adam Smith, or Karl Marx against Thomas Jefferson, lest I start massive debates and flame wars). So back to the music thing, we plan to continue the Song of the Day series in the form of album reviews, and there are quite a few Song of the Week potentials that I've been exploring for some time. I'm not highly ambitious and I don't want to get any reader's hopes up because I realize that this could be one of the craziest years I've had yet. However, stay tuned, I will continue to promote all sorts of music here that I'm very excited about and maybe once in a while I'll contribute something of literary value. As long as I'm running things, it'll be music, music, music :) and more music.

Executive Summary:
2011 started fairly strong, finished very weak. 2012 will similarly start strong via planned scheduled posts. Primary focus is featuring independent music in infinite detail and making sure artists get at least some of the recognition they deserve.

Miscellaneous Extras:
These are the last 3 albums I've listened to.
Highlights by Luke Wieting ($6 USD on Bandcamp)
Free Play by Shnabubula (free)
The Midnight Sessions by Dave Greening (free)

Merry Christmas 2011

Merry Christmas everyone!

We got some big stuff coming in with the new year and we plan on unloading it all in the span of a few months with posts averaging twice a week. In the meantime, check out some good Christmas albums and tracks.

Through Sand and Snow by Jillian Aversa
Big Giant Christmas EP by Big Giant Circles (Jimmy Hinson)
Tinsel and Baubles (An Ode to Christmas) by Dave Greening
We Wish You a Merry Christmas by myristica

Post a comment if you'd like to add your own suggestions as to what we should be listening to this Christmas.

It's On

This...

er...

maybe.

We'll try...

November Plans for 2011

I cannot begin to describe how hectic things have been recently. I've certainly had time to work on blogging and I have, but it's been all behind the scenes stuff. I feel like I owe an apology for the last few months of inactivity. We have stuff coming, we really do, we're just backlogged and trying to deal with a lot of things at once. Marim and I have been picking up our composition pace recently as we continue to produce music (I should be coming out with my first album within the next year for free and likely produced entirely with Nanostudio including my existing tracks on SoundCloud). I should be getting a new USB MIDI keyboard interface pretty soon and that'll be sure to occupy me for a bit as I adjust to working with computer based DAW technology (I have a feeling I'm really going to miss the touch screen). Anyway, here's what I got lined up for the blog within the next two months if we get work done.

Music
Song of the Day: We're currently working on a multi-album feature of the artist 12 Followers/Meteo Xavier focusing on his albums Espers and Meteocrity; this will probably be the first stream of posts once we complete our work. I recommend checking the albums out before we do reviews so familiarity is an advantage (and no, we're certainly not the first blogsite that has done coverage of this album, but the more the merrier).
Song of the Week: We have a lot of tracks we've been looking at in the past few months and quite a few that are independent of OCR entirely. I'll probably be contacting some artists on Soundcloud in the near future about having their stuff featured here.

Literature
Thursday Thoughts: I'm liking the idea of reviving these as soon as possible as they are easy to write and look good in most cases. The only issue here is finding topics that haven't already been used, are not purely inside jokes, and have either some philosophic meaning or comedic value.
Short Stories: Reogan has been doing a lot of writing recently, but I doubt he'll put it up here (if he does though, that'd be great). I recently went through all my old short story universe (tagged as story zero) and did some editing. Behind Closed Doors is pretty much discontinued due to massive plot holes, but I like the idea of continuing with Operational Catalyst as the character environment is much more static and it's easier to focus on detailed action. Right now this makes no sense if you just arrived because I removed all story zero posts from public view about a month ago when I did the editing. I may end up reposting them later or just hold on to them until my plot materializes to a fuller extent. Either way, music takes priority over writing for me so its unlikely you'll see me writing any short stories any time soon.

Video Games
Reviews: I love the idea of writing video game reviews, especially for some of the less recognized games on the market. However, music is the priority and it's unlikely you'll see me doing any formalized video game review until spring of 2012 (I may get other people to do it though).

Other
As I mentioned before, we've mostly been doing behind the scenes stuff for the past few months. Overall, I still don't feel like we've accomplished that much, but we're making strides in the right direction. If I had to guess right now, I'd say that we're looking at an average of 4-5 posts per month for the next year or so. This would be a historic low judging by previous standards, but I feel that we can let the existing posts speak for themselves as more people find their way to the site here. This should also free up some time for me to focus on more of that behind the scenes stuff that I've been so keen on doing recently.

Overall
We're not dead yet. The next few years look like a significant transition period so things are subject to change at a whim (although we'll try to maintain some sort of flexible posting schedule). Just enjoy what we have so far and look forward to the future.

-Met_OutSpoken/Reomet

Please Vote

I've been very busy with lots of stuff going on. The stuff I'm supposed to be posting here is backlogged almost as far back as June so it'll take me a while to get stuff sorted. In the meantime, please vote for Russell Bell in this contest, and check out the rest of his music as well as his new project.

Metroid: 25 Years

No, I didn't completely forget about the 25th anniversary of the video game that started it all for me. I can't really say that I've been busy, just that I've been lazy in posting. There is a lot of stuff I plan to do with RPS in the future and I have a lot of posts I want to write, it's just not getting done. I'll step it up in the coming month, but in the meantime this is my "filler" seeing as the 25th anniversary of Metroid was about a week ago. The Metroid franchise has some great music (most of it by Kenji Yamamoto) and if I had never done a google search for Super Metroid music, I would've never found OverClocked ReMix. As a result of this event, there have been two albums that have come to my attention courtesy of OCR.

Harmony of a Hunter (OCR thread here): Harmony of a Hunter is a two disc album of about 2 and a half hours containing music from various artists and in different styles. Overall, I've been very impressed with the general quality of the music, although not strictly up to OCR standards, pretty darn close. There's about a 40% chance we'll feature something from this album as a SotW in the coming year, largely depends on Marim's reaction to the album as I currently have a large project in the works.

Crystal Flash EP (OCR thread here): One of the tracks in this album has already been posted on OCR and I must say I love the style. This is some refreshing stuff that I'll definitely be recommending to everyone interested. I can almost guarantee that this album will soon see action as a SotW (likely the track already on OCR). Personally, I have listened to this album 7 times in the last 3 days; very impressive for someone like me who's usually absorbed in soundtracks while working. Overall, this album comes with extremely high recommendation from myself. The piano, etheral, IDM style is absolutely perfect for a Metroid remix album and you gotta love the cover art.

Metroid Suite (OCR thread here): It's not an album, but it's an epic 10 minute or so tribute to the music of Metroid done by Shnabubula (Samuel Ascher-Weiss). Definitely worth watching the video on ign, but if you just want to download it, go here.

What you have here is a lot of music from a very good established video game franchise remixed by experienced musicians who've really put something together. Lot's of good stuff to listen to here.

Administrative Changes

We've been having a busy summer here at RPS, we've all got our own stuff going on, but we're also trying to post and keep our blog updated. I've promoted Marim to administrator due to Reogan's increased absence. You can definitely thank her for all her updates to every single Song of the Week and Song of the Day post by adding the title and artist. Also, I finally linked every single OCR track to the review thread on OCR. Due to this there may be an influx of readers from OCR. This brings me to the final administrative issue that we have yet to resolve: tagging. Right now the Song of the Week series should be sufficiently tagged so that you can simply find the OverClocked ReMix tag and find all of the content we've looked at coming out of OCR. However, there are plenty of fictional stories and other features we've done on RPS that have tags that need to be consolidated. Therefore, consolidating tags is definitely on our agenda, as long as at least getting a few posts up each month (once a day is no longer realistic). There should be a few posts coming your way in the future. Personally, I'm working on 2 drafts right now, both involving music (one's a SotW) and there are also several other related feature drafts that we've yet to post simply because we haven't had time to thoroughly proofread them. Overall, if you have any suggestions about the content you'd like to see here or some other administrative changes we can make to improve the site, please contact me.

A possibly problematic government bill

Bill S.978 might pose some problems to some of our readers and authors. Here is a good video explaining it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ib7-vSrp6y8

Video Games: Prologue

Before I begin putting up a lot of posts revolving around video games, I'd like to go through some background stuff. I've been playing video games for a while, but I'm busy enough that having games on my GameCube, GameBoy Advance, iPod Touch, Cell Phone, and PC is enough for me. Beyond the games that I actively play, I've watched several walkthroughs of games I do not own. Overall, I'm hoping that my thoughts on the matter aren't completely useless. Eventually I might refine this such as I did to Song of the Week, but for now we'll be going through a variety of potential ideas and concepts that we have about video games as well as reviewing games we've played.

May(hem)

May(hem) is my version of March Madness. Basic idea: post every day of May, continue it into June, and give Arkive his long awaited debut. Here's what you can expect to start seeing:

Song of the Week: Both Marim and I have plans to get one up every Wednesday and every Saturday (.5).

Behind Closed Doors: I'm just about done with chapter 8 which will definitely appear in May. As for the rest of it... I'm in the middle of a plot crisis

Puns: Arkive's got a lot of these.

Random Thoughts: Arkive will probably go a long way toward reviving this obscure series.
Newspapers: Fictional news with a point... Arkive.

Video Game Reviews, Ideas, Discussion: At RPS we've always maintained that video games are a complex form of art resulting in anything from simple entertainment to a comprehensive experience. Arkive has ideas to make games, I have ideas to review games and talk about what I'm looking forward to *coughmasseffect3cough*.

Thursday Thoughts: It's easy and fairly well liked (in my experience), so why not?

Reogan?: Haven't even talked to him about this site in almost a month. Let's see if we can bring him back.

Overall:
This is going to be hard to maintain. Any and all help would be much appreciated.

Protagonist Records Shutting Down

As much as I wish it were an April Fool's joke, it's true. Check the link out for full details. This kind of presents a major problem if all our Song of the Week links die, so we'll begin looking at alternative sources. Protagonist Records has been a big part of what got me started on Song of the Week here at RPS, especially with its revival when Marim joined. I've already dropped by the announcement page and left a comment and I'd appreciate it if you did as well if you were a fan of the music I took from there. SGX has done a great job of creating an awesome home for independent electronic artists and many of the tunes I heard from Protagonist have given me lots of inspiration. I look forward to hearing from SGX in the future and I hope Protagonist will eventually be restored.