Hurt (NIN Fat Angus cover)

April 30, 2016 3:03 PM

Hurt (NIN Fat Angus cover)
In the spirit of #keepmefiweird, an old cover I did of Nine Inch Nails' Hurt, guest starring an Amiga 500 (well, WinUAE, as I couldn't get my own running) on vocals. Why? Considering the tone of the song, I decided to go the exact opposite direction of Johnny Cash. It's a machine almost doing an almost Shatneresque take on a painful, regretful song. (Also: you see that spike at the end? It's loud. You've been warned)

Role: musician

posted by lmfsilva (12 comments total)

Yessssssssssss.

I have this dim recollection of Paula being the primary audio chip on the Amiga board, with Agnus as more of a hub and the, uh, it's not Lisa but the other chip handling video stuff. But Agnus is a way more memorable name (especially compared to not-Lisa, clearly) so I can't fault the catchy naming in any case.
posted by cortex at 3:07 PM on April 30, 2016

Yup. "Fat Angus" is nerdy enough to be recognizable, "Paula" would leave people confused.
posted by lmfsilva at 4:06 PM on April 30, 2016

And of course, I'm always forgetting it's Fat Agnus, not Angus.

Also, I'm terribly sorry for doing it again.
posted by lmfsilva at 11:01 AM on May 1, 2016

I find I can't listen to too much of it, but I always love the mournful delivery that can be got from synthesised speech like this. I'm double-loving the fact this is Amiga-based. Thumbs up!
posted by comealongpole at 12:59 PM on May 1, 2016

What was the production process, by the way? Did you cut together bits of speech synthesis against the backing track in editing, or was this a, well, "live" performance of a single appropriately-spaced-out string of text running in real time?

I wish my old A500 hadn't been essentially destroyed in an attempt to ship it cross country in college. Thing was a brick, would probably still run today if otherwise unjostled.
posted by cortex at 4:47 PM on May 1, 2016

All editing. The most interesting part was trying to get the actual words - while most times it gets the word right away, sometimes I had to type what the word sounds like, but surprisingly not that often, considering this is mid-80s home use speech synthesis.

The reason why I resort to emulation is because mine has a busted floppy drive. I probably have a workbench floppy around, but I'm almost sure it wouldn't work. I really should have bought an HxC when I could.
posted by lmfsilva at 8:15 AM on May 2, 2016

This is fantastic.
posted by shelleycat at 10:38 AM on May 2, 2016

Oh god now I'm listening to Heresy and it's even better. My coworkers just bought speakers so we can play music in the lab while we work and I'm totally going to bust this out when they least expect it (which I would say is always).
posted by shelleycat at 10:40 AM on May 2, 2016

I want to know their reactions when that happens.
posted by lmfsilva at 2:31 PM on May 2, 2016

The speakers finally arrived today! I'm going to give it a few days of innocuous things to lull everyone (my colleagues listen to bland pop generally) then bam. I'll keep you updated!
posted by shelleycat at 9:00 AM on May 11, 2016

The instrumentation works surprisingly well.

The machine voice saying "your God is dead" in Heresy is sort of terrifying.
posted by reventlov at 11:15 PM on May 14, 2016

Uhm.

(at this point, I'm not sure I'll stop before I've covered all of Downward Spiral. March of the Pigs is probably going to be next.)
posted by lmfsilva at 12:27 PM on May 15, 2016