Balearica Island is a psycho (NSC 234)

[Morty]

Re: Balearica Island is poetry in motion (NSC 184)

Great result for Never Alone. After the result Corona got in NSC 180, I wasn't sure what to expect, but finishing 7th in the final was a lot better than I dared to hope for. By far my best result with oldschool eurodance.

For NSC 184, we're staying in the 90's, which has been the plan for a while. Last year, way before the whole corona thing, the CD player in my car broke. It wouldn't load CDs anymore, and for someone with a CD collection of more than 7500 CDs, that was a rough time. Still took me more than half a year to get it sorted tho... And as Norway has shut down all nationwide FM broadcasts, and I had refused to get a DAB adapter as a protest against the shutdown, I had to rely on local radio stations on my trips around Norway during those months (my car didn't have an AUX port either, what were they thinking at the Honda factory in 2004??). And on one of those trips, this song from 1992 came on, and it got stuck in my head for a while. It's not the typical entry, and I wouldn't normally even vote for a 90's pop song (this would have been an exception), but I figure there's room for this one in my playlist and the history as well, as it will be a memory from that time the CD player in my car didn't work. And, I still listen to it from time to time, because it is a pretty good song.

Inker & Hamilton was an English/New Zealandic (or whatever something from New Zealand is called) duo, but if you google "Poetry In Motion", their song isn't the one that pops up, because Johnny Tillotson had a number one hit in 1961 with the same name, and there have been several cover versions of it too. But I found the right song eventually, and the NSC 184 entry is Inker & Hamilton - Poetry In Motion.

 

[Morty]

Re: Balearica Island is your biggest fan, this is Stan (NSC 185)

As the list of nations with 100 entries keeps growing, has now joined a far more exclusive club, thanks to the result that Inker & Hamilton got, becoming the third nation in NSC with 100 DNQs. It was only a matter of time. Halito and Ugaly are the two others, and I am still trying to catch up. But my nation is also quite a bit younger than those two, so I'm pretty sure I will catch up. I won't send entries that I think will fail just to catch up tho, I do still want to qualify to finals.

Our next entry is in many ways a long story. I was really hooked on Eminem's "The Marshall Mathers LP" album 20 years ago (happy anniversary!), and "Stan" was one of the best songs on that album. And it's apparently still relevant, I see people "stan" this and that all the time these days, and I eventually had to figure out what it actually meant, as I first thought it was a typo for "stand" or something, but that didn't make much sense. Or maybe it was something like if you stan Rihanna, then it would be like Rihannastan, a "nation" of Rihanna fans, all united by their love for Rihanna? Made a little more sense tbh. But apparently, it comes from Eminem's old song "Stan", and that's a bit creepy, considering what Stan really was, an obsessed stalker fan with mental issues, who ended up killing himself and his pregnant girlfriend while drunk driving, all because Eminem didn't reply to his fan mail. Not the ideal role model imo. Which is why you'll never see me use the word "stan" as a positive, because in my book, it's really not. But then again, maybe that's just me being old and grumpy, and not being able to follow kids these days. From what I understand, this came from Kpop fans, so what I think happened is this: Someone came across the line "your biggest fan, this is Stan", and thought it sounded good. Maybe even thought that "Stan" was a word for a super fan, instead of a name. And then it spread. Everything seems to go viral these days... But real life Stans do exist. I recently read about Taylor Swift fans (or stans) issuing death threats against music critics who doesn't give her new album a perfect score. I thought the Beliebers were nuts, but apparently there's no limit to the madness anymore.

I've been wanting to send this song for over a decade tho, but couldn't, for two reasons. Number one, Prasia sent Dido's "Thank You" all the way back in NSC 10, and I wasn't sure if it would be allowed under the old sample rule, because "Stan" has sampled the first verse from Dido's "Thank You" as the chorus (Dido is actually acting in the video as Stan's pregnant girlfriend), altho I never actually checked. Partly because of reason number two. The full length uncensored version wasn't on YouTube. The original Vevo video has beeped out lyrics (not gonna happen, it ruins the song), and a slightly censored video, and the unofficial "explicit" versions also use the censored video. But now someone has finally uploaded it like it was originally meant to be (hopefully won't be taken down again, it's been up for a while now, so fingers crossed), and with the rule change regarding covers, I'm pretty sure this is now allowed (if it wasn't already).

The entry for NSC 185 will be a classic, Eminem feat. Dido - Stan:

Be a fan, but don't (be) Stan.

In case you're wondering (and in case the real deal is taken off the air again), the parts of the video that are usually censored are Stan drinking vodka while driving, and his girlfriend being tied up in the trunk of his car. Yeah, it's bad, but I've seen similar and worse things happen in music videos on YouTube, so I don't really get why this one should be so hard to find.

I had a listen to "The Marshall Mathers LP" again on a trip a few months ago, and altho I still think "Stan" is a great song, there were several other songs there that appealed a lot more to 16 year old Morten (that was my name before I changed it about 12 years ago) than to 36 year old Morty. Maybe I AM growing up after all...

Also, this edition marks 100 editions since the last time I skipped an edition of NSC. I had to skip NSC 85 due to a trip to USA (a country that's gone off my list of places I want to visit in the past 4 years), and since then, I've always found a way to vote in at least one semi and the final in every edition. A bit proud of this tbh, even tho I know it's not even remotely close to an NSC record.

 

[Fearnavigatr]

Wow, that's a club I wasn't aware (but not at all surprised) I am a part of. Yay for us!

 

[theditz83]

Wonder who will stan Stan this coming edition?

 

[Morty]

Wow, that's a club I wasn't aware (but not at all surprised) I am a part of. Yay for us!

Wonder who will stan Stan this coming edition?

You? I hope you mean the song and not the character tho.

No idea what to expect with this tbh, but I haven't had any luck with Eminem or hiphop in general before, so it'll probably be another DNQ. But we'll see.

 

[Morty]

Re: Balearica Island brings the zombie apocalypse (NSC 186)

"Stan" did really well, but fell just short of qualifying to the final. Equal on points with 10th placed Adamsburg, but with fewer voters. The exact opposite of what happened in NSC 54, where I qualified with 2 Unlimited with more voters than Alinta. Goes around, comes around, I guess. Overall happy with the result, but would of course have liked to qualify with it instead.

For the upcoming horror show in Doire, I had difficulties picking my entry. My original plan went out the window when the horror theme was announced, because I had a song waiting for a Halloween spinoff. But that song is a cover of a different song I've had on my list for a decade, and deciding on which of the two I wanted to send the most was a hard task (which is why I wanted to use one of them in a spinoff instead).

The songs were Organ Donors - Zombie Apocalypse, and Zombie Nation - Kernkraft 400 (DJ Gius Video Edit). The DJ Gius remix of Kernkraft 400 is a classic, and way more known than the original. And, DJ Gius is an old alias of Cristiano Giusberti, better known in NSC as "Technoboy", a legend with the 2nd place finish that Catfight got in NSC 70. So there's history in that song. But there's also some history attached to Organ Donors, as they represented in NSC 86 with... well... soft p0rn. *cough* And that was exactly 100 editions ago. Perfect opportunity to send them again, right?

So in the end, I decided to send the Organ Donors. The video is pure nightmare fuel, full of scenes from zombie movies. There's one scene in there that I struggle to watch, and I was unsure whether this video would be too much. But I'm gonna finish in the bottom 5 anyway with this, so it's probably not gonna make that much of a difference.

Watch at your own risk, the entry for NSC 186 is Organ Donors - Zombie Apocalypse:

There's also a spinoff going on, hosted by... *drumroll* ME!
finished 3rd in Melodic Picture 2, and that resulted in the MP3 spinoff being hosted here. I'm not very creative, and struggled to find a good picture to use. First idea was the Olympic rings, but I eventually went with a Futurama theme instead. Which resulted in another struggle, as I had 2 songs that I felt would fit. Venice Beat feat. Tess Timony - In The Year 2525 and Poison Teddy - Bender's Beer, a remix of the Futurama theme. Now, I really like the Venice Beat version of The Year 2525, and it's been on my list for quite a while, but the quality of the video on YouTube is really poor, which is why I decided to go for Poison Teddy instead (which I found after doing a quick search for "Futurama remix"). Whether that was the right choice, we'll never know.

 

[Morty]

Re: Balearica Island is not in the 2020 fan club (NSC 187)

Ok then, this is going to be an update full of surprises.

Surprise #1: Organ Donors unsurprisingly failed to qualify to the final, but Zombie Apocalypse got twice as many points as their NSC 86 entry, and did NOT finish in the bottom 5. So I'm pretty happy about the result.

In the first hosted spinoff, the entry didn't do that well, and for a long time, I thought my Futurama remix would finish last. But it got a 19th in the end (of 22), and I didn't screw up the hosting, so I'm pretty happy with the end result. Despite completely forgetting about the text show...

Surprise #2: Until now, after 186 editions of the NSC, and 150 spinoffs, Scooter has only been sent twice. That was back in NSC 33, when Pangora sent Nessaja, and Trollheimr also sent Scooter to the Boogenre spinoff.

Surprise #3: Me sending Scooter is not a surprise, I realize that. But that it took me more than 140 editions (much more if you include spinoffs) to send an act I've been a fan of since the mid 90's, now that is a surprise.

So, Scooter will finally represent in NSC 187. Not long ago, they released a track dedicated to the year we're all going thru, 2020. And the dedication is pretty simple: FCK 2020. Not necessarily sure 2020 has been the worst year ever (I mean, Trump didn't get reelected, so it could have been worse), according to Google, that would still be 536 (altho maybe the year the dinosaur-ending meteor hit was worse?), and 1997 was worse for me personally (at least the second half of it), but 2020 is not going down in history as a favorite year. Little Big has also released a 2020 track with a similar message. So FCK 2020, hope 2021 will be more normal.

The entry for NSC 187 is Scooter - FCK 2020:

Can it beat the 7th place Nessaja got in NSC 33?

is also joining the Spingrats 3. Figured out which of my spinoff entries had participated in spinoffs with less than 20 entries (and not gotten seen by many), and which of my entries had ended in the bottom 5 (robbed!). Found 5 entries that matched on both, and my entry was going to be one of those.

Here are the ones that didn't make the cut:

National Finals 13: New Level Empire - The Last One

Genres 2 (Industrial Music): Icon Of Coil - Headhunter

Hate Is The Way!: Five Finger Death Punch - Donald Death Punch (Jekyll And Hyde Trump Mix) (I still hate Donald Trump btw)

AATW 18 (Kazakhstan): DopeMonkeys feat. Ernar Kaldynov - Freestoila

And that leaves us with one, from the Unfair Host spinoff. Ironic, a spinoff where long songs would get bonus points, and I generally prefer longer versions of songs, but I send the 3:50 radio edit of a song that was originally 6:25 (extended version), or even 7:55 (club remix), thinking it'll have a better chance of scoring points, and get negative bonus points instead. It wouldn't have won anyway tho, but it could have avoided the bottom 5, so I'm gonna take this opportunity to give it another chance.

The Spingrats 3 entry is Minimalistix - Struggle For Pleasure:

Surprise #4: When we approach the end of NSC 187, I'm gonna hold an NF to decide on my next entry. I have decided on the artist, and even the song, but there are a few versions of it that I can't seem to decide between. So if you have 30 minutes to spare, and want to be in before I make it public, give me a hint, and I'll PM you the songs.

 

[Ana Raquel]

count me in for nf help

 

[theditz83]

Always in for NF help buddy

 

[Sean]

Happy to help with a NF!

 

[Rmetr0]

Yas, moar NFs, take us in

 

[Morty]

Re: Balearica Island is fueling the fire with an NF (NSC 188)

Very frustrating results in the semi finals of NSC 187. My 12 pointer came 11th, what would have been my reju 12 pointer could have been the reju qualifier if I had voted, and my own entry finished low, but would have been just 1 point away from being the reju qualifier if I had reju voted. So close for both me and my favorites.

Anyway, we're moving on, hoping to end 2020 with a good result. Early this year, a commercial for the Norwegian coffee brand "Evergood" started going around on Norwegian TV, and I found the song used to be a bit hypnotizing. With the help of the SoundHound app, I found out that it was the David Lynch remix of Agnes Obel's "Fuel To Fire". Then I had a look around, and found several other remixes of it, 15 in total. Not that much separating them tho, so to make it easier for myself, I should have just gone with the David Lynch remix, but I usually don't make things easy for myself.

I've somehow narrowed it down to a top 4, but now I need help. So, for the second time ever, is hosting a NF.

Here are the 4 versions:

Conrad

Dexcell

Hubert Kirchner

Miszer Laurent

Simply rank them from best to worst in a PM to me (1 to 4, lowest score wins). Deadline will be set later, but it will obviously be before the end of the NSC 188 confirmation period. Hope you like them.

Thanks to , and for voting so far.

 

[theditz83]

will definitely vote here - if I get sidetracked, feel free to chase me

 

[Morty]

Only has voted since the last update. Thanks!

Standings so far: 7, 9, 11, 13.

Not expecting many more voters tbh, I know it's hard to rank 4 versions of the same song, but I'll keep this open until around 18 CET on Sunday.

 

[Morty]

Thanks to as well for voting. Pretty tight right now. I also just realized that the deadline I put is in the middle of the first half between United and Leeds (there's only one United), so I'll keep it open until the end of that match, around 19:30 CET.

 

[Morty]

Thanks to Griffin Empire for voting as well. This became a really close race in the end, with just 2 points separating all the songs. 6 voters, all had a different order, and in the end, it was a tie between Conrad and Dexcell on 14 points, and another tie between Miszer Laurent and Hubert Kirchner on 16 points. But all of you managed something I couldn't do, to rank these 4 remixes of Agnes Obel - Fuel To Fire, so once again, thank you to everyone for taking the time to help me out with this.

2 of you had Conrad as your favorite, while Dexcell only got one top spot, so I'm using an NSC tie-breaker for this, and Conrad's Edit is the entry for NSC 188:

Also, as some of you know by now, is also competing in the Languageception spinoff. A Japan-obsessed coworker (who's also responsible for pointing me towards Babymetal, Aldious and Dazzle Vision) sent me a link to RichaadEB's Bad Apple!!, a metal cover of a Touhou Project song. A great song, performed in English, and I quickly decided that I wanted to send it to the NSC. Then, I found out that he had also made a Japanese version of that song, with Cristina Vee doing the lyrics for both versions, and judging by the comments, she's doing it flawlessly. And that's when I started to hope for the Languageception spinoff to become reality.

Bonus:

Here's the song I would have sent if Languageception had never happened:

 

[Ana Raquel]

Whoever also had Conrad as their favorite

 

[Morty]

Re: Balearica Island and the atomic Katana (NSC 189 + Word Randomizer spinoff)

Very disappointing result for the Conrad edit of Fuel To Fire. I don't think any of the other versions would have given me a better result tho. Maybe the original by Agnes Obel would, but it's really not my style, so that was never an option anyway. But that's life, I regret nothing, and we move on.

I recently posted about the release years of the entries in the Statistics & Trivia thread, and there was only one entry from 2020 there, which was FCK 2020. It was a bad year, but it definitely had some good music (inevitable really, since all artists were stuck at home making music), and the next entry is one of the best things I think 2020 had to offer.

Over the past couple of years, a hardstyle trend that I think was started by SubZero Project has gotten pretty popular, to add several different kicks in just one track, and usually pretty short tracks too, like 3-4 minutes long. And I hate it. There's often at least one kick there I don't like, and it's hard to dance to, when the tempo constantly changes. But every now and then, something comes out that doesn't follow this trend, and our next entry is one of those.

Blademasterz is an alias of Brennan Heart ( NSC 162) that he doesn't use very often, but for his new album (Brennan Heart And Friends) he brought the old name back for an amazing track, called "Katana". The blade of all blades. And this is definitely something different. It's 12 minutes long, and altho there are some variations, there's no part of this track I dislike, it's 12 minutes of perfection. And who knows, the first 2 minutes of the intro might even attract some points from nations that do not necessarily like the rest of the track. Or it might not.

This is the longest entry ever, beating Albuquerque with about 45 seconds. I also think it's the longest hardstyle track ever. Longer tracks were more common in the early days, but rarely longer than 6-7 minutes, and now it's rare to see tracks longer than 5 minutes, but it happens. I found a 6 year old Reddit thread (click) about the longest hardstyle tracks, but none of them can match Katana. They're still pretty long tho.

The entry for NSC 189 is Brennan Heart aka Blademasterz - Katana, and I'm sorry to the people in the LL who doesn't like it. However, I had to force myself thru 12 minutes of random accordion sounds in the LL of NSC 171, so... Payback?

Not sorry.

It could be worse tho, Giuseppe Ottaviani made a 30 minute Chillout Mix of his trance track "8K" in 2019, but I won't force you thru that one.

Spinoffs:
Languageception was a great success. Bad Apple!! in Japanese finished 3rd, making this one of the best spinoff results ever for . Thanks again to everyone who voted for it.

Since I've done much better in the spinoffs than in the main contest recently (3rd in Celebrate NSC 2, 1st in The Alphabest, and now 3rd in Languageception), I'm of course going to try again. But I had a total number of 0 entries on my waiting list with my word in the title for the Word Randomizer spinoff. So I went thru my CD collection, and found some good tracks, but I wanted more, and then went thru Discogs and related YouTube videos to search for more gold. I eventually had to stop, because I suddenly had about 70 potential entries for this spinoff, including nearly 20 different remixes of a The Killers song. The quality of the 70 varied quite a bit tho, but at least half of them could be worthy entries.

So there was a lot of interesting stuff to choose from, none of which I think would be able to follow up on the successes of Doğukan Manço/Funda, Roman Messer/Cari, and RichaadEB/Cristina Vee, as none of them have a female featured singer, which has been the recipe for most of my best results (including both my NSC winning entries). Not including the remixes of The Killers, two thirds of the potentials were trance, and then there was some hard house, hardstyle, eurobeat, psytrance and drum and bass. And surprisingly many came from Italian artists.

In the end, I narrowed down to 4. One trance anthem from the label run by Balearica Island's first president's brother, a really long psytrance track (even longer than Katana), a remix of one of Technoboy's earlier tracks, and my favorite remix of the song by The Killers. The 14 minutes long psytrance banger by Green Nuns Of The Revolution was tempting, but 26 minutes of new entries in the same day might be a bit of an overdose. The trance anthem was from an "Artist - Topic" YT account, and I don't really trust them that much. I want my entries to stay online. And that left me with two options, a hardstyle track, and a hands-up remix of The Killers.

The "Atomic" entry for the Word Randomizer spinoff is a remix of one of the tracks I found in my own CD collection, Technoboy - Atomic (Joshua Hiroshy Remix):

Oh, and one more thing. After 4 years of only using YouTube to listen to music, I'm now back on Last.fm, as I found some newly updated Last.fm/YouTube browser extensions that works for both Firefox and Chrome.

 

[Morty]

A sad day on , as we have been informed of the news of AWS' singer Örs Siklósi losing his battle against leukemia at the age of 29. Örs represented together with the rest of AWS in NSC ESC in 2018. R.I.P. Örs.

 

[Morty]

Re: Balearica Island goes to heaven (NSC 190)

Two hardstyle tracks have competed for , and I'm actually pretty satisfied with both results. Katana scored more points than I thought would be possible, and Joshua Hiroshy's Atomic remix got a top 10 result in an incredibly strong spinoff. Not bad.

The thread title could have been a reference to the tragic news about Örs Siklósi, and the title of our next entry is related, but this is actually entirely coincidental. It is actually a very good memory for me. On the MondayBar cruise from Stockholm to Mariehamn in 2020, Ferry Corsten was playing on the car deck stage, and one of the tracks he played was a highlight in my "career" as a raver. Hard to describe with words tbh, but it was around 7 minutes of pure joy. That track was "Surga", using his heavenly alias Gouryella. Gouryella was originally a joint project between Ferry and Tiësto (Tiësto left in 2000), and it means heaven in the Australian aboriginal language, and all the titles released by Gouryella has some heavenly meaning. Walhalla was battle heaven in Norse mythology, Anahera means angel in Maori, Tenshi is Japanese for angel, Ligaya is Tagalog for happiness, and Surga means heaven or paradise in Indonesian. Which means this track translated to English could be "Heaven - Heaven". When Ferry releases something as Gouryella, you know that this is going to be out of this world. Ferry Corsten also isn't a complete stranger to in the NSC. Back in the first fruity Melodic Picture spinoff, I sent Moonman's Orange Juice remix of Cygnus X - The Orange Theme, and Moonman was an early alias for Ferry Corsten, before he started using his own name.

Also 4 minutes shorter than my previous entry, and my first instrumental trance entry in a very long time, the NSC 190 entry for is Gouryella - Surga:

New spinoff
Gotta say, I really like that spinoffs have gotten pretty popular again, and in the latest poll, I was going to take part in at least 5 of the 8 candidates. AATW obviously being one of them. Caribbean started out as a bit of a challenge tho. I figured artists like Rihanna and Haddaway would be taken pretty fast, so I decided to dig deeper. Realized Major Lazer has been part Jamaican since 2011, and was also part Trinidadian until 2019, and that opened several doors, but I ended up picking something else.

It's no secret that I grew up with 90's music, and one of the hits back then was from a Jamaican artist called Ini Kamoze. That song is obviously "Here Comes The Hotstepper", Ini Kamoze was a one hit wonder. But, in rather typical style, I'm not going for the original version from 1994, but a remix made by Ukrainian Jay Filler in 2018 (which is fitting, since Ukraine is so far my ESC 2021 favorite).