More than just the corner stone of every bachelor’s diet, Doritos have also launched a nation-wide competition called “Make An Ad, Make A Fortune”.  The competition pits aspiring film makers against each other to create the next Doritos TV commercial so their advertising agency doesn’t have to.  We at Golden Tusk Productions think that’s a brilliant idea, so we threw our hat into the ring.

Combine the above with alcohol, boredom and one overacting cowboy and this is what you get:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Does this make us sell outs? Absolutely not. What makes us sell outs is that we’re asking all of you to vote for our video to be selected for TV air time. By voting for our video, you’ll be helping us fulfil our life long dream of being ripped apart on the Gruen Transfer.

We need your votes before next week to win the round, so go now and vote my lovely ladies and gentle folk!

[VOTE NOW]

Have I plugged the voting thing enough yet?

In the world of Star Wars geekdom, not much escapes me. It was only a matter of time before I caught wind of the Star Wars Uncut project. I mentioned it to my pals over at Golden Tusk Productions and, to my surprise, they loved the idea. And so, the following bastardisation of Star Wars was born.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If you want to see our scene make the final cut, cast your votes at www.starwarsuncut.com. Run Luke, run!

I got to talking with guitarist Adam Kurzel last year. Both of us were badly depleted of motivation since the demise of Nitidus and its short-lived successor Shotgun Zero. However, Adam had written a bunch of songs that never quite suited either band. We jammed on some of the songs and liked what we were hearing, so we recorded a few rough demos, nabbed ourselves a bass player in one Ben Howling (from Immersion) and settled on the band name Romeo Knights.

As of this writing, most of the songs are already good to go. We plan to write a few more, then lay down the best tracks in a home studio so you can hear our new sounds before we take it to a stage near you.

For now, here’s one we prepared earlier. This is a track Adam and Marki recorded during the Shotgun Zero days that has found a home in the Romeo Knights set list.

If you would like to keep up to date on the band’s progress, head over to www.romeoknights.com and subscribe to the feed.

We had so much fun making Wine Capades for Golden Tusk Productions that we made a sequel with a cleverly imaginative name. Beer Capades is just like Wine Capades, except with more hops… and nothing like Wine Capades. Watch the teaser video, you’ll get the idea.

EDIT: So, I forgot to mention the most important part! The theme song for Beer Capades was written and recorded by Ground To Zero regulars Catherine Robinson (guitar) and myself (drums). You may remember seeing Catherine in our Demo 1 video from the first jam session. Now finally we have some new music here for you. Enjoy!

Click here to view the embedded video.

You can check out the rest of the show on the Golden Tusk Productions YouTube channel.

So anyway, I had a little extra spare time this weekend and thought I’d take a few moments to share what I’ve been doing outside of Ground To Zero. Welcome to part one.

Over the past year or two I’ve been stepping out from behind the drums and in front of a camera with the rest of the Golden Tusk Productions crew. We’ve been making odd-ball indie short films for years, but this time we put together a mini-series devoted to one of life’s most wonderful pleasures: wine drinking! Here’s a little taste of Wine Capades:

Click here to view the embedded video.

You can check out the rest of the show on the Golden Tusk Productions YouTube channel.

• This project is still kicking around and certainly not dead.  Sorry.
• I will not be deleting any unpublished content, in fact I’ve just set up a shiny new QNAP TS-410 Turbo NAS decked out with four WD10EVDS hard drives to handle my storage needs, which should free up space on the iMac for some serious iMovie action.  In non-geek terms: more Ground To Zero jam videos coming eventually, stay tuned.

There were, however, some truths sprinkled amongst my April goofs:

• My gratitude to everyone who has contributed to this project and all of you for following.  Your positive energy is what drives this thing, so for that I thank you all.
• I am focusing on so called “paid endeavours” because the rent doesn’t pay itself, however it is not at the expense of this project, which has always been about the music and never been about the money.
• I do encourage everyone to support artists who embrace the digital culture and not those who make you a criminal for sharing and promoting their music.  Luckily there are a lot of good artists out there to choose from.

So to make up for my bad joke and to share a little positive energy, here’s an interview with Damian Kulash of OK Go, a favourite of Ground To Zero, talking about the band leaving EMI, finding success in the digital age and a look at their latest video clip that has become another internet sensation.  If you haven’t seen it, it’s totally worth watching!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Video courtesy of TWiT.tv

I would like to thank everyone who participated and contributed their considerable musical talents to make this project so much fun over the last year and a bit. I’m sorry I was only able to make available a small portion of what we created. I will need to delete the rest to make space on my hard drive for afore mentioned paid endeavours, so if there are any videos or songs you want a copy of, please contact me directly in the next few days.

Thanks also to all of you who followed this project’s exploits from the beginning. Your kind words were an immeasurable source of encouragement and I could not have gone on this long without you. I only hope that you continue to support artists who embrace the digital culture and not those who make you a criminal for sharing and promoting their music.

This has been a hard decision, but the fact is that everyone needs to make a living and creating music is not a viable way to do so in this millennium. To those who believe otherwise, I wish you the best of luck and if you find a business model that works for you, let me know.

So long, and all the best.

As a general rule, all news items posted on 1^st of April should always be considered suspect. If you haven’t guessed yet, this was an April fool’s joke. Tune in next time for a better post.

Here’s a little background from S.L.A.M. (Save Live Australia’s Music), a “non-politically aligned, independent entity made up of musicians and music-lovers”:

In a bid to address street violence, Liquor Licensing Victoria (LLV) has introduced sweeping changes with unintended consequences for the local music scene.

LLV should admit its mistake and make simple changes immediately, acknowledging that there is no link between live music and high risk. The Tote is gone, who’s next?

On 23 February, coinciding with the 34th anniversary of AC/DC’s famous ‘It’s A Long Way To The Top’ film clip shoot down Swanston Street, S.L.A.M. is protesting in support and celebration of Victoria’s music scene, where new liquor licensing laws threaten to pull the plug on live music.

Today is the day people!  If you’re in Melbourne this afternoon and want to show your support (or just hang out with your favourite local musicians), head over to the State Library at 4pm, where they’ll be marching to Parliament House and being generally disgruntled until 7pm 6pm.

I work in the city, so I’m hoping to stop by later on.  I’ll be sure to take some of my usual low-quality Blackberry photos.  Come say hi if you’re there, I’m the one in the brown jumper (because stupid me forgot to bring one of my many local band t-shirts).

Update: as promised, my happy snaps…

You can find more photos from the rally under the “slam” tag on Flickr.

Unfortunately we don’t have any studio tracks for you, but we do have a metric shit-tonne of raw video footage taken from our 2009 jam sessions. “Shit-tonne” is of course the technical term for a hard disk full of video files, which I’ve been trawling through like a pig digging for truffles.  Before you get too excited, let me first point out that these videos were never meant to be high quality productions.  What we have is a demo reel of musical experimentation, and some of those experiments failed spectacularly.  Others sucked considerably less (to my ears anyway), so I’m going to release those ones to the world.  Why?  Because that’s how we roll bee-atch (cue the gansta beatz).

My god that was a lot of preamble.

If you’re keen to hear some raw new music, check out this demo track I cobbled together from our second jam session on 28^th March 2009.  It features Jase on bass, Jake on guitar and both Gazz and myself on the duelling drum kits.  Roll it…

Click here to view the embedded video.

So now that we’re all sharing, it’s time for you to share your comments.  You can even share the video itself if you want, it’s free under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.  Have fun!

Here it is in a nutshell:

We’re back baby, yeah!!

Here it is again in slightly more words:

A sixth jam session was intended for mid 2009, but other commitments demanded attention at the time and unfortunately Ground To Zero lost momentum. The media landscape of course continued to change and I did my best to capture the highlights on our FriendFeed. Lessons were learned, the Ground To Zero concept evolved and pretty soon another decade passed into history. I was keen to get this project rolling again, and so were a lot of people apparently, so it’s about time we break the silence… and by that I mean make some serious noise!

To be more specific:

• Demos from the 2009 jam sessions will finally be released. For real this time. Seriously, I’m editing them right now. Stay tuned.
• There’ll be more rants coming. You’ve been warned.
• A new round of jam sessions have been scheduled, starting this Saturday! We’ll let you know how it goes.

So there it is, lots of stuff happening. Probably a good time to subscribe to our news feed if you haven’t already.  Not into RSS or newsletters?  Fine, we’ll come to you.  We’re on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Myspace, plus I have just carved out territories on Flickr, Vimeo and thesixtyone as well, so friend us up on your favourite sites.

That’s enough words from me, I’ve got videos to edit and jam sessions to organise. Ciao.