Welcome to Day 4 of the 14 Days of The Simple Carnival! Every day until February 14 (Valentine’s Day), I’ll be posting one cool, free Simple Carnival thing. On February 14, The Simple Carnival’s new (and final) album, Smitten, will be released. It’s been nine years since The Simple Carnival has released an album, so I’d like to celebrate the occasion by sharing a bunch of good stuff over these 14 days.

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Today’s Simple Carnival thing is a special throwback recording that only two or three people have ever heard.

I wrote and recorded literally hundreds of songs on a cassette four track from the mid-’80s up through the mid-’90s.

Most of these songs were awful. However, creating awful stuff is often a necessary step toward creating stuff that is not awful.

One of the last songs that I recorded on four track inadvertently hit some sort of nerve that all of my previous songs failed to hit. I think this track was recorded in 1993 — eight years before I decided to publicly release songs as The Simple Carnival.

In retrospect, this is a Simple Carnival song. I just didn’t know it when I recorded it.

So here’s me from over 20 years ago.

I had WAY more hair, my voice sounded a little different, and my guitar was slightly out of tune. But the song came from a sincere place. The song is called “Bittersweet”. Hope you like it.

Simple_Carnival_The_-_Unreleased_-_Bittersweet.mp3

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Get The Simple Carnival’s fantastic final album, Smitten, from Bandcamp or iTunes!

Welcome to Day 3 of the 14 Days of The Simple Carnival! Every day until February 14 (Valentine’s Day), I’ll be posting one cool, free Simple Carnival thing. On February 14, The Simple Carnival’s new (and final) album, Smitten, will be released. It’s been nine years since The Simple Carnival has released an album, so I’d like to celebrate the occasion by sharing a bunch of good stuff over these 14 days.

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Today’s Simple Carnival thing isn’t a free download. It’s a free physical item. In fact, it’s now technically a collector’s item.

In 2008, a bunch of Girls Aliens Food t-shirts were printed. All of them have been sold…except for one:
This shirt is brand new. It’s a small. (Sorry, I don’t have any other sizes.) I’m giving this shirt away to some lucky Simple Carnival fan (or a Simple Carnival’s fan significant other), and I’ll pay for shipping to anywhere in the world.

To get a chance to win this shirt, however, you must tell me the correct answer to the following trivia question before midnight EST tonight:

What is the 29th word in The Simple Carnival’s song “Really Really Weird”?

Send your response to (deleted). The winner’s name will be drawn out of a hat. The name will be announced here on this site as well as on Twitter.

UPDATE (February 4, 2017): And the winner is…Eddie Finley! Congrats!

As a side note, if this giveaway has whetted your appetite for a Simple Carnival t-shirt, there are now totally new ones for sale with the Smitten album artwork. And they come in sizes other than small, too!

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Get The Simple Carnival’s fantastic final album, Smitten, from Bandcamp or iTunes!

Welcome to Day 2 of the 14 Days of The Simple Carnival! Every day until February 14 (Valentine’s Day), I’ll be posting one cool, free Simple Carnival thing. On February 14, The Simple Carnival’s new (and final) album, Smitten, will be released. It’s been nine years since The Simple Carnival has released an album, so I’d like to celebrate the occasion by sharing a bunch of good stuff over these 14 days.

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You’ve listened to yesterday’s free download, The Simple Carnival’s Girls Aliens Food album, right? If you like the opening track on that album, “Really Really Weird”…

…you’re in luck. Today’s Simple Carnival thing is a whole lot of that song.

In 2008, I held a “Really Really Weird” remix contest, where the raw multitrack recording for that song was posted online and electronic artists were invited to creatively mangle those tracks into something new. A panel of judges ranked the mixes, and the winner (DrummerMan) received a circuit-bent Casio SK-1 sampler that I had used on the song. It was a fun experiment and some very impressive remixes were created. However, nine years is a long time on the internet, and the web sites where this happened have pretty much disappeared.

Anyway, nothing posted on the internet is lost forever, so today’s Simple Carnival thing is a download of the “Really Really Weird” remixes from that contest:

Simple_Carnival_The_-_Really_Really_Weird_Remixes.zip

All of the “Really Really Weird” remixes have been released under a Creative Commons 2.0 non-commercial license, so feel free to share your favorite versions far and wide.

But there’s one more thing…Besides the above collection of remixes, here are the original multitracks for “Really Really Weird”, so you can hear what a Simple Carnival recording sounds like when all of the fancy effects have been stripped away:

Simple_Carnival_The_-_Really_Really_Weird_Multitracks.zip

Feel free to do your own remix and send me the result. Just be aware that there’s no vintage Casio sampler waiting for you if you do it well. Have fun and enjoy!

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Get The Simple Carnival’s fantastic final album, Smitten, from Bandcamp or iTunes!

Welcome to Day 1 of the 14 Days of The Simple Carnival! Every day until February 14 (Valentine’s Day), I’ll be posting one cool, free Simple Carnival thing. On February 14, The Simple Carnival’s new (and final) album, Smitten, will be released. It’s been nine years since The Simple Carnival has released an album, so I’d like to celebrate the occasion by sharing a bunch of good stuff over these 14 days.

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Most of the things I’ll be posting in the next two weeks will be brand new. However, today we’re going to begin with the best starting point for anyone who is unfamiliar with The Simple Carnival’s music. Today’s free thing is a download of The Simple Carnival’s critically-acclaimed 2008 album, Girls Aliens Food:

Girls Aliens Food was originally released on my own Sundrift Records (now Sundrift Productions) label. In 2012, a remastered Girls Aliens Food CD was released in Japan on the Disques Dessinee label. Today’s download is the remastered Japanese release, minus the bonus tracks that were part of that release.

UPDATE (February 14, 2017): This download has been removed since the Smitten album has been released. If you’d like to get the Girls Aliens Food album, you can find it on Bandcamp and iTunes.

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Get The Simple Carnival’s fantastic final album, Smitten, from Bandcamp or iTunes!