RIP Lou Reed - 71

According to a Rolling Stone article, Velvet Underground front man Lou Reed has died with the cause of death unknown/unreleased as yet. A pioneer in the New York art scene, his work with Velvet Underground and plentiful solo work earned him recognition and fame - his album Transformer being the most accessible and popular.

Saturday Soundtrack: International Karate

A very well produced title back in the days of 1985/86 when the home video game revolution was in full swing and martial arts were experiencing another boom in popularity. From the opening titles and credits, you can tell that a lot of work has been put in to the animation, thought sadly the beat em up game play is still a basic, albeit button-mashingly joyful affair. Music occasionally stutters and its various parts get out of sync with each other to resync later on, but I think this is quite charming of a game that is nearly 30 years old. 

Fists as big as your hand!

Et tu, Microbrute?

It all starred innocently enough; an Arturia newsletter came in around the Sunday night with a link to some kind of teaser page hosted at their site. It wasn't until I had a look at some of the comments, most notably from Portishead's Adrian Udley, that I realised that these quotes were in relation to a new hardware synth to follow up on the Minibrute.

Volca Keys Review

As all signs from Korg seem to be pessimistic, it looks like the Volca Bass synthesiser won't be available to pick up and purchase until around mid to late October. One school of thought says that customer demand is the reason, while others report that a lost container of units aboard a shipping vessel are to blame. 

Either way, to salve my need to get twiddling, I found that despite the hype around the Volcas, plenty of shops in and around London's Denmark street had single units of the Volca Keys in stock. As I had recently received a tenancy deposit back, I was allowed to by the powers that be to buy one to hook up to my existing Volca Beats and get fiddling.

Updates

I haven't been keeping this blog as up to date as I should for a variety of annoying, real-life reasons. Sufficed to say I do have some things to talk about and will be trying to add these on the blog shortly and get updated.

Things to come include a thorough review of my Volca Keys, the return of the Saturday Soundtrack video games nostalgia-fest, new synth hardware and hopefully even some new music as well.

Korg Volca Keys Unboxing