Dual Core

This is a re-post from last summer but deserves mentioning here on the site.

If you don’t read the whole post, know this:  S&J CD has high quality CD duplication/replication, and is very attentive to customer service.  They went out of their way to correct a mistake that UPS made.  We are very lucky to work with S&J!

The long version:

The folks over at S&J CD bailed us out in a huge way at DEFCON.  S&J pressed our Lost Reality albums back in March.  We placed another order with them at the end of July for a new shipment of CDs.  S&J has a very fast turn time, and so they were shipping the albums to us at DEFCON via UPS ground.  We needed the albums on Friday, August 8th; and UPS quoted a 4-day ship time via ground.  So to keep costs low all around, S&J shipped the albums via ground at the beginning of the week.

After having fulfilled their duties of pressing our albums and handing them off to UPS, S&J checked the shipping status.  The tracking on the UPS website showed that the albums would take 5 days for ground rather than the originally quoted time of 4 days.  UPS mis-quoted the shipping time.  Already, S&J had exceeded my expectations just by checking the shipping status.  But then S&J went above and beyond.  They notified me right away to advise they were trying to have the shipment diverted and marked for express overnight delivery.

A quick note here:  one extra business day (so 5 instead of the original 4) would have had the albums arrive in Vegas on the Monday following DEFCON.  That is completely unsatisfactory when the point of the order was to sell the albums at DEFCON.

S&J attempted to leverage their status as a UPS Preferred shipping customer and have the packages redirected.  Unfortunately, UPS messed up again and didn’t grab the packages out of the shipping hub.  On Wednesday, August 6th, the bad news was delivered to me that UPS had failed to follow the directive of diverting our albums.  At this point, UPS had fumbled twice and our albums were going to miss the mark.

Here is the true point of quality.  S&J, realizing the situation from our perspective as Dual Core, ran an emergency half-order, and shipped them out overnight — all at no cost to us.  The emergency shipment arrived just in time as we ran out of our initial stock of Lost Reality rather quickly.  All of this is truly phenomenal to me.  Every day I read about airlines who shaft their passengers, and companies who could care less about the experience of customers; but S&J moved swiftly in the right direction.

To emphasize how amazing this is, I want to iterate that S&J had originally completed its work as agreed.  Our late album delivery was in no part the fault of S&J.  They saw that UPS had twice botched the situation, and S&J stepped in to make everything right.

This was, by far, the best customer experience I have had in years.  The people at S&J were in touch with me any time an update happened.  They exercised their options to first get UPS to correct its problem.  Then when it became apparent that this would not happen, the people at S&J took matters into their own hands to provide an outstanding solution.  If you are looking to press any media (demo, EP, LP, DVD, etc); the competent and hard-working employees of S&J CD come highly recommended.

c64 here, with news of some very exciting projects that you may/may not be aware of.

In no particular order..

Dual Core album

Yes, myself and eighty are indeed working hard on a 3rd full Dual Core album (4th if you count the Super Powers compilation).  Beats, vocals and ideas have been flying back and forth for a while, and some very interesting material is coming together. The album should be with you good people sometime in July, but don’t hold us to that!

Collaborations

I’m excited to say that we’re working with a nerdcore rap superstar that you may be familiar with; you can call him Beef.  It may not be out for a while, but a bunch of c64 production is likely to find its way onto Beefy’s next album. Earlier this week I received demo vocals for what may well be the album opener, and it’s sounding very very good (imho). We’ve previously collaborated on ‘Fantastic Four’ – one of my favourite songs from our Lost Reality album.

To continue the Beefy link, I am currently working on a track with The Grammar Club. If you haven’t already heard, check the band’s ‘Bremelanotide’ album which can be downloaded from their site. These guys are a very talented collective – hopefully I can add something extra to their (already extremely professional) tracks.

That’s all for now!

-c64

Last week, the list of 10 Definitive Nerdcore Tracks was posted by Z at Hipster, please! Guess to which group the first <li> belongs?  If you guessed Dual Core, you are absolutely correct.  Here is what Z had to say:

“Nickname ‘dead-eye,’ loaded and cocked / my Deagle sends a round through the scope on your AWP.”
Some of the earliest MCs to find themselves classified as nerdcore actually self-identified as “CS rappers.” Many of these computer science devotees, however, were not exactly the most adept with regard to lyrical delivery. But Dual Core’s int eighty is a perfect example of a contemporary, tech-minded rapper who can still flow. Though “Hostage Down” (from their 2007 debut Zero One) is about gamer culture, as opposed to, say, programming, eighty brings the fire with a nod to the more technical aspects of Counter-Strike atop one of c64’s fiercest beats to date.

Other artists to make the list include good friends such as Lars, ytcracker, and Frontalot.  I’m pretty sure I owe Z at least one drink and maybe a special freestyle or something at Nerdapalooza.

-eighty

Notacon has always been an amazing weekend for me, and this year was no exception.  Our show was a ton of fun, Blockparty was great (greets to and from dc5), and as always b9 was an outstanding hostess.  To say I was looking forward to Notacon would be an understatement.

I was actually a bit anxious about the show as there were one or two new tracks to play live for the first time.  Since the first new track went so well, we played the second.  The audience was incredible.  The set was slow to get going due to some issues with the monitors (speakers that face the stage), but they were replaced, levels adjusted, and we took off.  It felt like everyone at Notacon came to the show, and they brought a ton of energy which really amped me up.  It doesn’t get much better than having an audience full of my fellow nerds yelling things like “Hostage Down!” and “Dual Core!”.

Notacon is also a mile-marker of sorts for me.  At Notacon 3 (2006), I found out that other people besides me liked hip hop about nerdy topics and culture.  This was the catalyst to starting the Dual Core music with c64.  In the following years, we had one new album (2007), then two more (2008).  This year we had no new albums…

But we have photos — a lot of new photos since the previous Notacon.  Those photos are from shows in places such as New York, Chicago, Las Vegas, San Diego, Orlando, Nashville, Indianapolis, etc.  I cannot express how fortunate and grateful I am to have visited those places, played those shows, and met the people there.

So congrats all around to another successful Notacon; and thank you to everyone, for everything.  At the end of my sets you can usually hear me say that I love all of you — it’s true, without you all, I would be unable to do any of this.

Also, it’s official.  The new album is on the way.

-eighty

Are you a fan of Mario?

This lady likes him a helluva lot (maybe a little too much?), and created her very own Super Mario World. You may have seen this already, but I think it’s amazing.

Full set of pics.

If it wasn’t for my girlfriend, this is how my home studio would look. Thanks to Antoinette J. Citizen for the craziness.

-c64

I have been notified of some problems of the cart interfacing with PayPal.  I am currently elbow-deep in PHP code looking through stuff trying to figure out the root cause.  The cart seems to work alright for some people so if you run into an issue, you have a couple options, in no particular order:

1. Hit up Amazon or iTunes
2. Bribe a friend to give you a copy of our music that s/he owns
3. Grab it off of BitTorrent / What.cd
4. Email me to let me know

My email address is the first part of our domain name before .com (dualcoremusic) then suffix an at gmail dot com to that.

Thanks for your patience, and desire to pick up our music :]

-eighty