Happy New Year 2010!

There have been better years for me, I must say, than 2009. So I say good riddance to this one and hope that 2010 will be better not just for me but for us all. I know about so many people who had bad luck in 2009 and that not just because of the effects of the so called financial crisis. As some of you may know, I had to close down my business as a freelancer in the IT-sector in June of 2009 and afterwards got awfully sick. Currently I am suffering from a big depression which renders me unable to work. Currently I am living of unemployment benefit because of that and try hard to get on my feet again. But as I said, I know about not just a few people who also are hoping that 2010 things will work out better for them.

But while being one of the worst years so far in my life regarding to financial stuff and healt, 2009 was also a very creative years for me. In fact I released 25 songs this year. Not as much as in the most fruitfull 2004 and 2005 when I released 36/34 songs , but the highest number of songs since then. This may be due to the fact that I had more time on my hands to make music. Here's what my database says about my productivity over the first 5 years of the alionsonny project:

Year Songs Videos
2004 36 0
2005 34 0
2006 15 0
2007 14 5
2008 12 4
2009 25 4
--------------------
ALL: 126 14

I hope that 2010 may be even more creative and fruitfull than this year and all before. Happy New Year and all the best to you out there for 2010!

Merry Christmas and a little Christmas Carol

I want to wish all visitors of my website, all fans of my music, all friends and simply all you folks out there a merry Christmas. I have created a little christmas carol for you too. It is my personal version of the well known christmas carol "Ding Dong Merrily on High". It is a Reggae- /Ska-version. Yes, yes, I know it sounds crazy to think about doing that song in that particular genre. I myself first had some doubt about if this works but in the end it was quite simple. And I think the result is quite good:

Ding Dong Merrily on High - LISTEN
Ding Dong Merrily on High - DOWNLOAD

New Album "Reggae?" is now OUT FOR FREE DOWNLOAD!

Yes, like the previous four albums, this is a totally free download. No strings attached! It is released under the Creative Commons License Non Commercial No Derivs. You can either download it for a limited time from alionsonny.com (limited, because I have very little webspace on my hands) or from LastFM, where you can also pre-listen the songs if you don't want to download the whole 80 MB RAR-package without knowing what's is in it. To tell you a bit more about the album, just let me quote from my official release statement:

"Reggaelike" songs by alionsonny are getting fewer since a time, so the fifth album titled "Reggae?" consists of 13 "regaelike" tracks from the years 2007 to 2009. It is a real sequel of the album "This is not really Reggae", because it stretches the term "reggaelike" even more than its predecessor. While some tracks are in fact Reggae, some are "reggaelike" and some others are just "reggaqe influenced". This is another album which showcases the evolution of the alionsonny "reggaelike" style. The album starts with the new and rather fast track from 09 "Life goes on" and goes on with the slow dub track "Springtime 2009" from the same year. It contains in a wild mix with dubby tracks like "Aquatic Dub", experimental tracks like "Hamburg" and even more experimental style mixes like the second chapter of "The Knights of Dubwood Castle", a sequel of the track from the first album "XperiMental Reggae WorX" from 2004. The album even contains one of the rare vocal tracks by alionsonny, titled "Information Dub". Again this is in no way an album for Reggae purists.

So finally I got the fifth album released still in year 5 of the alionsonny project. This means at least an album a year. Not bad I think. Especially if you keep in mind, that I have loads of non-Reggae songs waiting to fill future albums on my harddisk. So the next album releases will be for sure NonReggae-Albums for sure. But for now: Have fun with this release!

New Song: "Days Of Our Years"

My latest song was born out of the idea to do a song in the typical 80's New Wave Style. First I was inspired by songs of bands like "The Cure", but I more and more was distracted from that path. Well, in one way I am sorry that I was not exactly able to follow that original path, but on the other hand another original work came out of that approach, a unique musical piece in the original and well know alionsonny style. The title of the song was inspired by Psalms 90:10.

DAYS OF OUR YEARS - LISTEN
DAYS OF OUR YEARS - DOWNLOAD

New Song: A Day At Ligeia Mare Beach

I released a new technolike teack again: My new song "A Day At Ligeia Mare Beach" is in no way reggaelike like "Mountainbiking on Mars" from the year 2005, but is indeed some kind of a sequel of it. Actually I planned to do a songseries like the "Drunken Joe" series in which I wanted to thematize several leisure activities on the celestial bodies in our solar system. Unfortunately that plan got lost over the years and the several other projects. When I read about the methane lakes on the saturn moon Titan recently and was working at the technolike track you are about to listen to, I had the idea to bring that old plan from 2005 to life again. I must say that I managed it quite well to catch the virtual athmosphere of a day at the beach of a methane lake on Titan. The song sounds cool, in fact ice cold and at the same time like sun and beach. Well, listen for yourself:
A Day At Ligeia Mare Beach - LISTEN
A Day At Ligeia Mare Beach - DOWNLOAD

New Video "Meditation One" is online!

Yes, it has been a while since my last video release. But this time I have something real good for you. It is a video in HD instead of the SD format which I am forced to use usually by my outdated camcorder. I simply cannot afford a new one. This is why my new video is mostly made up of foreign material. STOP: I know that there are some jealous folks out there who by now think how they can pee at my leg by picturing me as a copyright violator. But NO chance: I only used material available in the public domain or under a fitting Creative Commons License. Well, ain't I clever? ;) The result, from my point of view, is great. As soundtrack is used my latest track "Meditation One" from my planned series of musical pieces for my own meditation experiments. You can read about this here. You can also listen to the soundtrack HERE and download it HERE.





By the way: For the first time I am 100% more satisfied with the upload result at YouTube than at Vimeo. Vimeo has finally lost it's leadership in quality it had from my point of view for a long time. Not just that Vimeo offers only 500MB PER WEEK upload quota, which is simply laughable if you see that YouTube offers 2 GB all the time, every day, 24/7. The upload of the video took the same time of about 3 hours for a bit below 500 MB. Also the videoquality is now much better at YouTube as is the quality of sound, which allways was a point where I criticized YouTube for. Additionally you can see at the example of the video embedded above, that even the embedding works better with YouTube now. Vimeo is finally second choice. Greed for cash is not a good advisor.

Just some final words for the technical stuff: The video first was with moderate XVid compression of 1 1/2 Gigabytes size and looked just a bit better thatn the actually uploaded version. Because Vimeo just allows me 500 MB per week, I reduced the video to a bit less than 500 MB. Still it looks great. A upload of 1 1/2 GB would have taken 9 hours to upload and I don't trust the stability of a network connection as much, that I would risk 9 hours of upload time. You know: It hurts less if an upload crashes after less than 3 hours, than it would if the upload crashes after about 9 hours :D

New project "Alion Meditations" and first song

Yes, again I have started a new project. This time it is not an arbitrary decision, like: "Oh, currently I'm feeling like doing this or that too!" like all the other times I started some project. No, I was practically forced to do that project by my current miserable state of health. I will briefly explain it, because a detailed description of the project will follow for sure sometime. I've noticed that closing my eyes and doing a certain rocking body motion puts me in a very calm, meditative state, which makes the current severe pain much more tolerable and generally gives me more peace. But the sounds and influences of the outside world allways disturbed this meditative state and I wished that there would be music that maybe could help to shut down those external influences and/or deepen that meditative state. So I asked friends and acquaintances, of whom I knew that they were dealing with meditation and appropriate music. To my great surprise I found everything I could find described as "meditation music" terrible or inappropriate. So I came up with the idea of me going again as far as possible into the meditative state and to imagine how the appropriate music for my kind of meditation must sound like. I did that and I was amazed that I got a pretty good idea how this music would have to sound to and feel like ....right out of nowhere. So I got started working and created the first song.

Meditation One LISTEN
Meditation One DOWNLOAD

A meditation testrun was simply optimal and to my surprise it gave me the idea for the second song on which I am already working on. I feel in relation to this project like Tarzan lurching from one liana (Song) to the next to go somewhere. Where does this leading to? No idea ... but I am definately on the road.

...and again this site hasn't been updated for a while...

This time it is rather not because of lazyness, but because things went very bad recently both health- and financialwise (see previous blog) and I was quite unable to do much things. Still music has been created. Four songs have been published since the last update. So, enough words, let's get right to the facts:

Some time ago somebody came up with the idea to do a Halloween Songcontest. I do not really like that commercialized version of a ancient festivity and I allways chase those kids begging for sweets away from my door. But the idea of creating a scary, spooky song... well I liked it. And out of this idea I created the following funny tune:

D.E.M.O.N -The Enemy within (LISTEN)
D.E.M.O.N -The Enemy within (DOWNLOAD)

I don't know who exactly won the song contest. I do not know about any votes on that.. and I really don't care :D

As said before things are not going very well regarding my health recently. In fact it is getting worse, but I try hard to ignore that. At the time when I was feeling very bad, I created and published the following lovely melody out of frustration and anger:

SNAFU (LISTEN)
SNAFU (DOWNLOAD)

Ok, if your ears do not bleed yet, it goes on a bit more smooth and positive. When I realized that my healthstate was not getting better, how much I tried, I changed to "positive thinking mode". To moan, scream and shout is not really a solution in the end, right? As a signal to the outside world and the "evil", I created the following song, dripping of "positivity":

Life goes ON! (LISTEN)
Life goes ON! (DOWNLOAD)

...if fate should after that stretched middle finger still go on bothering me, I have published another load of positive vibrations yesterday:

Fear NO Evil (LISTEN)
Fear NO Evil (DOWNLOAD)

Ok, that's it so far. I still have some other news for you but they deserve a seperate news posting.

Call for Help (Support)

Hi Folks,
this is a call for help, something, I think you would have never imagined to read from me. But heavy conditions require heavy actions. To me, begging you out there for help is a heavy thing. Ok, so I'll describe what makes me doing that step:

Since 2007 I was self employed (freelancer), because I was offered some work at project from companies mainly from the US. I decided to become self employed, because the company I was working full time for at this time was about to go bancrupt. So instead of becomming unemployed I prefered to become self employed... with all the risk this carries inside. For the first year, everything went fine. It was not making me a rich man, but my girl and me could live of the cash comming in. But after a year two of the main contractors told me without prior notice, that the projects I was working at were either finnished or the staff was reduced. This caused far less money comming in and I wasn't able to pay our healthinsurance anymore. Well, we felt quite healthy back then and so this wasn't nice, but also no big deal.

In December 2009 one by one the other companies giving me work told that they cannot afford to pay me anymore. This process went on, until in June 2009 I had allmost no contractors anymore giving me work. I tried everything to acquire new contracts/work to do with little to no success. So at start of September it was unavoidable to report my girl and me as unemployed to the unemployment office, so they pay us at least unemployment benefit to have food and pay our rent. All the liitle cash I had saved on my bankaccount for "harder days" was used up. But now the REAL SH*T started: The folks at the unemployment office told us, that in order to get unemployment benefit, we need a health insurance. So we tried to get one, but all insurance companies
refused to give us health insurance. There's a law in germany since (I think so) 2007, which tells health insurance companies, that they must give a health insuranceto any german with no regard to if he had one before and no regard to financial or employment status. First the companies we called were trying to fool us by telling us the opposite. Well after I told them, that there's the law mentioned above, they started playing on time. This means they delay everything. And the unemployment office tells that they can't help it: They cannot pay us unemployment benefit unless we have health insurance. I think you get the problem.

So since September we are totally out of cash and weren't able o pay the rent. We get some support from neighbors and friends to at least have a bit of food on the table. But the landlord says we're gonna be kicked out of our flat if we do not pay the rent. Additionally (how fitting to the overall sh*t) my health is going down the drain. Not just that I am in a deeep depression, but also I have pain allmost everywhere in my body. I have (I think it is called that way) vertigo which makes for example a risky thing to ride a bike. I feel weak as sh*t am allways tired. Not the state I love to be in as you can imagine.

To keep it as short as possible: This is a call for help going to all the people out there who like my music, me or for whatever reason are willing to help. You know that I usually like to be the "tuff guy" and this doesn't suit me well, eh? I wrestled for quite a time with my "foolish pride" until I even typed this text. I do not like to beg, but it is the last thing I can do now. So please, if you want and can: Donate something to my Paypal account (alionsonny@alionsonny.com).

IMPORTANT: I would prefer if you had something to work for you, because I prefer to work for cash. Most of you know about the several skills I have and event tho I am not feeling very well these days, I am still able to work.... my girl says the opposite, but what does she know ;)

I allways gave everything away for free and maybe I could have a less hard time if I had been a good capitalist. But: Some people can't help it.

Please don't make this thread your personal payday. I know there are folks out there who do not like me or even hate me. And those folks maybe feel tempted to now tell me that I deserve what happens to me. Well if you think so... party on and keep it to yourself. It was not your sword which cut me down, it was just bad coincidence. And don't forget: Tomorrow some bad luck may happen to you.

I do not really feel well to post this, but it is the last thing I can do. If you don't want to use paypal, just message me for banking details. If you want to help in any other way, you can allways mail me.

Thanks
Sonny

Can you compose me a song (or 3-4) ... for FREE?

This news entry is somewhat different from the usual news you find here. There's no new song or video to announce this time. No, I just want to share a little rant with you, that's it. So what is it, Sonny is pissed about? Here we go:
Since I am a very nice guy, I share my music, videos and other art with you, mostly for free. Even tho a donation is allways appreciated, I usually do not ask you for money to enjoy what I produce. Well, some people seem to think, that because of that, I must live in Cockaigne, where everything is fluffy and free. But I can assure you: I have to pay rent, electricity, online costs, webhosting etc. and I have to drink and eat and work for it. That just as a bit of information for you.

From time to time, with a increasing frequency, people ask me for "a favor". Some ask me to do something at their homepage, some want me to build a bassline, a drumpattern or some graphics or video stuff.... and of cause for free. Nobody ever had the idea to offer me some cash for my works and usually this is ok, as it is small "favors" which do not cost me a huge ammount of time. So usually I just help out and get more or less credited for it. That's 100% as I love to help.

But then there are those who expect me to do huge ammounts of work for them... also for free. The absolute "bestseller" amongst this is the request "Can you build me a reggae riddim on FL Studio and send me the flp-file (projectfile)?". I usually keep cool if I get such requests, even tho I am tempted to ask the person what the fuck he thinks what ammount of work he just asks me to give away for free. Those requests, may it be for composing complex drumstyles, complete songs or even a whole album concept allways come in with no offer for what I get in return. People expect me to edit their musicvideo for free or even produce a whole musicvideo for them.

What do those folks think? Don't they realize what massive ammount of work is behind all those things? Do they think I am just on this planet to fullfill their dreams? Many of those folks even leave no doubt about, that they want to make money using the services they expect to get from me, like that guy who runs a relatively successfull website with a radio on it, and asked me to create a jingle for his online radio show... for free... while he generates a good income from his website and radio ventures. Do those folks think I am stupid?

Why am I writing this newsentry right now? Easy: Yesterday I got a mail which (from my point of view) put the cream on the cake of impudence. A guy wrote me, that he likes my music (this is how it allways starts) and that he does a site about boardgames. I don't want to go into the details, but the bottomline was, that he asked me if I could do 3-4(!!!) original custom tracks in orchestra style for some videoshow to be played in the background while people talk about a certain boardgame. The fact alone that CUSTOM COMPOSED SONGS should play in the background makes my toenails roll up. This is like using a painting by an old dutch master as toiletpaper... after the dutch master custom painted the painting for just the purpose to serve as an asswipe.... hillarious... eh?

Ok, but never mind the usage and that the site linked at the bottom of the mail was literally screaming THIS IS A COMMERCIAL SITE AND I STRIVE TO MAKE SERIOUS CASH WITH THIS! What did this guy think? Did he think that it is the work of about 5 minutes to create a quality orchestral music piece on todays digital equipment? If so, why doesn't he do it himself. If it is such an easy thing....
The reality is, that a minimum of several hours of work is required to create a quality music track, regardless of its genre. But orchestral tracks require a huge ammount of more work than, for example, a simple pop-techno piece. I plan a minimum of 4-8 hours alone for composing and arranging plus the time for mixing the final result. And can you, dear reader, understand that one must give me a GOOD reason to invest such a huge ammount of my creative lifespan? For me it is clear, that simply giving me credits on some website is not that kind of a GOOD reason.

This is why I indeed do contracting works for music- and video production, graphical works etc. For such tasks as composing complete tracks, producing musicvideos, creating complex graphical artwork etc., I have hourly rates I work on. A good ammount of cash IS a great reason to invest time and work. I think we all live in the same world, right? I think there's nobody living on this planet who doesn't know about the fact, that serious work costs serious cash in our beloved capitalist system. And especially people, on whose websites I only need to take a look and I see that they run a business should know the price of artistical craftmanship. So I cannot really understand how one could make me an "offer" like the one I got yesterday.

To set it clear once again and for all: My free works available for download on several websites are free to use EXCEPT FOR COMMERCIAL PURPOSES. If you make money with my works, I want my share or hell breaks lose. So, you can use my music as a soundtrack for your holliday videos on YouTube, you can burn them on CDs and give them as a gift to anyone, you can play them on your online radio etc. But once you make serious cash with using my music, don't forget to give me my share.

If you want me to make something special for you, if it is not much work AND it is for non-commercial purposes, you'll most likely have me doing it for free. BUT: If it is a huge load of work, such as producing whole tracks, producing your music video etc., please mail me for my hourly rates, terms of service and other business stuff. This is ESPECIALLY the case, if the usage of my works generates money for you. So consider this, before you mail me, asking me for "a favor".

Another important note: The term "crediting someone" seems to have become a somewhat magical spell for some people. They think that "crediting" pays all bills. Friends and neighbors: I meanwhile have so many people, websites etc. crediting me, that your crediting is nice but just one amongst a huge load. So don't expect the magic sentence "we credit you on our website" to work at me. There's still things I do for crediting, but it must not be too much work.

Long text. I hope all of you out there now know a bit more about me and my handling of "requests for favors". If you feel tempted to ask me for a favor, please keep in mind that I am not a rich wealthy guy who can spent hillarious timespans on making your dreams come true. If I find your name amongst the donators for alionsonny.com, chances are bigger that I will do even bigger stuff for free for you. But if you wanna make sure that I'll work for you, just make a contract with me and pay me.

I have been very lazy recently...

... in updating my homepage and various other places on the web. I was not lazy in making music tho. Two new songs were released since my last update of this site:

1. A new song for the "Alion Soundtrack" has been published a while ago. The title is "The River Valley" and, as hopefully everybody can imagine, this song shall be played while exploring a idyllic river valley.

The River Valley (Alion OST)
LISTEN -- DOWNLOAD

2. It was about time for the release of a new "reggaelike" song. Listeners told me that this is probably is the best song I ever published in the "reggaelike" segment. As topic of the song I have chosen the classic spy movie topic this time. So here's the song:

Special Agent Jones and the case of the Saphire Cross
LISTEN -- DOWNLOAD

So what was it which kept me from updating my homepage, blog and lots of other stuff? Well, you know me and somtimes I do not find some stuff too important :p Ok, some things are not going the way they should currently here, but I don't want to bother you with my problems. ;)

Well, that's it for now. Much stuff to update. Let's go

Entomologia II - Song and Video online!

This time I decided to update the blog ie the new on alionsonny.com in one go for the song and the video. The song was actually ready two days ago, but I decided to upload it today with the video. People, who follow my updates on Twitter knew much earlier about it all. If you, dear reader want to be amongst those who get all news about all I do before all the others get them. just just follow my Updates on Twitter... if you, have a Twitter account.

The first chapter of the Entomologia-Series was published in late May and there was also a video for the first chapter. Now the second chapter has been published, which shares the topic of the first part and also its musical style: Videotopic = Insects, Music = Techno in a Trance style. As allways it is all for free and can be downloaded from various sources on the web.

The Soundtrack/Song:

• Entomologia II LISTEN
• Entomologia II DOWNLOAD

and here is the video:



This time I embedded the video from YouTube, because Vimeo lost it's advances over YouTube in things like videoquality (compression) compared with YouTube. At all some things have changed at Vimeo since the PLUS pay-accounts have been established, for all freeriders and those changes were no positive ones. For example: One has to wait in line for videos to be encoded, because videos of paying members are encoded first. This takes a looong time recently. In the case of the "Entomologia II" video I had to wait about two hours after the video was allready uploaded until it was encoded. Additionally Vimeo cutted the possibility for freeriders that visitors could download the original uploaded video. Well, I understand that Vimeo must have an eye on the costs and that they want to make money. But this eliminates all advences Vimeo had compared with Youtube in the past. This means: From now on I'll embed my videos from YouTube, because YouTube got better in many aspects. Uploads do no longer time out and are processed in acceptable time and the results of encoding are no longer as bad as they were some months ago.

The Old Harbor Pub (Alion OST) has just been released!

Yes, the story continues! A new song for the "Alion Original Soundtrack"-Album has just been released:

After a heavy fight with the undead on the cursed Cemetery of Alion Castle the throat is dusty and dry and our heroes urgently need a drink. The Old Harbor Pub at the harbor of Alion Castle is just the right place for that. As we enter the pub late in the evening it is quite crowded. Fishermen, Sailors and some folks who are for sure no honest merchants but rather pirates or thieves are enjoying the music of the band and the rum. A guy at the bar who is barely able to not fall on the floor shouts for another drink. He is told by the bartender that he allready had enough and should leave the place. As he keeps complaining the bartender grabs him and throws him out. We sit down at the bar and order a drink. The bartender looks at us with a suspecting face. Maybe it is because of our look: Full of dust, some minor wounds, dents and bruises all over the heavy armor. "You should visit a healer" he shouts with a thundering voice. Then he serves the rum. Finally... some peace and comfort... We all know: This will not last for a long time.

This song should capture the warm and rough atmosphere of The Old Harbor Pub at Alion Castle:

The Old Harbor Pub - Alion Original Soundtrack- LISTEN
The Old Harbor Pub - Alion Original Soundtrack- DOWNLOAD

Do you ear some celtic roots in this. Yeah, for sure. Ok, this is track four of 13. So we have 1/3 of the songs for the album done. I have some tracks in progress, but dunno which part of the adventure will be next... or let's say it like this:
Our heroes do not have the slightest clue what will be next. And they really don't care, as the strong rum blows away all care for future events like the breeze at the docks of Alion Harbor. They rent a room at the Old Harbor Pub and sleep until a loud knocking at the door wakes them up...

First song of the "Classic Reggae Riddims Orcastrated"-Projekts is ready!

Well, this is how it is allways with me: You read nothing from me for several weeks, dust blows through the blog, the community is waiting in vain for a sign of life and then again I publish something all the time. If something is less predictable than the weather, it is my actions. That may be a problem for those who are tuned on simple and predictable minds, but I don't care. I am that I am.

The song was published today, confirms the facts written about above 100%. Who except me would have come up with the idea to reinterpret old reggae arrangements in orchestra style? ;) Well, I recently had this idea and extensively explained it in various forums. This brought me into the situation that I MUST complete that project now. Just too many negative minded folks would use it as a weapon agains me, if I would fail at this project.

Many times while working at the songs for the project, I must admit, I thought "Oh, if you just kept your mouth shut". Because, as I found out, I put a serious load of work on my agenda with this. Why?Well, how do I describe it avoiding the reggae community wants to roast me for this? *LOL* Well, let's say it this way: Reggae is not very well known for extensive melodic arrangements, but rather for catchy melodies and basslines. But orchestral music LIVES of extensive melodies and arrangements. How the hell do you get that together? You have plenty of work keep the typical Reggaegroove and -elements, and at the same time ,avoid to let the orchestra repeat the same phrases all the time like a longtime politician. ;) If the orchestra plays a 100% unchanged copy of the reggae riddim it is less then 1 1/2 minute musical entertainmen, not to mention a musical experience.

Somehow I've managed it and I think I have found out which is the way to go. Not that it will be really easier in the future, but at least I know now what the main aspects are that need to be considered. And now you want to listen to the music for sure. Here we go. Here is the first work of the series "Classic Reggae Riddims Orcastrated". It is a version of the "Answers Riddim":

• Gimme some answers LISTEN
• Gimme some answers DOWNLOAD

Lotsa News

Maybe it is because of the great weather and the fact that I prefer outdoor activities recently over posting news in blogs. Yes, I have been some kind of lazy recently at updating the blog(s). Well, but that's all not that bad because I can allways catch up on it. Ok, so what did happen? Let's start with the most recent event. Do you remember my collaboration with Colin Mutchler?
Back then, I think it was in 2004 or 2005, I produced two songs with lyrics and vocals by Colin. For those of you who missed them back then, here they are:

• Language of my Reality LISTEN
  
• Language of my Reality DOWNLOAD
  
• Everyday Choices LISTEN
• Everyday Choices DOWNLOAD
  

Well, recently, because of Twitter, I got in touch with Colin again and I thought it would be a good idea to work with Colin again. So I searched at CCMixter, just like in those good old days, and found an accapella on which I had a try allready, but failed back then to get something done with it. This time everything went just great, because now I have one version ready and 2 to 3 in progress. The version I finnished yesterday is a Euro Techno Pop Version. You can listen and/or download it right here:

• "More than 2 sides" LISTEN
• "More than 2 sides" DOWNLOAD

If this is too pop-like or techno -> keep cool: I have one reggaeversion and one version in the style of "The Pogues" in progress. Most probably there will also be a orchestral version. So far for the work with Colin.

Since I last updated this blog, there have been 2 more songs released. First there is the song I finnished on my 41st birthday, with the title "Gettin' old". It is a production in the style of "Forest" and Flowers:

• Gettin' old LISTEN
• Gettin' old DOWNLOAD

and then I released the second chapter of the legendary "The Knights of Dubwood Castle". The first chapter was allready a bit orchestral, but the sequel takes it to the max. Again it is orchestral reggae crossover:

• The Knights of Dubwood Castle - Chapter II LISTEN
• The Knights of Dubwood Castle - Chapter II DOWNLOAD

While we are at the topic of orchestral reggae, I like to announce a new album project which you maybe do not know about. The workingtitle is "Classic Riddims Orcastrated". The idea is, to release an album featuring 13 of the most popular reggae riddims in orchestral style. The first song most probably will be based on the "Answers Riddim". I allmost finnished it yesterday, but it still needs some polishing.

So this was the news I think. I ommit all promises regarding poting more often at the blog(s). You know where it leads to ;)

The Survivor - Some Techno again

This year seems to be in competition with the year 2004 in which the alionsonny project has started, regarding the number of songs published. Yes, one song after the other is published and the shere number of different styles makes some people doubt, that this is all still done by one single person. But I just can tell you folks out there to stay calm: It is still just me and I have no kind of team here which releases songs week by week. It just doesn't go very well currently in my dayjob and so I use the time I get from this to do creative things. And each and everybody who observed what I did over the years will know, that one of my main characteristic is, that I love to do different styles of music. Well, I admit that this year I am really mashing it up. But this is some thing you, dear listeners, can just profit of, right?

This time I moved again in the direction of trancetechno. Originally, believe it or not, this project was a reggaesong. But then a few arpeggiators were added and, woops, it was a technotrack. The speechsamples, by the way, are taken from the movie "Frankenstein" featuring Boris Karloff from 1931. So, here it is:

The Survivor (STREAM)

and of cause you can also download the MP3:

The Survivor (MP3)

"The cursed Cemetery" a new track of the Alion Original Soundtrack released!

Again it is done and it was really a trip creating this song. To create the two previous tracks of the soundtrack was quite easy compared to this. This track really involved some additional work to get the atmosphere of how that evil place it is transfered into music. Well, I think I got it nailed.

So here it is:

The cursed Cemetery (Alion OST) LISTEN
The cursed Cemetery (Alion OST) DOWNLOAD

Sit down, close your eyes and imagine a place where you would never go alone at night, at least you would have a gun loaded with silver bullets, a big pack of crucifixes *LOL* and some garlic with you. This is a cursed cemetary where the restless spirits of those folks roam, who are not very happy with being dead and gone. As quite a lot of those folks were warriors when alive, they have been burried with their weapons. So, be aware of the fact that they are not only undead and dangerous but armed with mighty axes and swords. There's even tales of black mages burried here. No nice place to go... but now you are here and you can't run away...

After you cleaned that place, you are of cause thirsty and looking for a good time. So the next track will take us to the "Old Harbor Pub" where the sailors get drunk... stay tuned.. I am working at it ;-)

"Exploring Alion Forest", the second track of "Alion - Original Soundtrack" has just been released!

It is done! One more track for my soundtrack album. By the way, this is the official logo for the fictional computergame "Alion".

The second track of the soundtrack album is, as announced, the song that should be played while exploring a forest and is therefore titled "Exploring Alion Forest". While listening to this song, imagine to walk in a forest with huge trees, sunbeams dropping through the treetops, birds, a deer bouncing by. Imagine the smell of a forest in summertime. You get the picture? ;-)

So here it is "Exploring Alion Forest", the second track of "Alion - Original Soundtrack":

Exploring Alion Forest LISTEN
Exploring Alion Forest DOWNLOAD

The next track I am allready working at, will be a lot less nice & lovely, because of it's topic/location. It will be the song which is playing while the hero explores a dangerous, cursed graveyard, where the undead roam... not a nice place to be ;-)

Alion - The Original Soundtrack

Again I like to announce a new kind of musical work I just published for you. Yes, this is really different from everything I have done before:

Theme of Alion (Alion Original Soundtrack) LISTEN
Theme of Alion (Alion Original Soundtrack) DOWNLOAD

Some of you maybe know that I got the opportunity to create soundtrack music for video games recently and it is great fun for me to work at such stuff, as it is really a different thing than the usual way of making music. I had to learn about totally different aspects than those one must keep track of when producing music for people just to listen to.

Unfortunately I did not get any opportunity to create soundtrack music for my favorite genre of computergames such as Gothic,

Wikipedia about Gothic I



Never Winter Nights, The Elder Scrolls or some thing like that. Those games with Kings, Dragons, Heroes in shiny armor and all that stuff. I love those action roleplaying games. The lack of opportunities in that genre is most probably because I did very synthetic and rather science fiction fitting music in the past and the production companies of such roleplaying games prefer orchestral, epicstyle soundtracks.

To solve that problem, I thought about how

1. I could gain knowledge about how to do that kind of music
2. I could show the folks in charge that I CAN do this.

Because I would REALLY love to produce soundtracks for that kind of games. A simple idea was born over a good glass of red wine... as quite often ;-) Why not produce a soundtrack for a fictional game that does only exist in my mind? That idea has even some advantages over getting into that business by creating a soundtrack for a real game produced by some company: I can let my ideas float free and I am not bound to any of the usual, sometimes very limitting, requests by the company which produces the game. Total artistic and creative freedom. I can really run my genuine own concept. That's great!

Of cause I would love to produce the game for my soundtrack too, but there's too much stuff involved in this and I think nobody can develop a state of the art 3D action adventure game just by himself. So, until I found a own game development studio, I must stick to the soundtrack, even though I allready have a story for the game.

But this soundtrack idea is enough. Everyone who ever played such a game will know, that is not done by creating a fancy theme song. Each and every location which can be visited in the game needs its own (at least one) song. There's songs for fighting, victory, defeat... all kind of that. I constrained my project to a soundtrack album of 13 songs. That's really enough to keep me composing and arranging for quite a time.

The first thing I needed of cause was that theme song which should be played every time the game is started. And... I have finnished one during the past week. This is the song linked at the start of this posting. I would very much like to make a game trailer like video for it and maybe I even do one once I find some time and more ideas for it than I have right now. But for now I am busy composing and arranging a song that should be played while the hero is exploring a forest.

I will release this sountrack as a complete album the day it is finnished. But still 12 songs to go. The projects working title is "Alion - The Original Soundtrack".

Wish me luck and energy for this project. I will most probably need it ;)

"Entomologia" musicvideo is online!

Yes, again it took quite some time, but this time it was not my fault, but because of the way my latest video was produced. I used 3D Raytracing Animation for the first time in this video and those parts had to be rendered upfront. 50 pictures/frames took one hour to render. If you keep in mind that each second of video takes up 30 pictures/frames, you can easily understand why this took some time. Well, and I must admit tht I had to stop rendering after a while some times, because I saw something was not ok and start rendering from the beginning. Well that's the way things go...
But now the video is finned and online for you to watch. As every time I uploaded it to all well known videosites, but the best quality is again on Vimeo.com. And here it is, the video for the song "Entomologia":

Entomologia from alionsonny on Vimeo.

Video for the song "Springtime 2009" is online!

Well, it took a while this time to cut the video material and I was, I must admit this, a bit lazy dong it. But the video was ready since four days. Since Vimeo decided to use a new encoder (I think so) it didn't like my preferred video format /-codec. They want H264 video and AAC sound by now. But since my (a bit outdated) Sony Vegas Software cannot do this (I tried EVERYTHING) I can not offer this format. And, honestly, I like my good old XVid video and MP3 sound. What's so bad at this? Well, somehow it worked yesterday late in the evening to get the video up and running. And here it is:

Springtime 2009 from alionsonny on Vimeo.

It is done!

I have fixed the last obvious flaws at the Homepage and some things that looked not so good were also fixed. It all looks much more like cut from one piece now. The layout problems when using the Internet Exploder seem to be fixed too. The site looks allmost the same on Mozilla and IE now. This is it I think, regarding the work at alionsonny.com. Now it is time to do something different.

What else? Somehow LastFM managed to fix the bug in the video uploads that prevented me from uploading my videos there. In the past two days I uploaded all released videos so far to LastFM. The quality is somewhat suboptimal because of the ugly compression but that's not my fault. Anyway: My videos are now available on my LastFM page also.

Some time ago I created an account at the musicsite Aimestreet.com. Somehow I forgot it, but recently rediscovered it. So I took the opportunity to upload my four albums there. So they are available on my Aimestreet page also. Please don't give my songs a recommendation there. A recommendation is to tell other folks on Aimestreet that they should listen to the song too because it is great. However, I want to keep my songs as free downloads available for everyone. But if you give my songs recommendations, they are no longer free after a certain ammount of recommendations. The price of a song at Aimestreet rises with the number of recommendations it gets. So the only way to keep my music free there is, that it gets NO recommendations. thanks in advance for NOT recommending!

Ok, that's it. Nothing more to tell yet. I'll be back once something important happens ;-)

New Video for the song "Paddy Cronin's Reel" is online!

Well, I was quite puzzled, when I saw in the Web Buzz of my Reverbnation Page, that my name was mentioned in conclusion with a video at YouTube which was not uploaded by me. First I thought it was because of the well known and hated YouTube keyword spam again, but when I visited the videos page, I realized that I was wrong. Somebody had done something I would have never thought about doing: Filming a video in SecondLife and using my music as a soundtrack. This is completely ok with me as I encourage people to use my music for such purposes, as long as the resulting works are non commercial.

Well, and the video is a good piece of artwork as you can see in the video embedded below. The topic, a virtual St. Patricks Day Party, is also suitable for the soundtrack. Sometimes one thinks, the avatars are dancing along to the soundtrack, right on the beat. Even though I do not like SecondLife too much, I love this work. Thanks again to the creator of this video. And here's the video:

Big progress at alionsonny.com

Maybe you allready noticed it. Many things have changed today on alionsonny.com. This is the reason why there were no news in this blog during the past days. It was neccessary to implement some changes in one go, instead of doing them one by one and keep you updated about what was going on. It can be said, that alionsonny.com is complete now. It is true that there is one or the other flaw in the layout. But this is not that important and will be fixed soon. But the most important thing is, that all modules have been finnished and placeholders have been removed for the real things.

I must ask especially the users of the Internet Explorer for patience. I do not use this browser very often and because of this users of the site had to tell me about the fact that there are some serious layout issues, especially in the video- and image-galleries with this browser. But this is not my fault. It is because the nice people at Microsoft refuse to implement the standard for the cascading stylesheets (CSS) properly. The site is optimized for browsers which implement webdesign standards properly. And because of that the site looks not so well in the trashy Internet Explorer. I'll see how and what I can fix at this soon.

Well, so what's new on alionsonny.com in detail? First thing that run inside the website and are therefore not very obvious for the usual websurfer, for that example the way how particular pages are generated was completely changed. I also optimized some stuff at the handling of the small database which is used for the sites content and I made it more difficult for hackers to attack the site. I would never say that everything is absolutely bullet proof, but I did something.. that's it. Let's name the bigger and viewable improvements:

• A completely new startpage now shows the lates entry from this blog as News. I have done this by using the RSS-Stream of this blog. So each time something new is written here, you can now see it instantly on the frontpage of alionsonny.com. Below the news, the latest song and album are shown and can be played and downloaded there. Below that, the latest video is embedded. So the startpage is a real newspage for alionsonny.com.
• The image section now has multiple pages and categories for images.
• The links got a new layout and structure.
• The album section was completely reworked and on the details page for each album you can view and download the fullsize coverart by clicking on the cover image.
• Some issues with the language selection have been repaired and places where everything was allways shown in english or german now work according to the selected language.

Well, that's it so far... I think. What's next? As I said some layout issues have to be fixed, especially for the Internet Exploder. And then it is finally time for a new song and video. A concept for a brandnew album is also ready.

...and done: The videosection is online!

Well, something went not as it should have, but who cares? Now it is ready: The fantastic new videosection of alionsonny.com. From now on all videos can be viewed again on the site, selectable from a nice thumbnail gallery. Additionally, the soundtrack for each video can be downloaded directly from the details page of the video. I'm a bit proud of me and what I've done ;-)

But no rest, it goes on and on. The picture gallery looks quite nice now, but it is not like I want it to be. This means: The picture gallery is next! Because I have built all components needed allready in the process of building the previous sections, this will be quite easy.

But because I caught a bad flu while walking in the rain yesterday, I better promise nothing. I fight with full force against getting sick, but who knows how it all will come in the end. Let's hope the best.

Videosection is making progress

There's nothing to see here. Move on! ;-) Today there's nothing new I can show you. Just the promise, that the new videosection of alionsonny.com is on it's way. Today I fooled myself for 4 hours by not recognizing a logical error in a PHP-class which should show a grid of things (albums,videos,pictures). Those who have nothing to do with programming will most probably not know what I mean with this. It's just one of those thingies that run in the background of many websites, causing grey hair for the webdesigners, eating years of a lifetime and causing pain in the stomach. Just the kind of stuff for freaks like me. Well, today I played a bit hide & seek with my own logic. But the core stuff of the whole thingie is working now perfectly. And tomorrow (if nothing unexpected happens), the ne videosection will go online in all it's shiny glory.

Oh yeah: Some folks ask, if I am doing no music no more. Well, sorry, at this thing I have a nice little creative blockade currently. Nothing serious, but still it will take some time until new music from me will hit your ears. Additionally financial problems force me to put more time into my dayjob. Rent doesn't pay itself here and so it is for the online connection and other stuff. Well, you can click on the "Donate"-button on alionsonny.com and donate some time-providing ca$h ;-) This may help a lot to get me back to the studio and make some music.

The Albums-Section is online!

Yepp, one day later as expected, the new albums section and everything related to it goes online. Why the delay? Well I just needed a bit time for myself, and so I didn't work at alionsonny.com yesterday. Hey, but what's a day? As announced there's a music overview page now which is shown if one clicks on the "Music" menuitem. The menu now has two submenuitems: "Songs" which takes you to the list of all songs released so far and, brandnew, "Albums", which takes you to a list of all 4 albums released so far. Here you see shrinked versions of the abumcovers, which take you to the deatails page for the album on which iage you clicked.
A few things have not been implemented yet and they will be finnished once I want to do so. Currently only single songs from the albums can be streamed or downloaded. One day there will be a possibility to stream complete albums or download them in a ZIP-file. Clicking on the coverart image should take you to the coverart in full size in the future to allow downloading it. Just as I said -> this is a future feature.
Currently I find it more important to get the other sections of alionsonny.com done and get rid of the ugly placeholders. Next is the videos section which will look much nicer and deserves a more logical navigation.
Well, that's it with my (allmost) daily status report. I wanna say goodbye with a little song:

Albums section of alionsonny.com is allmost ready!

Today I spent some time finnishing the part of alionsonny.com, where the albums released so far will be available. The section is allmost ready and should be available tomorrow. Additionally I finnished a new music startpage, where the latest 3 songs and albums are listed. The menuitem "Music" now has a submenu which contains the items "Songs" and "Albums". If you klick on the "Music"-item in the future, it will take you to the music startpage mentioned above. But don't go to alionsonny.com right now to check it out. Nothing of it all is currently online. All will be available tomorrow when it is finnished. And now I'll stop working for today. Enough is enough is enough :D

The new music section of alionsonny.com is online!

It is done! Formerly the musicsection of alionsonny.com consisted of an embedded player from Soundclick, which looked more than awfull with it's blue color on the green background of the site. Additionally there used to be no possibility to download music, except from going to the Soundclick page. This is over now. All 112 alionsonny songs released so far are now streamable and downloadable online. Just take a look at the new music section. Currently it consists just of a paged list of songs. But in the next days I'll add an album-mode, which will contain the 4 alionsonny albums released so far. Of cause there will be the coverart graphics available for download also in printable size. Well, and now I think I can be proud of what I've done and end my working day.

Donations are welcome!

The construction site, that alionsonny.com was for the last two months after the massive hacker attacks of December 2008, finally turned into a real website again. During the implementation of the enhancements, I also added something I was asked to add by several visitors in the past: A posssibility to donate. It is a fact that I provide all my music for free on the web. But there are, as I got to know, some people who would like to give something back, and if it is just a small ammount of money. For that reason I added a donate-link at a prominent position on alionsonny.com. Using that link, one has the possibility to donate via Paypal or direct bank transfer. I am fine with both ways and I thank upfront for each and every donation.
As some of you may know, I am a freelancer (my own boss) and I am free to chose the time I work at my dayjob as I like. Each donation that comes in gives me more time to create music and other stuff for you, because I am not a greedy moneysack and usually work just enough to make a living for my girl and me. So if donations come in, I have to work less at my dayjob and have more time to work at creative things. Pure logic, isn't it? So here, for you who overlooked the donation link so far, is it:



What's new else? Like I said, alionsonny.com was a bit changed. From now on you don't have to visit the site anymore thru the nice, but for some uncomfortable, language selection startpage. From now on, the language set as prefered language in your browser will be used automatically. Some magic *LOL*. No it is just technology. If, however, you should land on the wrong language version, there's also no problem. On a prominent position on the right side of each page of the site, there's a gadget to change the language on the fly. This works whether you have Javascript activated or not. If Javascript is not activated, there's a little button below the language selection gadget, on which you have to click after selecting your prefered language. If Javascript is activated it works by just selecting the prefered language from the drop down list. If you like, just try it with Javascript turned on and off.

And now I am off to do some more stuff. Much work to do!

Alion Free Music Base

Here I am again. Unfortunately not much has happened meanwhile, since a little accident kept me from doing something valuable since mid of last week. But now the show goes on with full force. I am currently working at a new website project, called "Alion Free Music Base". This site will be, and I am completely serious at this, the biggest listing of free downloadable music on the web. Currently I am still working at the framework and try to find some artists who will be the first in the listing. But allthough the site is completely free of charge, just a few artists seem to be interested in free promotion. Well, all things start small... BUT while we are at it: If you are a musician with some free downloadable music online, just mail me: alionsonny@alionsonny.com if you are interested to be listed on my new site.
Ok, what else? Nothing :D Now I am off to create something I can really write about something here...

What's up with alionsonny?

Well, Sonny is somehow on holliday now. The beloved girl is away for 2 weeks to visited some relatives and I have still to work at my dayjob. Still I spend the time left rather with being lazy, gaming etc. instead of doing anything creative. Well, and also the communication with you out there is on hold currently. And because of this, don't be puzzled if mails etc. are not answered very fast.

Still I am not completely uncreative. Currently I record some tracks with livedrumming using my Roland Handsonic 10. I just discovered some cool features of this thing. Ever played Sitar on drumpads, using the touchsensitivity for stringbending? *LOL* Pure fun! The guitar is used very often currently too.

Ok, I plan the following: The first week my girl is away I'll spend with things I like and by the way drink a lot too :D The second week will be hardcore creative work.

And now I'm off, opening a bottle of red wine and dive into the world of Fallout 3 to kill some monsters...

A bit of Raytracing

Several reasons and a curiosity if I can do it lead me to try creating a 50's/60's-style radio using 3D graphic. The image above is the result of my first try and I think I have done it quite well. As an example I used a photo of an old radio found on the web. If there's an expert for old radios reading this: Don't try to figure out what was the original model on the photo. You'll most likely fail, because I used the photo as a very raw guideline. If you take a close enough look at the picture you will surely notice some flaws. I'll fix this once I have time to do it. It think it is good like that for now.

Web.de drives me nuts!

Today it is time again for a bit of complaining about stuff that doesn't work. Because today I wanted to update afew of my pages across the web, which I did not update for a time. Amongst them my Videopage at Web.de. Well I could not remember that I ever signed up there. But szill 3 of my older videos were there. So I thought that I upload some newer today. No big thing... so I thought...
BUT: As I tried to log in, none of my standard passwords worked. No problem: Then I let the site send me my password via mail... so I thought...
I did as advised on the apropriate page and entered my mailaddress in the appropriate editfield. Result: A message that told me, that I entered something the site did not recognize. So I tried the same with my older standard mailaddress. Result: The same. Well there was also written, that one can do this using the username. HAH! That could not go wrong, because my username is the same all across the web: alionsonny. Result: This website also did not know my username!
Well, I clicked my way to the support to find out, that the dropdown menu for the service to support did not contain an option for the video upload service. Great! Well, I chosed "other" and as suboption again "other". But what happened now? I must log in to write to the support. AAARGH! I CANNOT DO THIS WITHOUT LOGIN DATA!!!
I took a deep breath and went to the impressum. Oh, there a infoaddress. I'll mail it simply. Said and done: I wrote a nice support question mail and sent it. Seconds later I got a automated reply which said, that they cannot answer my question via mail and I should contact the support using one of the support pages which only work if one is logged in. BUT there is a nice telephone number also there which costs loads of cash which I can call. Ahh, this is IT! Well, so the videopage stay in the state it is and the account stays a zombie account. So many video upload pages out there with working support. Bye Web.de!

Album Coverart for the album "Excursions in Time & Space" is ready!

...and done! The last missing coverart for my album "Excursions in Time and Space" is ready. Again it is 3D Raytracing Art, this time done using the software "Cybermotion 3D Designer". Well, what to say? The album title demanded a picture of a time machine, and I did one. It took quite a time to create the 3D scene, but rendertime was again below 5 minutes.
Just as I said, this was the last missing coverart of all of my four albums and so it is time to release a new one. I have loads of songs in my archives, but not enough for an album which fit into one topic. So I first have to release some more songs. Well then: Let's work!

Album Coverart for the album "Early Xperiments in Dub" is ready

Ok, the album coverart for the album "Early Xperiments in Dub" is ready. The album, which was released quite a time ago, and which contains my first Dub Reggae songs from the years 2004 and 2005, had no coverart until now. Now I have finnished it. I created it, using the free 3D Raytracing Software "PovRay". I don't know how long exactly it took to create the scene, but it were quite some hours. I programmed the whole scene using the so called "Scene Description Language" SDL and did not use a PovRay modeller because I don't like the PovRay modellers and programming in the SDL is much easier for me as a programmer. The rendering took 4 minutes and 16 seconds on my little rendermonster. Every other Raytracer would have taken much longer to render the image. Clicking on the image will take you to a larger resolution which you can save to disk for printing your own CD-cover.

Sunny Sunday

It has been a while since the sun was shining upon the north of germany for a longer time. If I did not miss anything it was cold and grey all the time at least since the first of December. So I was glad to be able to take a walk in the bright sunlight with my girl today. Yeah, that did good!

Not much at the creative side has happened since my last blogging. This is still due to the game "Fallout 3", which is so great that most of the sparetime in the past days was spent playing it. But who cares? I did not play much in the past months, so I do it now ;-)


One thing must be urgently done: Many people ask, why I left the reggae scene. I do not owe any justification to anyone for what I am doing anyway, but I want to describe my decision in detail though. I have more than just little interest in that no wrong assumptions come to life about my decision out there. It is not that way, that I suddenly hate reggae music. It is also by far not that way, that I did not get enough attention/appreciation from the reggae crowd. I never wanted to be a reggae star. I never expected anything from the reggae crowd in that direction. So the attention/appreciation I got is far more than I ever could have expected. The reasons for my decision are too complex to describe them in this blogentry. Because of this, I'll soon publish an extensive article that will set everything straight. So please don't send any questions about that topic anymore.

While we are at "questions by mail": People often ask about my healthstate via mail recently. My answer is: I AM WELL! Yeah, indeed nearly everything is well now. From what everything looked and felt like until mid of december, I would have not thought myself, that everything would go that well so fast, but YES, aside of a few sideefeects of the past illness everything is as it should be. Thanks for all the positive thoughts, prayers and what else some of you did: You may believe that it worked ;-)

I close this posting by embedding a song from the soundtrack of "Fallout 3". I LOVE this song:

Well like I said...

my new favourite game "Fallout 3" has horrible effects. Last night I spent from 00:00 to 07:00am cleansing to post-apocalyptic Washington DC of Ghouls and Supermutants. Well, those Supermutants are fun. Ghouls & stuff became a bit boring after a time, but the Supermutants are REAL oponents. I use the minigun, which is in fact not so mini but rather a gattling, for the distance fight and the 44er magnum for close battle. That makes nice goulash out of those Mutantscam in the wink of an eye. Hehe, like I said: You do not really know that side of me ;-)

Because of all that I got out of bed late at 04:00pm and spent the last 3 hours working at my dayjob. Yeah, that's the advantage of being my own boss / freelancer :D But my sleep-awake-rythm is completely ruined...

Fallout 3

Since yesterday I am a proud owner of the game "Fallout 3". After having lots of fun with the two previous parts of the "Fallout"-Gameseries quite a time ago, I was very excited about what the first real 3D version will have to offer. "Fallout 2" was, for the time when it was released, a real gem, and when I read that "Fallout 3" is released by my favourite gameforge Bethesda Softworks, I couldn't wait to get the game. The result could only be one of the best games ever. And my expectations where more than satisfied. The graphics and gameplay are top notch and the game is one of the best I ever played. I can hardly keep away from playing it all the time. The only bad thing is, that the sound is often stuttering gruelsome and sometimes the audio device driver crashes, forcing me to restart the system completely. But I cannot blame Betesda for that, because my audio interface, a Edirol FA-66, is far from being a common one. The manufacturer Edirol created the driver very spartanic and doesn't release updates very often.

Ok, so you know, if you do not see much news from me in the next days, why this is. I am virtually wandering the wastelands of the post-apocalyptic Washington DC, shooting everything that comes too close and in front of the various gunbarrels. Yes, this is another side of the peacefull alionsonny-guy: I am a evil evil killergamer! Who cares, there are worse hobbies one can have. And now wish me good hunting. Today I am off to the center of that virtual post-apocalyptic hell. Bring 'em on!

The first Song for 2009 is OUT: "Follow me up to Carlow"

After a creative break of about two months it is done again: A new song was released. It is my very own interpretation of the old irish folk tune "Follow me up to Carlow". And before anybody asks I answer upfront: Yes the very prominent and intense bassdrums are intended. They shall give a punch right in the face. I thought, I'll start this year with something that really punches the dust out of the bones. I have chosen this song as the first for 2009 because of many reasons. If you read the Wikipedia Article for the original version, you will maybe know what I mean with this. ;-)

So the first alionsonny album made up completely of irish folksongs is slowly on it's way. Maybe you noticed that all four albums released so far have 13 tracks on them. So it will be with this upcomming album too. So there are still six songs missing. But I have five songs in production. So it is only a thing of a few months ;-).

Enough words! Here's the new song: "Follow me up to Carlow"! DIRECT MP3-LINK

alionsonny.com is complete so far

Done! The first version of my website is complete so far. This means, that there is no page of the site which shows a "under construction"-message anymore. The last missing part, the images section has just been finnished. First I wanted to implement that part, using a images widget from Sevenload. But I couldn't find how to do this on the Sevenload page and a question to the support was not answered for a couple of days. Because of this, I have now built it myself. The good thing at this is, that everything works without Flash. For now I have just put a small number of pictures there. More will follow as soon as possible.

Unfortunately I recognized, that the layout doesn't really work in the Internet Explorer (at least version 7) somehow. There's a not so nice space at the bottom of each page. I think that this is related to the "special way" in which the IE interprets the CSS boxmodel. I'll repair this sometime.

Next a donation link will be put on the site. This is, amongst other reasons, because of request by listener, who wanted to give something back. No, I am in no way against donations. They come more than handy. I too do not just live of the air I breathe and each cent that may come in from donators will leave me more time for making music, videos and other stuff. So you have a direct benefit from donating some cash.

I'll let you know when I implement the donate-link, more about why I give away my music for free instead of asking for money directly by selling my music. There's my special philosophy behind this. And I'll let you know more about this soon in the "about alionsonny"-section.

So, the website is finnished so far but not completely finnished. There is, for example, no way to download music and videos directly from my homepage currently. This was possible in the last version, and will work again soon. Also a complete list of my releases is missing currently . This will soon be there again. But one step after the other...

Not very much news

Well, currently I have a phase of serious lazyness. Who cares? At least I have finnished the "Links"-section of my homepage. Not really something great, but after all at least something. Additionally I made some progress at my new song. The thing is somehow more complicated to get done than I thought. The conceptual album I am working at since christmas also made some progress, but the is so top secret that I cannot tell anything more about it.

And hey, what means lazyness? I worked all the time hours in advance for my dayjob. If no creative stuff works currently, I earn at least money and create buffer-time for more creative days.

To close this post I embed a great video (german language) recommended by a Telepolis-Forum-Colleague:

A quiet day

Last night me and my girl watched all episodes of "Kalkofe" we didn't watch until now on YouTube. Because of that I got out of bed at noon. Fortunately I had worked in advance during the past days and so no stress was generated off this. After all I must say, that this Kalkofe-Session was a double edged sword. Of cause it was funny as hell like allways, but on the other side it is shocking for people who didn't watch TV for more than 8 years. What a bunch of bullshit is present on german TV is by far not imaginable if one doesn't see it with own eyes. Worst of it all is, that it seems, that people let themselves get fooled and bullshitted without end. Shows where people allow to get their relationship destroyed, teleshopping where total trash is sold and nightly astroshows, where people pretend to be shamans, mediums and astrological consultants where you see not just a but that they lack intelligence big time. I mean: Who takes advise of a person who has obviously the IQ of a piece of bread? Who would think that such a person may have spiritual superpowers? That's heavy!

Ok, let's get away from the overall bad state of the intelligence-state of the population of germany: Today, when I surfed the web, I found something that really puzzled me. I am a big fan of the works by Douglas Adams and among other stories I found the description of the Currency called "Ningi" allways very amusing. But I never thought that a currency like the Ningi existed. At least not on Earth. Well today I was taught a Lesson. Please view this Wikipediaarticle and be amazed.

Nut much else happened today. I just finnished working at my day job and now relax with a good cup of green tea. I don't know how the evening goes on. Currently I try to upload some missing music videos at Sevenload.de. Unfortunately this site seems to use the same technology as Youtube, because the problems are exactly the same. Let's hope the best. Meanwhile I maybe work a bit at my lastest song. We'll see...

I HATE YouTube!

It has to be said once again: I HATE YOUTUBE! Why? Because this site turns each and every video I upload into unviewable trash. Yesterday and today I uploaded two of my videos which the site refused to accept without problems until now. That's nothing new: Of about 5 uploads usually three do not work. One time there's only a still picture available and the other time the video stays in "processing"-mode forever. My personal favourite: There's only a short "Blidelip" left of the sound at the beginning of the video and then.. silence. This was also the case with the two videos I managed to upload now. I encoded the videos once more and this time the sound is there. BUT: The videoquality sucks. And I uploaded high quality source material. Especially at the first alionsonny musicvideo in HD the destruction, done by the YouTube encoder, is clearly viewable. Additionally the stereosound was mashed into a monaural recording. That's really great especially for a musician :(

I cannot understand, that the marketleader in video upload services offers the worst quality. Fortunately I am able to back up what I told you above with a clear evidence in this blog. Below I embedded both videos once from YouTube and once from my favourite video upload service Vimeo.com. Judge for yourself. I uploaded the same sourcefile for each of the videos on both plattforms. For the first video it was a 720x576 pixels resolution, for the second the resolution was 1280x720 pixels HD resolution. Both videos contained 320kbps MP3 stereosound.

First "Springtime 2008" in the malformed YouTube version:


and here the Vimeo.com-Version:

Springtime 2008 from alionsonny on Vimeo.

Now the HDTV-Video "Autumn" in the YouTube Version:


and the Vimeo Version:

alionsonny - Autum (HD Version) from alionsonny on Vimeo.

I think nothing more has to be said about this. If YouTube wasn't so damn popular, I wouldn't upload anything there at all.

A sunny day

Today I took a complete day off work. This is a somewhat rare, but the good weather didn't leave me a chance. So me and my girl wandered down the Wandse (a little river that gives Hamburg-Wandsbek its name) in the sunshine. And man, it was cold! Not really, because I covered myself in multiple layers of clothing, but it was still f*cking cold.
The only Teashop which sells our favourite teas is located in Hamburg-Wandsbek, quite a long way down the river Wandse. This was the main reason for the direction of our walk. Additionally I had a chair that is best described as a torturing tool or a back-detruction-device recently in which I sat when I was working. Because of this I made the decision to replace it with a better one. So I did this today too. After all a really nice day. Sun, a few beers (I was a bit afraid that my lips freeze at the bottle for multiple times :D ), friendly dogs and folks and right now I sit in a, the product description of the seller says so, "presidents chair". Well, so I am a president now!!! So I declare mysel the president of the world now and I demand the end of all wars worldwide right now. Wow, this would be great...