Creativity strikes hard!

Hi friends! This time there's just good news, because there's a real creative mood going on the kingdom of Alion. Everywhere something is going and not just a bit. If you watched my activities during the past days, you'll have noticed that the recent creative block has vanished and made way for a quite fruitful era.

Yesterday, the 10th track for the album "Sumeria" by my project "Cimelium" has been released and that means, that there are just 3 tracks missing, until I will release that album. And, what a  coincidence, I have about 6 song projects in different states of completion, which fit on the album beautifully. So it is more than just possible, that the album will be released prior to my birthday (July 19th). And once the concept album "Mesopotamia" is released, I have two more album ideas for "Cimelium". Yeah, the beat goes on and on...

A new sideproject, a new facette of my musical schizophrenia, is also in a state one can call it a concept. Because my musical origins are in the metal and punk genres of music, it was a wish from the heart all the time to do such music too again, besides all the other musical styles i cover. The concept for my new project is titled "Greifenberg" and under that name I will release Folkmetal, Viking Metal, Blackmetal etc. And because the whole concept is not just a bit about Dragons, Knights, Sword and Magic, this project is also a great new home for the successors of the "Alion - The Original Soundtrack" album.

You will be surprised at all, which new facettes of my creativity I will unveil to you soon. For example I will put more focus on guitar and vocals in the future. I expect that, aside from the alionsonny project (Reggae Dub), there will be 10 to 15 projects for particular musical styles in the end. Some of those projects are more or less alive allready:

• Cimelium - Electronic Ethno, Chillout, Meditation -> formerly AlionMeditations
• Willma Poppen - Techno Pop of the most commercial kind
• Tubenwurst - Electronic Rock, Wave, Avant Garde -> successor of the album "Electronic Spacerock"

Scheduled for the future are the following projects so far:
Greifenberg -> Folkmetal, Viking Metal, Blackmetal, orchestral stuff
WOLTHER -> Singer Songwriter and Progressive Rock

And what about AlionLive? AlionLive Madeira? YEAH! This will go on too! Currently I am cutting the longest part so far, which is about a day at the botanical gardes of Funchal. This part will consist of twoo separate parts. No this time not because of upload issues, but because when we were getting back from the botanical gardes, we took the bus and I was able to sit in the front of the bus and could film the whole busride from Funchal botanical gardens to Funchal center from nearly a drivers perspective. And because riding a bus at Madeira is allways an adventure, I make the busride a video part on it's own to not let it drown in all the flowers & stuff at the botanical gardens.

This will be part 10a and 10b of AlionLive Madeira then. And so you know what awaits you still, here's a little outlook on the comming parts of the series. These are the parts comming up next:
Part 11 - Hiking on our own to the wild heartland of Madeira
Part 12 - The day after hiking and the return.
Part 13 - Another day at the beach and more
Part 14 - Departure -> extremely short.

Maybe I will do a part 15 for an aftermath with tips & tricks, do's and dont's. This could be very useful for your own planning of a trip to Madeira. Please let me know if you would like me to do this.

Well and after this is done, other stuff from AlionLive is to be done. I have loads of ideas. Well, and that's the report so far from here. I'm at work for you again!

Part eight of the "Alion Meditations" series has just been released!

Yepp, and on we go, friends of the calm and meditative sounds. The eighth part of the "Alion Meditations" series is here! Some listeners told me, that the recent parts of the series were a bit to rythm oriented for them, so this part comes alomg without any drums and percussion instruments. The whole song floats nicely along, thanks to the magic of audio filters and ping-pong-delays. This time the song is also a bit longer. Instead of the traditional five minute playtime, it is about six minutes long. Is there another thing to say about this song? No! So here's the song

and as allways the indestructible links at Archive.org:
Meditation Eight - LISTEN
Meditation Eight - DOWNLOAD

The seventh Chapter of the "Alion Meditations" series has been released!

Actually this song has been released four days ago and my followers on Twitter and friends on Facebook know about it since then, unless the message drowned in the endless digital buzz. The reason why the visitors of alionsonny.com/alionsonny.de get the news that late is the following: Some other things got into my way and I didn't find the time to update this site and additionally I wanted to test how the downloads and streams of the song go, if I use promotion via social networks only.
But now for the new song: After about four moth since the last chapter of the "Alion Meditations" series was released, it was about time to release a new chapter. It was especially about time, because many of the folks who enjoyed the previous chapters were strongly demanding a new chapter. Because of that I halted all other projects and ideas. AND HOW GLAD I AM ABOUT THIS NOW! Somehow I had exactly the right ideas, mood and inspiration for it at the day I created "Meditation Seven". The whole song was created in about 6 hours and it took additional 2 hours to get the mix cleaned up and to remove some oddities. And it was woth the work, because the first feedback I got for the song was all positive and encouraging, sometimes even euphoric. I am also more than satified and happy with the result and the work at the song gave me quite a lot of inspiration for future works. Here it is, "Meditation Seven":

and as allways the indestructable links at Archive.org:
Meditation Seven - LISTEN
Meditation Seven - DOWNLOAD

New Track "Meditation Six" is out!

Well, that took quite some time again. As some of you know, some major changes took place in my life and for that reason I was down and had a huge creative blocking which kept me from doings any creative work. Well, I think and hope this is over now. My first release after that little pause is the sixth track of the "Alion Meditations" series. It is REALLY unusual and I suggest that you do not listen to this track if you are on ANY drugs. I tried to put my current state of mind and feelings into this one. This is why this is no realy composition. It has no real melody, no fancy hookline. In fact I am not sure if it is music at all. But I WANTED to do this and so I did. If some of you or even one single listener on earth enjoys it, I am glad about it. If notm I don't even care. I want to do more just for the sake of doing it. So here's "Meditation Six":

Meditation Six - LISTEN
Meditation Six - DOWNLOAD

"Alion Meditations" - "Meditation Four" is out now!

YES, this is a very creative week. 3 songs in 3 days, that's not bad ;) After releasing two new songs for the "Alion Original Soundtrack"-project, I wanted to do something without orchestral soundtrack arrangements, something to relax. And what's better for that, than a brandnew track for the "Alion Meditations"-project of which I know that not just a few people like it and are waiting for more tracks? Many thanks to the folks out there who wrote me very positive and encouraging comments and mails for the previous parts. So here it is, track number four:

Meditation Four - LISTEN
Meditation Four - DOWNLOAD

New song "Meditation Two" out now!

Yes, it's been a while since I released my last song. Over a month without a song release by me drove some chronical worried folks to write me mails, asking what has happened to me and if everything is allright. And now, on the occasion of releasing this new song, I can give the answer to this question to you all: Yes everything is ok so far. I'm still depressed and unemployed, but I'm alive. What have I done all the time? Well I worked at songs, what else? And I started programming in C++ again and that's what I spent most of the time with. Those who want to be up to date what I am doing in that field, may visit my brandnew blog I set up just for that purpose:

The Alion Code

Currently it is just in german language, I am sorry. But if I keep each and everything bilingual, I can make blogging my fulltime job... but nobody would pay me a friggin' cent for it. So learn german or use google translate *LOL* If you look into that blog frequently, you'll also be less worried about what's up with me while I am not making music but code.

Well, but now to the song I promised you. A while ago I announced a new themed musical project in which I want to produce music by and for meditation. I instantly released the first song for the project back then and a short while after, I released a suitable video for it. Here's the second song of the project with the very inventive title "Meditation Two". This time it is not just a bit more rythmically:

Meditation Two - STREAM
Meditation Two - DOWNLOAD (Richtclick and "Save as")

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.