The Ballad of Zach
Ok, as I said I would I wrote the ballad of zach. Of course this is my interpretation. I hope you enjoy, it was my intention to do a ballad of everybody here. This sort of came out of two things, one is the music from Diablo II which I like. The riff at the beginning is similar to one of the songs. Also I’ve been thinking about Shadow of the Colossus recently and was trying to do a version of some of the music which is in G minor. Obviously I played sotc on zach’s ps2. There are some mistakes in here but I’m pretty happy with this one, and I was just kind of having fun in the middle part. I wanted to have an ambient track of like forest sounds or rain in the forest, maybe I’ll do that at some point.
[audio:http://www.roaringshark.com/podcasts/balladofzach.mp3]
Download, Ballad of Zach
February 24th, 2010 at 2:10 pm
Wow, thanks Mark. I’m really honored that you wrote this for/about me. I think it really does capture something fundamentally “Zach” in it. Like the sanctum sanctorum of my hermetically sealed vessel of magical realms.
February 24th, 2010 at 2:51 pm
yeah, I know it’s not a ballad in a traditional sense but I did definitely try to make a “Zach” song, and also try to tie in associated themes. it’s interesting that you mention magical realms because I was looking for a fantasy book to read recently and was thinking about checking out tales of neveryon
February 24th, 2010 at 5:49 pm
Neveryon is okay – i found it a little too political/didactic for my tastes. Like Delany couldn’t quite bring himself to go full-out sword and sorcery so he settled for something that’s mostly people delivering lots of long-winded soliloquies. Although some of the ideas are still interesting. I can’t say that I can think of any fantasy books that I’ve read recently… I’ve been thinking about reading some of Le Guin’s Hainish cycle – although technically sci-fi, the cover art has a strong fantasy element to it.
February 24th, 2010 at 9:35 pm
I love the double-tap delayed bass drum-y effect, which reminded me of that choo-choo train snare in Ultravox’ “Vienna.”
February 25th, 2010 at 5:32 am
darren, that’s a setting I made on the tribe with some effects in audition. I don’t know what ultravox is but I’ll have to check it out because I was interested in vox amps.
zach, that kind a sucks that he didn’t go all out because I was sort of looking for a swords and sorcery kind of thing. I’ve read one book be Le Guin. she’s a lot more balanced than you might expect and definitely puts a lot of thought into her writing. fantasy is such a weird genre. it’s so much more nebulous
February 25th, 2010 at 5:00 pm
yeah in some sense almost any fiction can be fantasy – like…the fiction is the fantasy of the author or whatever. but yeah pretty disparate genre even using the fairly canonical definition, like on one hand you’ve got the lion the witch and the wardrobe, then you’ve got lotr, and then you’ve got like d&d books, not even counting the more humorous kids stuff like piers anthony or robert asprin.
I guess the biggest issue for me is that I don’t find LOTR very compelling, although you have to admit Tolkien was trying. And a lot of fantasy stuff is just cut&paste from that, minus a lot of the subtext.
One thing I was into recently, though, is the Conan compilations from Dark Horse. I don’t know if Ross still has them or not, but he loaned me a bunch of them and some of the stories are pretty good. There’s also the comic adaptation of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser drawn by Mike Mignola. Hellboy also has elements of a fantasy pastiche.
I was also scrolling through some of the Hugo award winners for fantasy books, but I think they’re pretty heavily sci-fi biased. Not sure if there’s an equivalent award for fantasy stories. I was thinking for a while I might get a subscription to F&SF or Analog or something but I imagine the payoff in magazines like that is pretty low.
February 25th, 2010 at 7:10 pm
this is awesome, mark!!! i can’t wait to hear the rob song.
i can’t think of any fantasy books, prose or comics, to recommend. haven’t read many and all the ones i have read blew.
February 26th, 2010 at 8:59 am
thanks ross,
the rob song will definitely be challenging for me because I want it to be really metal.
zach, I don’t find lotr very compelling either. but at the same time I was sort of looking for something that wouldn’t shy away from genre conventions. I think if conan were more lithe, like if he was a thief or something then I could get into it. the conan movies are definitely the best at presenting the mood of high fantasy without being all tolkien.
I guess we sort of had the same thought about looking at past award winners. I found this website which archives a bunch of sf and fantasy awards
http://www.worldswithoutend.com/
there are some awards just for fantasy but it’s not like every book there is something I’d be interested in
February 28th, 2010 at 12:50 am
Mark,
I asked my father if he knew of any S&S stuff with thieves in particular, and he suggested you check out Fritz Leiber’s ‘Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser’ books. The title characters are a pair of rogues. I think only the first book is a novel, though. He also put in a good word for L. Sprague De Camp’s S&S books written with Fletcher Pratt.
It shouldn’t take me long to dig any of these out of the collection, so if you’re interested maybe we could do a podcast.
March 1st, 2010 at 12:07 pm
darren, I looked into those books and they seem like they could be cool.
March 2nd, 2010 at 2:29 am
Wow Mark, I’m honored that you’re even thinking about writing a song for me. I like that it’s going to be metal! Sorry, by the way, for being such a Roaring Shark absentee of late. I just got out from under my book project, so I’ll hopefully be more active in the next couple of weeks – I’ve been reading Anathem by Neal Stephenson, and am interested in writing about it once I’m done slogging through all 900+ pages of it.
March 2nd, 2010 at 5:32 am
rob, hope your book project went well. I have to confess to being a one time adherent to stephenson with works such as snow crash and cryptonomicom.
March 2nd, 2010 at 2:01 pm
Hey Mark – I’ve read Snow Crash and I sort of had a mixed reaction to it. It’s such a fun read for about the first fifty pages, and the concept of a totally privatized, free-for-all future was cool (if terrifying). But I thought that the book got bogged down by the end. I haven’t read Cryptonomicon or any of his other stuff (other than about half of Anathem), but it’s an interesting experience trying to get where Stephenson is coming from. I’m so much more accustomed to more or less non-sci-fi, “realistic” literature that the narrative rules and subtext of science fiction are sort of difficult to grasp. And I don’t think that being a fanatical TNG and DS9 viewer has really prepared me for a heady, long-form sci-fi narrative about the history of mathematics. Still, it’s an engrossing book.
March 2nd, 2010 at 4:11 pm
It’s been a while since I read snow crash. As I recall the book opens up with the main character driving some hot rodded van to deliver pizza or something and then meeting YT the skateboard girl after getting into an accident. that was pretty cool. I also had a mixed reaction to his work. I think he’s to caught up in “telling it like it is” and also is afraid to take risks. it’s like the vietnam vet character and yt waxing poetic over helmets, or the main dude making fun of the guy that does kendo