New Website

I won't be using this blog anymore, because my friend Terran Olson just finished a new website for me, benjiemesser.com. See ya there-

Easter gigs

Three gigs this weekend- drums on Friday, piano on Saturday, trombone on Sunday- kind've digging that-

random tracks

We just started a "DJ Elements" category on Productiontrax, for anything expressly meant for sampling or live use by DJ's, and we started giving our contributors a choice to offer permission to sample their work (or not). So I wrote two tracks at the end of the day yesterday to get the categories started- each is available both as a full track and as separate instruments- here are the full tracks:

Latin Chillout

Trance

This is really my job? Really?

ABD Soundtrack CDs now available!

The At Best Derivative soundtrack CD is back from the factory! It includes 36 tracks and almost an hour of music. Mark Nokes plays lead guitar, Eliot Ventimiglia plays saxophone, and I do all the rest with a computer and some magic beans. There's retro-rock, chill-out jazz, tango, orchestral, surf-spy, kung-fu-style asian battle music, a let's-get-it-on funk tune, even a track with me singing in three parts like the Eagles, if the Eagles all had an identical slight lisp. Excerpts are in the gray flash player on the left.

Soundtrack CDs, DVDs of the movie, and other ABD-related paraphernalia will be on sale here sooner or later, but for now, you can send me $10 through PayPal by clicking the button on the right, or email me for my postal address and then mail me a check for $10. Either way I'll send your CD via Pony Express.

Chicken-lovin' Terrorist

Just released- a complete scene from At Best Derivative:

Do you have your tickets yet?

Boomin'

I made a short film last weekend as part of the Almost Famous Film Festival 48-hr challenge. Our PIFMG team already had a composer- Bogdan Rygalski- so I signed on as boom boy (which meant I held the microphone), and I ended up helping out with the lighting too (I guess that means I was an "assistant grip"?) It was the first time I'd been on a movie set, and I learned a ton. It was interesting and boring and fun and hard work all at once. I guess only the top twenty teams even get their films screened, so I don't know if ours will make it or not. It's a goofy 5-minute middle-class-economic-fear comedy about a guy who can't pay his mortgage and ends up in a sort of alternate horror universe of the poor.

Anyway, if you want to come see it- don't! Come see At Best Derivative on March 6 instead. I'm sure this one will be posted on YouTube in a week or so, and I'll put it up here for all to see.

Looking for Music Samples?

The streaming flash players I had installed on the left suddenly got really buggy, so I had to remove them. If you've come here looking for samples of my music (hi, 48-hr folks!), check out my the tracks on my myspace page for now. Hopefully they'll be back here shortly.