A cover of "Perfect Nightmare" from the soundtrack to Dishwasher: Vampire Smile, an amazing little indie game on XBLA (and now Steam!) by Ska Studios. You should really go and buy it. No, I'll wait...

I took the musical direction away from the punk/industrial feel it had, and turned it into a raw metal track. The original composition felt like an incomplete idea to me, so I fleshed it out... by about four and a half minutes.

The first "verse" (if you could call them that)as well as the music are written by James Silva and Ska Studios is the respective copyright holder. I just added some lyrics to it, and a riff or two.

Music and Lyrics: James Silva and Chris Ross

Instruments and Production/Engineering: Chris Ross

Lyrics:
I had a perfect nightmare on a starry torrid sea.
I am cast to prison at a crippled demon‘s plea.
The demon has three faces, all are laughing down at me.

The Banker with his filthy lucre sets the game astride.
The General with raging might lets forth a battle cry.
The Judge locks now the metal tomb where I am meant to die.

But vengeance is a brutal beast, not held by any cell.
My wit is steel, my blade is wet, so sound the reaper‘s bell.
Banker, General, and Judge—you all shall burn in hell!

So blade in hand I climbed atop the banker‘s ivory tow‘r.
I bathed among the generals blood upon his final hour.
My mind was set to find the judge, and rid him of his power.

The sea of stars did welcome me, soon causing me to grin;
My nightmare gave me leave to act, while laughing from within.
No pleasure greater than to purge the moon of all its sin.

My path fell out from under me, while hunting faces, three;
The nightmare lied, the creeper laughed, I was deceived you see.
For all along—vampiric cur—the demon was in me.

It‘s time to kill your creator, Yuki.
With the blade made of my Nightmare
Though I stick to my conviction,
And with it I lay the creeper to his rest.

I go into the foils of my mind
To find the thing that plagues me.
Scratching and dripping,
Its avarice is palpable.
The blade made of my nightmare
I bury between the demon‘s eyes...
And I crush its skull under my heel.

The halls are clean
The disease is dead.
In the end, I‘m Finally free!

Perfect Nightmare (Ska Studios Cover)

I recently stumbled into the world of Japanese music, and one of the bands that I've found and absolutely adore is "Microcosm_" (マイクロコズム). These two girls make some amazing music; raw, and rich, and kind of dissonant. I love it.

The thing with this band though, is that it lacks bottom end--it being a two piece and all. So I figured I'd pull out my bass and write some parts to one of their songs. It had been so long since I had been able to play and write bass parts, and frankly I missed it quite a bit. 

So, here is my rendition of "落とし蓋" (roughly translated as "Lid").



I pulled the audio from the internets, and played my bass over top. There's some post processing to marry the two parts together, and to tame the original some (the cimbals were a little out of control).

Bass is an Ibanez SRX 500, running direct through a SansAmp Paradriver DI, for the most part. For the bridge I utilize a Strymon BlueSky, an MI Audio TubeZone, a Boss DD7, and a Boss BF3.

This is not my song. It was written by the members of Microcosm, and the rights to it are theirs, or their label's--I just added a bass track to it. The intellectual property therein is used for educational purposes only. I receive no compensation from this, and I do not intend to infringe upon any copyright-- this falls under the category of Fair Use.

Lid. (Microcosm_ Cover)

This is the space for the noodleings and ideas of Chris that don't really fit into any of his other projects.

Chris Ross:

Instruments and vocals for Coram Deo

Bass for The Young & Gold

Producer and Engineer for ThoughtsUnsettling Productions

Chris Ross

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