Saturday, December 28, 2024

Weekend Lounge ~ Cruising at the End of the Century



Welcome to the weekend! It's the last go around for 2024!

For the last Weekend Lounge post of the year I wanted to introduce you to the Cannon Cruisers YouTube channel. This one isn't actually run by me, but my co-host, and, as a result has a more modern look than the rest of our channels. It's not up to date, but the channel will be slowly updated as we have the time.

It's another alternative to check out the Cannon Cruisers, if that's the kind of thing you're interested in. We talk old b-movies, discover old classics (and not-so classics), and have a lot of fun along the way. We've been doing it for over half a decade at this point, surprising both of us. What started as a lark turned into a long term side project for both of us. I don't think we'll be stopping anytime soon. There's plenty to go over.

We've covered over 300 movies since we started, by the way. You can peruse what we covered on our Letterboxd page here.

Uploads on the YouTube channel are not our first priority right now, so if you want to keep up I highly recommend going straight to the blog itself. It was the first place we set up camp and I make sure to update it every week or when there's a new episode up.

As always, check out the Cannon Cruisers if you like or are interested in old movies and want some fun.

Completely unrelated to that, I was recently fooling around with AI music again, and concocted the following EP. It is related to a writing project I've been slowly trying to puzzle out of my end of the year brain.

The idea was to create an EP that matched the weird dour tone at the end of the 1990s and early 2000s before 9/11 or even Columbine really changed the mood permanently. I specifically chose third wave ska to do this with because of how much the genre changed over the decade and I wanted to see if I could push it in a different direction than it went in reaction to the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the resulting Clear Channel monopoly which more or less banned it and other genres of the time from the radio. So it's an oddly reflective piece on endings since there was a lot of that as we were leaving the 1900s behind at the time.

In other words, I wanted to grab a mood that existed with a sound that didn't. Where could it have gone if things went differently? Who knows. I tried to puzzle it out here. It was an interesting little project to try out because I could almost imagine it existing, even though it didn't. and in retrospect it's kind of eerie, which I suppose was the point.

Here is the album cover:


The EP is here!


The album starts with the skate-punk inspired sound the decade started with before changing over the course of the album to being more in line with the more confident style it had by the end of the 90s when it broke into the mainstream. Where could it have gone after this, we'll never know. It was cast out of the club and most of the bands either abandoned the style or deliberately went insular, crashing the genre in the '00s.

This is a bit of a what-if, I guess.

As for how it relates into my writing, well, you probably won't see that for awhile, but a lot of it is based on a story cycle I've had in my head for awhile and have been trying to write down for about as long. So if you see lyrical motifs or lines show up in stories later on, you'll know where they first showed up. It's been strange cobbling this together. I've never quite done anything like this before, so it's been strange figuring it out.

But, really, just have fun with it. Enjoy the music, download it, remix it, or ignore it. Love it, hate it, or be indifferent. Whatever you want. It's a bit of an experiment to help me with inspiration for something else, so it's all meant in good fun. Don't take it too seriously!

Enjoy the Northbound Lights, a band that might or might not have existed from an era long gone that increasingly few remember. There's always something we can learn from those forgotten days. In this case, I don't know. I just felt like doing something strange and off the wall. You can find the End of the Century EP for free here. It might be a bit different than you're expecting, especially if you only know the genre from its oft-mocked tropes.

And that's all for this week!

Enjoy the last week of the year and I will see you soon enough!






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