If the YouTube thing within this post doesn't work on your device, you can find it at this link:
Jerkatorium
Thursday, July 12, 2018
Wednesday, July 4, 2018
Overdue Update: New Jerkatorium and Matchy Matchy songs
It has been over two months since the last Jerkatorium blog update. Since then, we have recorded five new original Matchy Matchy songs, one new cover song, and three new podcasts. I have no excuses for not updating this blog earlier. Let’s just launch into it.
SpinTunes #14 continued through to its resolution on May 26. We're thrilled that our occasional collaborator Micah Sommersmith won his well-earned and deserved victory.
As I’d explained in previous posts, Jerkatorium was compelled to judge the competition this year because we won SpinTunes #13 last year, and so we had to supply reviews for all of the songs throughout this year's competition. To that end, Jerkatorium continued to generate review podcasts for each round of SpinTunes #14. All four of those podcasts can be found at https://twojerksonevote.com. The podcasts are free to stream or download - but I should warn you that they are very specifically geared towards SpinTunes, and they would probably not interest anyone who wasn’t already following SpinTunes #14. We tried to inject some humorous bits into the podcasts, but even those bits are mostly inside jokes for SpinTuners.
As noted in the previous blog update, Jerkatorium’s alter ego band Matchy Matchy submitted those first two shadow entries (One Of These Days and I Think You’re Okay) for SpinTunes #14, but then time constraints and other projects prevented us from submitting shadow songs for the last two rounds. Instead, Jerkatorium completed a cover version of Today’s The Day by Inverse T. Clown for Song Fight’s 2018 Gift Of Music sidefight. Today’s The Day covers are sort of a thing on the internet, and to date there are over 30 different versions of the song online. For our cover, we changed some of the lyrics to tone down some of the gender-specific derogatory remarks that seemed a little gratuitous and unnecessary; that judgment might be arguable, but regardless we’ll chalk up our edits to “artistic license”. You can hear our version here:
Early on, we decided that we weren’t going to participate in the Nur Ein competition this year. The Nur Ein song challenge requirements tend to hurt the quality of the submissions: you might have a good song and then be compelled to include animal sounds, or backwards recording, or jump through some other hoop to have it qualify, thereby dragging down the appeal of the song. Also Nur Ein uses judges with no qualifications and no bona fides, who post their rankings anonymously. The judges are free to base their rankings on petty Song Fight resentments instead of any legitimate criteria. If Jerkatorium has no respect for Nur Ein’s challenges or judges, why would we make the effort to participate?
For some reason we changed our minds at the last minute and decided to compete in Nur Ein this year. Early on it was clear that the two least-qualified judges were dead set on giving us low rankings no matter what we submitted - a typical round would have two judges ranking us up with the very top songs and the other two putting us near (or at) last place. It was just a matter of time until the math caught up with us. We were eliminated after the fifth round (officially Round Four, but that’s still five songs because there’s a Round Zero). We never expected to win - the winning group (Merisan) is much more talented than us and submitted really fantastic songs every round - but it is disappointing that we didn’t get a fair shake.
Due to either confusion or unilateral decision, Chumpy submitted our Nur Ein songs as Matchy Matchy instead of Jerkatorium this year, but everyone knew it was us. The judges and other competitors occasionally even referred to us as Jerkatorium instead of Matchy Matchy on the bulletin board and during the listening parties. You can find our Matchy Matchy Nur Ein songs at:
The Round Zero challenge was entitled “Trial By Fire” and we had to incorporate sirens. The incorporation of sirens was a terrible, song-ruining requirement, and obviously a very bad idea; all of the submissions for that round suffered from it. Round 2 was entitled “Internet Sensation” and the challenge was to sell an imaginary product. Round 3 was entitled “3:20” and the listed challenge was Ambience. Round 4 was “We Should” and we were required to have a guest play a household item on the track. We actually had two guests that round: Brian Raiter and Andrei Balitaan each played various kitchen implements and other household items as percussion instruments, and I think it turned out great. Round 5 was “Never Knew The Guy”, and the challenge was to make the song a biography.
The day after submitting “We Should” to Nur Ein, Chumpy and I went back to clean the song up a little. Here is a better version of the song:
I’m so happy with our “We Should” that I’m making a music video for the song, and I’ll post a link as soon as it is finished.
Wednesday, April 25, 2018
SpinTunes Judging Podcast And Some New Songs
Jerkatorium won SpinTunes 13 last year (which is something I already bragged about in a previous bog post), and SpinTunes winners are generally expected to be judges for the following SpinTunes. SpinTunes 14 officially started up March 2018, and Jerkatorium is participating as one of the five competition judges.
Our intent was to submit our reviews in the form of podcasts. Travel and other issues got in the way of submitting our Round 1 reviews as a podcast, so Chumpy composed written reviews. Since then, we have caught up and created the podcast for the Round 1 reviews. The appeal of these review podcasts might be limited to SpinTunes followers and contestants, but if you are interested in listening to us yammer for a while the various ways to access the podcast are listed below:
https://twojerksonevote.com <-- minimal website
https://twojerksonevote.com/ST14R1_TJ1V.mp3 <--- direct link to mp3
http://twojerksonevote.com/feeds/podcast.xml <-- xml feed for iTunes or other podcast listening software
The podcast does include a new short song from Jerkatorium, which is our SpinTunes Judge's Theme. You can hear the theme separately at:
https://soundcloud.com/jerkatorium/spintunes-judges-theme
This next bit is going to require a little bit of explanation: Bands may participate in SpinTunes competitions without actually competing, and they call that "shadowing". SpinTunes shadow entries are songs that meet the challenge criteria and are submitted and posted along with the competing entries, but shadow entries are not competing and they are not rated, and shadowing bands are not eligible to win SpinTunes. Jerkatorium's alter ego band Matchy Matchy has been submitting shadow entries to SpinTunes 14. Obviously it would be unethical for Matchy Matchy to compete in SpinTunes 14 while we are judging SpinTunes 14, but we didn't want to miss out on the fun of participation.
The first challenge was to "refer to your pet as your roommate and write a song about what your roommate did today, never mentioning its species in the lyrics." We submitted the song "One Of These Days" as Matchy Matchy, and you can hear it and download it for free at the link below (adult language warning):
https://jerkatorium.bandcamp.com/track/one-of-these-days
The second challenge was to write a prequel to a famous song. We decided to do "I Think You're Okay" (as Matchy Matchy) as a prequel to "I Think I Love You" by the Partridge Family. You can hear the song and download it for free at the link below:
https://jerkatorium.bandcamp.com/track/i-think-youre-ok
Our intent was to submit our reviews in the form of podcasts. Travel and other issues got in the way of submitting our Round 1 reviews as a podcast, so Chumpy composed written reviews. Since then, we have caught up and created the podcast for the Round 1 reviews. The appeal of these review podcasts might be limited to SpinTunes followers and contestants, but if you are interested in listening to us yammer for a while the various ways to access the podcast are listed below:
https://twojerksonevote.com <-- minimal website
https://twojerksonevote.com/ST14R1_TJ1V.mp3 <--- direct link to mp3
http://twojerksonevote.com/feeds/podcast.xml <-- xml feed for iTunes or other podcast listening software
The podcast does include a new short song from Jerkatorium, which is our SpinTunes Judge's Theme. You can hear the theme separately at:
https://soundcloud.com/jerkatorium/spintunes-judges-theme
This next bit is going to require a little bit of explanation: Bands may participate in SpinTunes competitions without actually competing, and they call that "shadowing". SpinTunes shadow entries are songs that meet the challenge criteria and are submitted and posted along with the competing entries, but shadow entries are not competing and they are not rated, and shadowing bands are not eligible to win SpinTunes. Jerkatorium's alter ego band Matchy Matchy has been submitting shadow entries to SpinTunes 14. Obviously it would be unethical for Matchy Matchy to compete in SpinTunes 14 while we are judging SpinTunes 14, but we didn't want to miss out on the fun of participation.
The first challenge was to "refer to your pet as your roommate and write a song about what your roommate did today, never mentioning its species in the lyrics." We submitted the song "One Of These Days" as Matchy Matchy, and you can hear it and download it for free at the link below (adult language warning):
https://jerkatorium.bandcamp.com/track/one-of-these-days
The second challenge was to write a prequel to a famous song. We decided to do "I Think You're Okay" (as Matchy Matchy) as a prequel to "I Think I Love You" by the Partridge Family. You can hear the song and download it for free at the link below:
https://jerkatorium.bandcamp.com/track/i-think-youre-ok
Thursday, February 1, 2018
Fan Art! Also Flamethrower Win, New Song, & Radio Airplay!
A ton of thanks to artist/musician Bomberanian for this fantastic art for our "43 Hours" song:
Bomberanian explained that she "always felt like the song was about a dog with a phone", and now I can't hear the song without thinking the same thing. Thanks again, this is awesome.
Jerkatorium featuring Micah Sommersmith won the Flamethrower Song Fight by a sizable margin, maintaining the 100% win percentage for our collaborations with Micah. Sure, we've only collaborated on three songs so far, but three out of three is still a pretty solid score. Be sure to check out Micah's fabulous "Tunesday" accordion performances posted every Tuesday on YouTube.
Jerkatorium has a new song currently posted at SongFight.org for the "Until It Happens To You" fight. You can hear it (and vote for it and/or download it if you like it) at the link below. It will be posted there probably until around February 10, and after that time you will find it in our Jerkatorium Song Fight Archive (click the link on the right side of the web version of this blog).
http://www.songfight.org/index.php
We recently discovered that our song Adele In The Car got radio airplay at least twice on college station WSIA 88.9 back in March 19 and March 26, 2016, on Anthony LoGatto's weekly comedy radio show "A-Log on the Airwaves". Apparently we placed #2 on his "Wacked Out 5" countdown of the top 5 most requested funny songs for the week of March 26. He included a shout out to SongFight.org and to this Jerkatorium blog, which was very cool of him.
Bomberanian explained that she "always felt like the song was about a dog with a phone", and now I can't hear the song without thinking the same thing. Thanks again, this is awesome.
Jerkatorium featuring Micah Sommersmith won the Flamethrower Song Fight by a sizable margin, maintaining the 100% win percentage for our collaborations with Micah. Sure, we've only collaborated on three songs so far, but three out of three is still a pretty solid score. Be sure to check out Micah's fabulous "Tunesday" accordion performances posted every Tuesday on YouTube.
Jerkatorium has a new song currently posted at SongFight.org for the "Until It Happens To You" fight. You can hear it (and vote for it and/or download it if you like it) at the link below. It will be posted there probably until around February 10, and after that time you will find it in our Jerkatorium Song Fight Archive (click the link on the right side of the web version of this blog).
http://www.songfight.org/index.php
We recently discovered that our song Adele In The Car got radio airplay at least twice on college station WSIA 88.9 back in March 19 and March 26, 2016, on Anthony LoGatto's weekly comedy radio show "A-Log on the Airwaves". Apparently we placed #2 on his "Wacked Out 5" countdown of the top 5 most requested funny songs for the week of March 26. He included a shout out to SongFight.org and to this Jerkatorium blog, which was very cool of him.
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