Alright it’s finally time to hit the stage and once again do what we enjoy most, rocking out hard and heavy on stage for your entertainment! After a year and a half long hiatus from playing live we’re finally coming back for an awesome night of hard rock to kick off the launch of our new album! On Friday April 9th the Starlite Room on 10030 102 Street NW in Edmonton, AB will be hosting us for our CD Release Party. Sharing the stage with us will be Grounded Star and our favorite Canadian band and previous Sonic Band of the Month Winner PORTAL!
To say you have to be there would be an understatement… YOU MUST BE THERE! It’s going to be a wicked show, with an amazing line up and at a great live venue as well, plus you can pick up a copy of our brand new album which is being released at the show. Over a year in the making, the new album showcases the evolution of Living Illusion with a focus on quality, progression, and a refined style of songwriting… and it sounds freaking HUGE! It’s been a long time coming and we’re all stoked to finally get to share it with the world.
To be more precise this would be the title or prologue theme to Blaster Master. This game was an awesome one from the Nintendo Entertainment System. I wasn’t actually introduced to it until last year by Classy Man over at The Game Heroes, I know it’s crazy… both that I’ve never played it, and that I still play NES games. This is a little different than the other covers, this time around there was a lot of electronic instrumentation to keep the eerie and haunting feel from the original version of the song. There is some guitar and drums but it is mostly just sounds, effects, synths, and various other good stuff.
Finally, after months of procrastination and weeks of hard work, it has arrived! The new LivingIllusion.com. With the music and entertainment industry going in the direction they are I figured it best to ensure that our new site be built around easy access for visitors to find new content from the band. I wanted this new site to reflect the constant stream of updates and content that we plan on posting while keeping the site dynamic and giving people a reason to come back. Not to get into too much tech speak, but I used a blogging/content management system called wordpress to build the site.
So big things are in the plans for us these days. We’re going to be releasing our new album at our CD Release Party which is booked at the Starlite Room in Edmonton on April 9th 2010. We’re going to be playing with not only our friends, but one of our favorite bands, PORTAL! We’re going to be pushing to get our record on the radio with our good friends over at Oddball Productions, plus more things that I don’t want to mention quite yet. I will have a proper announcement for the cd release party in the coming weeks once we have tickets, posters and all that stuff pulled together. It’s going to be a wicked show, not to mention that we’re finally releasing our album!
Alright, well I’m off to bed, it has been a long day, but it’s great to finally have the new site finished (for the most part). There still will be lots of updates and changing pages in the coming weeks as I fill out and update old content pages plus pulling new merch together and posting songs!
Feel free to check out the site and post a comment to let me know what you think about the new site and if you think I should make any changes!! I’m always open to creative criticism and want to make the site as awesome as possible: http://www.livingillusion.com
With the holiday season starting to come to an end I figured its best to post this sooner rather than later. That being said, here’s our rendition of the song Carol of the Bells aka Ukrainian Bell. This song always reminds me of the movie Home Alone. I used pictures from Fail Blog and Epic Fail to make the video for the song and it turned out quite hilarious. Guitar, bass and drums are used for the instrumentation as per usual.
Another week down and another rock cover to share. This week I did the introduction theme to Nintendo game Metroid. It’s a great tune and has a very cool time signature change in the middle. I think that the production on this one turned out really good as well. Although, it’s still no where near the production quality of our new album that’s coming out soon.
This song I recorded over a year ago and have just never gotten around to making a blog post about it. I actually learned how to play this song back when the TV show was still on the air in the 90′s, back around the same time I was learning how to play guitar. The X-Men Cartoon that ran on Fox Kids every Saturday morning was my favorite cartoon by far. Since I posted the song to YouTube, it has received over 66,000 views!
A special note needs to be written about this song because it was used by the Nostalgia Critic in one of the videos on ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com. It was used in the TGWTG Team Brawl video which can be viewed here. Special thanks to Doug Walker (aka That Guy with the Glasses) for putting this in the video. If you wait til the end credits of the video you can see the band name! When I saw the video I literally freaked. I have been following TGWTG since his YouTube days and was so amazed to see that he used our cover in one of his videos.
Alright well that’s enough talk about the song, you can check it out below.
It has been a busy week so here is another update, this time for a hard rock version of the theme from the Mega Man 3 Snake Man Level! I chose this song because of all the levels in Mega Man 3 (which is by far my favorite Mega Man game) this one was the stage I always beat first whenever I played. In the end I think the song came together quite well and sounds pretty wicked. The track is complete with drums, bass and guitar.
Alright so if you’ve never heard of the Desert Bus for Hope Charity here’s the run down. The comedy sketch group Loading Ready Run (http://www.loadingreadyrun.com) from Vancouver Island (Victoria) get together once a year to play the most boring game ever “Desert Bus” in order to raise money for Child’s Play. Child’s Play is a charity organization that brings toys and games into hospitals for children to play with while there recovering
Desert Bus was a mini game on an unreleased Sega CD Game called Penn & Teller’s Smoke and Mirrors. In the game you have to drive a bus in real time from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada. The bus always veers slowly to the right, you can’t go above a maximum speed of 45mph and it takes 8 hours (can’t pause) to get your 1 Point for the drive. Once you’ve made it all the way to Vegas you can decide if you want to drive back to Tucson to get another point. And no, the scenery doesn’t change for your 8 hour stint for the most part. It’s a horrible game that was more of a joke than anything else. Sidenote: If you crash a tow truck takes you all the way back to either Tuscon or Vegas in real time.
Currently the team at http://www.desertbus.org have a total of 13 points and over 110 hours of non stop driving day and night with no crashes. They have raised over $85,000 (even I contributed)! Wanting to go above and beyond with my support I took the honor of tracking a hard rock cover of the Desert Bus Theme from the game. It’s the intro song and the only time you get to hear music, like I said it’s extremely boring.
Desert Bus Theme – Hard Rock Version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9ESzI_NuF0
Back at it again. Yay for video game covers, haha. So if everything goes as planned, we’re gonna start doing this weekly. Basically we’re going to be taking songs from our childhood and recording hard rock versions of them with our own arrangements. Right now we’re mostly going to be focusing on video games and tv shows although we have plans to start doing other songs as well. This is something we’re doing just for fun and don’t want to take it seriously. Now that that is out of the way…
While most people are out drinking and having fun on their weekends we’re busy being giant nerds and recording hard rock versions of random things from our childhood. We decided to dive in to the world of the Nintendo this weekend and recorded the Jogging theme from Mike Tyson’s Punch Out. It’s too bad we didn’t have a pink jumpsuit because we could have made a sweet live action video to go along with this theme, haha.
Alright it’s finally time to hit the stage and once again do what we enjoy most, rocking out hard and heavy on stage for your entertainment! After a year and a half long hiatus from playing live we’re finally coming back for an awesome night of hard rock to kick off the launch of our new album! On Friday April 9th the Starlite Room on 10030 102 Street NW in Edmonton, AB will be hosting us for our CD Release Party. Sharing the stage with us will be Grounded Star and our favorite Canadian band and previous Sonic Band of the Month Winner PORTAL!
Over a year in the making, the new album showcases the evolution of Living Illusion with a focus on quality, progression, and a refined style of songwriting… and it sounds freaking HUGE! It’s been a long time coming and we’re all stoked to finally get to share it with the world.
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