I think this is number seven? Here's something that I found in the shared files on the network at university in 2005 or so, put up there by someone I knew as Steveo, who used to stay in the same residence as me and who is now the Earl of Cumbria or something. He was into stuff that was on the pretentious side, and alongside Stratovarius and Pink Floyd he had a fairly large collection of songs by a band I'd heard the name of called Dream Theater. Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence was the first song that I heard from them, but Scenes from a Memory is the one that has stayed in my mind the longest.

Dream Theater are possibly one of the most recognizable names in progressive rock/metal, a cousin of the power metal genre I was familiar with, where music is characterized by its length and complexity. And there's no doubt that they're a group of incredibly talented musicians, but a lot of the time I feel they lean a bit outside actual music in the traditional sense and into the territory of show-off wank that happens to be in the shape of music. Scenes from a Memory does contain a certain amount of this (take for example The Dance of Eternity, a song in every time signature known to man and some from space) but it's connected so wonderfully together, with a story about solving a murder that happened 100 years ago through what Wikipedia tells me is called past-life regression therapy. Oddly, I feel I got an even better experience out of this album by downloading the songs individually as the connection allowed, before eventually buying it for myself, rather than being able to listen to the album beginning to end at first - a mountain of themes and references are woven through its 77 minutes so I could discover them gradually song by song, and it was another step in the idea of telling stories through music that I'd come to love.

The highlight for me is the wonderful ballad The Spirit Carries On, which builds gradually into a triumphant reprise of the very start of the album. As it was one of the last songs that I downloaded, it was all the more effective at tying together the story and calling back to this simple guitar strumming that I'd heard in the opening. It made me want to take my own attempts at music in a more story-focused direction, but I wasn't anywhere near being close to being able to pull that off at the time (and doing something of this complexity will frankly always be beyond me).

What, yes, okay, I'll keep doing it. How are you gentlemen - formative album five is the soundtrack to Zero Wing!

This might seem a bit of an absurd choice because people know and love this game mostly for its farcically poor translation, but I really wanted to include something that represented my roots in loving game music. I thought about a few different soundtracks to represent it - Frank Klepacki's guitar smashings on Command and Conquer, the excellent soundtrack to the first Soul Blade game (which I actually started writing this post about before changing my mind) - then settled on this due to it being the most power metal thing ever forced through a 16-bit FM chip.

It really shows where the sound I loved came from - game soundtracks at the time had to rely on synthesis unless they wanted to devote 75% of their cartridge space to music alone, and I think that forced music for action games to be attention-grabbing with a strong focus on melody to get its energy across. This was a combination of sounds that I didn't know existed in "real" music for a very long time, but now that I understand where the roots of a lot of this came from I've begun to recognize a lot of influence from early metal in games (take Doom for example, which lifted some Alice in Chains and Metallica songs wholesale).

The composition that went into the Zero Wing background musics is something that still impresses me, despite the Megadrive showing off its comparatively poor sound chip through its bizarre and alien efforts to sound like drums and electric guitars - the sound of that attempt is just immensely nostalgic to me. And the intricacy of the drums particularly stands out!

In the early 2000s the music industry was at war with the Internet. Peer to peer sharing programs like Napster and Kazaa were making redistribution of music (not to mention viruses) easier than it ever had been before and the lost revenue was preventing Lars Ulrich from buying a fourth yacht. Noise Records was one of the first record labels I saw really embracing this wave instead of pushing against it, with a tagline of "Download, Burn, Spread". For each album they released, you could go on to their site and get a ZIP file with a song or two as well as cover and disc artwork and so on, to print your own copies of a single at home which you were encouraged to give away everywhere. It was a concept very much like shareware music, before people stopped caring about physical media entirely and everything was put on Youtube instead.

Iron Savior was the band that led me to discover the Noise Records site, but on it I found an absolute goldmine of similar bands in the power metal genre. One of the other standouts was Kamelot, with a K as in Mortal Kombat. Unexpectedly given the stupidity of their name, they had a more sophisticated kind of flavour to their music - still heavily guitar-based but with the addition of orchestrations, piano parts and experimenting with traditionally non-metal instruments that I'd never even heard of like the bandoneon and djembe. Vocalist Roy Khan also had an unusual tone for a metal singer, very smooth and measured compared to the vocal acrobatics that are more characteristic of the genre.

This particular album was about to be released when I first discovered them, and I think it remains my favourite - Epica is the first of a two-part adaptation of Faust, and continued my fascination with music that told a story. There's such a variety of different styles here, each song having its own unique characteristics.

"A list of 10 Albums which have greatly influenced my taste in music. One title per day for 10 days. No explanations, no reviews, only covers." That's what the thing I was tagged in on my mostly defunct Facebook account said, and it gave me something to do, honestly. And what's the point of posting just covers - I'm going to share my memories and thoughts about them anyway!

I wasn't into music for a long time, but Iron Maiden was the band that changed that (actually it might have been Crush 40's melodic rock as a stepping stone to this but that's a much dorkier-sounding story). Their songs were so different, melodic and interesting - and were made even more fascinating when I found the fansite http://www.ironmaidencommentary.com/ with in-depth background on what every Iron Maiden song means. Discovering a thirteen-minute retelling of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner (which we had recently slogged through in English lessons) opened a completely new world to me in terms of what you were even allowed to do with music.

I first noticed them on the soundtrack to Carmageddon 2 which I was playing with a school friend, then went home, dialled into Freeserve and downloaded a load of their songs from Napster - from there, we gradually spread them around our group of friends. After a long time downloading random songs, Powerslave was the first ever album I bought for myself, from a music shop when on holiday in Germany. It was a good time to get into them because Bruce Dickinson had returned to the band very recently on Brave New World, and these albums were part of the soundtrack to our 6th year of school whenever we wrestled 5ive and Steps off the stereo.

I miss our common room.

I keep on saying that I'm going to keep this thing updated again and then usually instantly forget - but there's still no better place for a long-lasting archive. Therefore, I really should announce that The Poison Skies is finished and released after so long in production!


It's a 20-track album based on kjorteo's novel The Afflicted - it's the first album I've produced with vocals and digital instruments instead of through Modplug Tracker, and it features songs written variously by both of us. You can listen for free on Bandcamp or download a digital version - for the first time, physical copies are also available, and I'm immensely pleased with them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPZcpGdVShk

This is a preview of something I have been aching to show off for a very long time!

"The Poison Skies" is a joint project by me and kjorteo, with artwork by Sparkyopteryx. It's a concept album inspired by the characters and story of Kjorteo's novel "The Afflicted" (and you can read the first chapter of the online edition behind that link). "Stand Our Ground" is the fifteenth(!) track, and is about Jonathan Coral, a character from the story who is determined to keep standing up to the wickedness and madness of the world despite his exile in the wilderness.

Over the couple of years since I released any new songs I've been trying to learn more about music production, graduating from my previous Amiga-style sound (and I have to thank ravenworks for giving me so much advice on vocal mixing). After experimenting with my own vocals on The Day the Night Slept, this is my first fully voiced album - and I hope you enjoy the sound as much as I do!

You can hear the high-quality version of this track on Bandcamp, along with a selection of previews from the rest of the album! I have just a few more tracks left to record - hopefully the full version will be available soon.

Nova Genesis (Ad Splendorem Angeli Triumphantis): Choirs split into male and female chanting passages from Psalm 68 and the Apocalypse of St John. Duke Nukem speaks Latin.

Il Cigno Nero: Starts off sounding like it's going to be slow-paced but quickly turns fast and choir-supported as well, with high notes from Alessandro Conti singing quite beautifully, but I have no idea what about because it's in Italian. The last passages of this, with heavenly choirs and trumpets, sound like what I'd expect from the final song on any album by a reasonable person.

Rosenkreuz (The Rose and the Cross): This was one of the singles released before, so I thought I would be prepared for this, but the choir of the apocalypse is still here and is now joined by a very active string section which gets its own solo.

Anahata: The first track not to feature any Latin. But what it does have is a glorious John Williams-styled orchestral beginning that turns into a mid-paced song without quite so many choirs (then again, this isn't saying much) but with an equally pompous horn section.

Il Tempo Degli Dei: The booklet quotes Jesus Christ. (Equally applicable: "The booklet quotes. Jesus Christ!") Like Il Cigno Nero, this is entirely in Italian, it's upbeat and wondrous and I have no idea what it's saying.

One Ring to Rule them All: Gollum!!! I can't tell if it's the Andy Serkis version from the films or just an impression of it, but it's Gollum and his precioussss. I seriously thought that this song was in Orcish or some other made up language, but it's actually entirely in English (the first track to have this honour) with enough layers on top of it to disguise it as such. It's what you'd expect, seven minutes of being absolutely stunned by the excess of it all.

Notturno: I think we're actually calming down a bit here. By this album's standards this is a fairly low-key performance, still full of orchestrations but slower and dare I say it, calmer.

Prometheus: No, that was just to make you think you were safe. We've already covered this - the lyrics hide a code that somebody managed to work out a part of, and that's that the pre-chorus lyrics encrypt a binary number that works out as 81, which the explanation tells us is the Perfectum Numerum Quem Noviem Novies Multiplacata Componiunt and invites us to use this as a starting point to decode the rest of the album. You absolute wankers.

King Solomon and the 72 Names of God: I seriously think this is in Yiddish or Hebrew or something. Possibly both. I don't even know if I can make intelligent commentary any more. Very technical track. I'll need to listen to this another twelve times before I can even process it.

Yggdrassil: There's so... much of everything. I don't know.

Of Michael the Archangel and Lucifer's Fall Part II: Codex Nemesis:
Chapter I: Codex Nemesis Alpha Omega: You...
Chapter II: Symphonia Ignis Divinus (The Quantum Gate Revealed): ...absolute...
Chapter III: The Astral ConvergenceL ...wankers.
Chapter IV: The Divine Fire of the Archangel: What?!
Chapter V: Of Psyche and Archetypes (System Overloaded): I seriously can't do this any more.

Thundersteel (Cinematic version): It is a bonus track.

You absolute wankers.

Ten out of ten.

It's like a parallel universe here in Germany, seeing GammaRay's latest release just sitting there at the end of a convenience store's music shelf instead of only being available on import... and on vinyl, as well! I really would have bought it despite not having any means to play it if it had been an album with remotely attractive artwork.

(There are disputes on how to typeset it, I've gone for camel case here because that was what it said on the back of the sleeve.)

I've been toying with a new version of Shreddage and I'm really pleased with how things are beginning to come together now! Here's a sample of one of my earliest coherent songs redone in it.