Explored again. The Mother of All Demos used footpedals and a chorded keyboard, for example. Versions of these have been commercially available ever since. They near really caught on.
There is something about the MIDI voices (samples? there's a word at the tip of my tongue here) that were built into the cards from back when that snaps me back 20+ years.
It's almost insane at how much artistic output the demoscene has produced and yet has remained almost entirely underground.
That's almost a year of round the clock music playing 24/7 for free and completely unencumbered by any sort of licensing or playback restrictions. Most modern media players will play the formats back also without trouble (VLC for example).
Awesome write up, I'm looking forward to reading it all.
Still remember seeing fr-08 live at The Party here in Denmark 17 years ago. It has to be one of the most impressive things ive seen and it was what got me into demos.
Whoa. Hard to believe it's been 20 years already. I remember Impulse Tracker coming to the scene vividly. Almost everyone in our crew (Explizit) on ST3 jumped ship. It was technically superior; you could keep notes playing in a channel for longer, and music improved for the better. We made awesome music in it.
Of course those on FastTracker2 would never use Impulse Tracker. They were two camps, even within our crew, and the two would never meet. At the end both trackers were equally capable if I remember correctly. Of course we're talking about a time when 16 bit samples were the hottest thing around.
In case anyone wants to listen to a bunch of Impulse Tracker songs, check out our archive at http://www.explizit.org. The .IT tracks are at the bottom (or just download the full ZIP).
I'm still trying to relive the good times that I had recording with a Fostex 250 4 track in the 90s. Maybe I just need to set the DAW aside and try one of those little Tascam 6 tracks.
The Quietus did a piece[1] celebrating the anniversary, remarking on the pregap[2] and how various artists would leverage it:
> On their third album, 1999’s Guerrilla, Super Furry Animals slipped one of their best songs, ‘Citizens Band’, into the pre-gap, that is, the neverzone before the album proper. Autechre pulled the same trick, in the same year, on EP7, hiding an eerie six minutes of intricate sound design which seems years ahead of its time, and then three minutes of silence, before ‘Rpeg’. They did it again, including the untitled track in the pre-gap to the fourth disc of EPs 1991-2002.
> Pre-gap tracks are a CD-specific phenomenon, paralleled only by DVD Easter Eggs, or hidden levels in a computer game. On the one hand, they’re only possible digitally, on the other, they seem to be an attempt to add some mystique to a circle of plastic. They are a defense of the physical medium because it is impossible to rip them to your computer. Finding them meas having a bit of extra knowledge about the artist, uncovering a hidden layer of depth others hadn’t noticed.
> Earlier, experimental artists took even greater strides into the CDs unique sequencing possibilities. Otomo Yoshihide’s 1993 release The Night Before the Death of the Sampling Virus is a fluctuating voice collage designed specifically for the medium. Its 77 tracks are tiny, most less than a minute, few going above two. The listener is encouraged to hit the random option on their hi-fi. “To play this release in random mode is to allow the SAMPLING VIRUS to regenerate, to mutate with near infinite possibilities.”
> Eccles, UK-based experimentalists Stock, Hausen, & Walkman encouraged listeners to do something similar with their debut album, Giving Up. From the release notes: “The Original CD had 60 ID points deliberately inserted in the middle of a lot of the tracks so that random play would cut the music up and present the listener with a new and unique 'remix' version if desired.” There were things you could do with a CD, that you definitely couldn’t do with a tape or LP.
Reminds me a bit of how when I was a teen, Amiga demoscene and game music sounded like nothing else and contributed to my sense that the "computer world" was something apart. Then years later I found out about Italo Disco and Tangerine Dream.
Back in the late 80s-early 90s with the advent of FM, digital recording, samplers and other stuff, people were ditching analog equipment en masse and _nobody_ wanted to buy it except for broke kids, and this gave rise to whole new genres and creative idioms we take for granted today. The modern iteration of this is a kid with a cracked version of FL Studio making weird phonk-hyper-trap. Maybe playing in a band will come back. Who knows, but most of the innovation right now is in the box.
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