My buddy Jacob is a purveyor of cool. He is always up to something interesting on phreque.com, where he has most recently been converting old school NES & SNES controllers into plug and play USB devices for authentic Nintendo emulator gaming.

These controllers are hella cool, and he has a new creation available equally as awesome entitled BitKits. These BitKits are cool retro gaming adornments for your fridge, that come in a multitude of character designs and he is adding more each day.

When you’re done checking all this cool retro gaming goodness, listen to some of his music too, which is how I got to know him in the first place, picking a track of his for our Track Of The Week on SectionZ.com.

Thom Yorke’s The Eraser has been out for a few months now and I think it deserves a spot here. The title track is my favorite.

After 3 years of no news or updates to z3ta+ (with the exception of rgc:Audio being aquired by Cakewalk), looks like René has put some effort into improving it a bit by making sure it’s compatible with Vista, and also rewriting the arp which now loads it’s own MIDI files which is a very cool addition. There are a few other handy updates to it is well, such as 64-bit Windows binaries & a playback quality selector. I’m happy to see this update as z3ta+ (or is it Z3TA+ now?) has a special place in my heart as the first VSTi plug-in synthesizer I purchased.

The thing about z3ta+ for me had always been that it was too difficult to use. I bought it with the best intentions thinking I was getting the One Synth (to rule them all) but I ended up just using it for it’s presets. I knew what kind of potential it had, and I really liked the Bitplant GUI, but didn’t understand the DSP enough. I’m getting back into it now though since I’ve learned a lot over the last 4.5 years when I originally bought it.

soon…

Now that I’ve found out about this cool way to link music from Bleep.com on here I thought I would add Grizzly Bear’s new album Yellow House.

These guys are really cool. They layer endless tracks of banjos, xylophones, glockenspiels, flutes, vocals, and other things to create something really unique. This is a great album and I’ve been listening to it a lot since I picked it up 2 weeks ago. Check it out below.

Amon Tobin’s new album was released today, and I am a huge fan of his, so I will be picking it up in the next day or so. In the meanwhile, I will be listening to these clips on Bleep.