Here we go. Three tracks added to the masterful discography of K.H.D., in his personal style of melodic gabber. This is Shyfted Minds’ ninety-ninth release! BIG DEAL. YEAH? Click the cover image to get to the release’s page. It’s good. I listened to it, and you can trust me. Who am I? ON WHOSE AUTHORITY DO YOU ASK SUCH QUESTIONS?
Here we gooooooooooo! Scorpyd’s doin that boom boom thing again. Two tracks, typical aggressive style, on most digital retailers again, but we’re linking to Google cause Google is the least dicks. ENJOY!
K.H.D. pointed out to me this morning that the album art images for his new album and Red Ankh’s UNIVERSE weren’t visible from his computer. I checked on this, and it turns out that Google Photos has started making all of its URLs private, unless a special share link is generated, and the image source URL is extracted from that. Annoying! Especially since these new source URLs are so damned LONG (five hundred ninety-seven characters long, to be precise)! Any who, as you can see above, they are working for every one now in stead of just me, and you can actually click on them to navigate to the music. COOL? COOL.
Time for an other master piece! This is his second album of the year, and it’s pure audio magic. Melodic gabber is the focus but not the constant, following the pattern of shift toward interluding down tempo and theme music from his previous recent releases. It’s totally top notch, and totally free. Click the image above to escape in to a beautiful, infinite melody space!
Red Ankh is still plugging away at revising their old albums for rerelease, but some thing came over them and they jumped back from the on-deck Green album to UNIVERSE, the instrumental, many-genre-blending album from two thousand five, the one written between This is Our New Age and Bronze. UNIVERSE is comprised of four long pieces that progress through organic styles of music, with a hard core/gabber alternate version of a refrain section thrown in for good measure! The first track of this album, A Little Bit of Every Thing, is the second fifteen minute plus track to be written under the Red Ankh name, the first being Made Zon from their second album, MASTER SYNTH. A Little Bit of Every Thing is twenty-six minutes and twenty-seven seconds long, which also means that it beats out both A Change of (Speechless) Reasons and Bittersweet in length, making it the longest Red Ankh song to date!
More than any thing else, A Change of (Speechless) Reasons, released as a single track in 2010, was inspired by UNIVERSE. As such, UNIVERSE and A Change of (Speechless) Reasons are together the most diverse Red Ankh releases to have been released so far, though where the former borrows from electronic genres as IDM, drum ‘n’ bass, and trance, UNIVERSE downplays its use of synths to leave more room to explore classical, jazz, and an assortment of folk genres. CAN YOU DIG IT? Click above image to acquire this monster for FREE!
It’s epic fantasy on the dance floor! Who said European folk music is dead? Well, I haven’t heard it… but most were surely thinking it. And, okay, there’s also a darker-styled track and some thing more reminiscent of the melodic Enzyme records sound, and they’re totally worth your time too. Click the image above to pay what you want for this five track release, which includes collaboration with Shyft, DMT, and MissCyainide!
We’re getting pretty close to Shyfted Minds’ one hundredth release… I wonder what happens then.
The short version: WOAH CHECK THIS OOOOUT!
The long version: I talk about money some times. Yeah, yeah. Do art for the love of art. Well, it’s kind of hard to work to fulfill your dream all of the time when you’re spending half of your life working to fulfill some one else’s, and half of the rest of your time recovering from doing so, with the other regular responsibilities of living to boot. In other words, working for some one else to make money to live really puts a damper on artistic endeavors. But most artists have to live this way, so why do I deserve to live off of my art? Well, I guess that I don’t, but it sure would be nice. And, hey, I don’t think that I’m a special case. All complicated art is work, and I think that all artists should be able to live off of their work. If you agree, you should check out Patreon. It’s a web site that is similar to Kickstarter, but it’s not about kick-starting any specific project. It’s a place where people can set up recurring donations with the idea that artists can get regular income and be regularly inspired to produce new material. Patrons can donate as little as one dollar per month, and in return get exclusive access to what ever the artist lists as recurring rewards. It encourages a more personal exchange between artists and fans also, which I find lacking in today’s society. So check it out, and, please, if you delight in the idea of Shyft being able to write books and music for a living, contribute what you can here. It’s not just for me and the fans of my work, but for Shyfted Minds as a record label and the other artists on here, for future artists of SHM, as promotion and producing all of the releases all takes time and money that I rarely can afford.
Even longer: school’s over and I have a degree, but it’s a BS degree that’s kinda intended for use with a doctorate that I don’t have. What I do have, that came as an added bonus to my degree, is a load of debt to the government. Hey. I couldn’t get a job at the time, so loan-funded school/living expenses was my only option. In order to make minimum payments and still be financially secure, I need to get a pretty well-paying job… or work more than one full time job. This comes down to actually landing some thing with my degree, being over-stressed by the service industry, and/or never having time for art and hating my self. Yes, I’d probably feel fulfilling for me to work as a research associate or a low-end counselor, and I live in an area with a decent job market, but it’s not what I want my energy put toward. Getting a stable income of, say, five hundred dollars per month for my art would make a huge difference. I could work some mindless full time job where I’m able to exercise my body and listen to music, and not be very mentally fatigued by the time that I get home every day- I could still regularly work on stories and music.
Yes. The life of an artist is a struggle. Does it ought to be a struggle? I understand that there are plenty of people out there who are dysfunctional without good art in their lives, and they are also quite poor, and I would rather they get the art that helps them for free. I also understand that there is already plenty of art available from people far richer than I and more motivated, more willing to sacrifice than I am, but that doesn’t mean that artists like my self should die off. Good art is some thing that the world can’t get enough of, just as it can’t get enough well-educated pioneers of thought (there’s a similarly shameful problem with the education system in this country). I fancy the idea of making a living off of my art so that I can love my job, so that I can fully embrace my true identity, and so that, some day, I might be able to vigorously patronize many other great yet struggling artists out there.
This Shyft release is a special one. Why did it take me weeks to update the Shyfted Minds site to reflect it, then? Well, because I MOVED TO DENVER FROM MINNEAPOLIS! But, that only takes a day of driving and, like, two days of getting the new apartment situated. YEAH. AND I GOT IN TO THIS REALLY GOOD GROOVE OF JOB HUNTING AND WRITING MAH BOOK! Okay, so I can be disorganized some times.
Either way, here it is! The sixth installment of the Synthetic Experiments series is the greatest experiment yet! I’d tell you all about it, but there’s no sense in paraphrasing the description on the release page, if you just going to see the original text soon any way. Just know that it’s two beefy tracks that are only a little comfortable with being called ‘psy-gabber’ and click on the image above. Oh. And it’s an other free release. It combines many of my favorite styles, which, to some, clash, so it needs all of the ease of access that it can get!
-so click the image above to get your cyber hands on it. That’ll link ya to Google Play, because I favor Google and prefer their layout to, say, Beatport, but you can look it up on Beatport, Spotify, Itunes, et cetera and find it at those locations too. And, if you’re really lazy, below is a Youtube stream of the title track! Drum is loud. Drum goes boom. Other synthetic instruments do their things. Yeah!
Yep, Shyft’s fourth installment of Synthetic Experiments is finally available! SLOW BUT SURE. RIGHT? And, as a special treat, K.H.D. has made his first contribution to the Synthetic Experiments project, and this fifth volume is also now ready to be heard! These two stand out in other ways, though: they are being released on Bandcamp early, before retail releases, and they are both available on Bandcamp for FREE. Money is accepted and appreciated of course, but you can input an amount of zero to bypass payment. I still want Shyfted Minds to be remembered as offering free music, and, with this Shyft release being one of the least DJ friendly to date, I’d really like to make sure that people just have the chance to have and listen to the unconventional oddness when ever and where ever they please. Hit the images above to get your cyber fingers dipped in to these!
Shyft’s release will hit digital retailers on May fifth and K.H.D.’s will hit may ninth. Since Bandcamp is right here, this is mainly important for Spotify streaming, I imagine. Speaking of other outlets, click here to see K.H.D.’s video for Lebe Jetzt!.
Stay tuned! Scorpyd also has a new release in the mastering phase, Shyft has two other Synthetic Experiments volumes near completion, one focusing on psychedelic trance influence and the other on industrial horror atmospheres. He’s also reviving an old, instrumental epic within the realm of Red Ankh…
Shyfted Minds 