I released a lo-fi + lo-fi (lo-fi) song at the Kindergarden dance music competition: STORM RAVE. It ended up as #4 in the compo. That seems fair.
It was made with mostly (only?) sounds from ST-01 and ST-02 (that means Amigaaaaa 1987), and encoded in 80kbps to hide the lamer sound of Renoise. Lol-yeah-ölollö!
Also performed live and was interviewed by one of the authors of MusicLine (best ‘chip’-tracker, except for LSDj and Defmon?). Find the recordings on “internet”.
A re-destruction of the Dutch national anthem, meant to be performed at Hacking At Random 2009 for Bits of Freedom, the Dutch digital rights organization. Unfortunately I got sick and couldn’t attend, but this is the video of the rehearsal. The software is Defmon, and you can’t copy it. Wuao wuao wuao wuao wuuuaaaooo. Not so much improvisation in this one, except for the trashy solo at the end, but I’ll post more of those things later on.
A couple of months ago me and Linde and Salkin made a jam in a cave. Now the Internet2008 corporation has accepted 4 of the songs that we made. They’re made with C64 and Amiga and a Casio keyboard and other stuff. Get them here.
I like everything forever!
Datastorm is a new copy party in Göteborg, Sweden organized mostly by my partners in Amiga crime in Up Rough. It features people that drink 100 beers and lose their driver’s license, and people who make MP3-decoders for C64. I made a new C64-song at the party called TECHNO AHA which might be a joke with German minimal techno. Also released the Amiga demo New-D with Otro which I was very pleased with (not online yet). Also did two other releases under other names, but you’ll have to figure out what that was yourself. Fake-releases? No, because all my releases are fake.
Some stuff I liked especially (get them here at some point)
Everything by Otro : )
Frantic – Birdburner (C64-music)
Jucke – När jag var liten påg (C64-music)
Judas – Liseberg (PETSCII graphics)
Qwan – Miles to go (Amiga-music)
Bajtek & Manload – Durex is free (Amiga-music)
Mahoney – C64MP3 (C64-demo)
Anders Aalderen has released something silly++ at internet2008: check it out.
Somehow Psilodump turned me into an MC; just like on his album, I’m rapping on his new single The Return of the Snabelnauts. Well, it’s the same thing again, to be honest…
I was at Little Computer People 2009 – the largest 8-bit demoparty in Scandinavia for 15 years, with about 150 people.
I was happy to win first prize with Automatas in the C64-music competition. I spent the week before at the countryside, composing a song specifically to win the compo according to my algorithm. But after a while I gave up to make a good song instead. So obviously my algorithm was wrong. It is an 8x-speed song made in Defmon, meaning that it accesses the SID-chip 8 times faster than usual. This gives you a higher resolution of all the tables, faster slides and LFOs, etc.
In the Amiga music compo, I came second last with my song Konkurs Data. The sounds used are mostly textfiles, pictures, executables, etc – sweet data that Protracker eats perfectly. It is not the recipe for winning demoscene competitions.
Some of the releases I enjoyed especially was the Amiga songs by Yonx and Qwan (mp3s), Zabutom’s Space Fish, Mortimer Twang’s Seved Skweeeeeeeee, Jucke’s Where is Dino?, LFT’s Power Ninja Action Challenge (custom hardware, mp3 here), and many more! Get all the releases and photos
Already a month ago actually, Psilodump released his new album: The Nya Albumet. It’s a double CD with the typical sound of Psilodump, which means eclectic-fragmented, harmonically floaty, and fonkey! I appear on the song Phonebook – rapping! So watch out for that. I represent the Swedish fetus.
Since 2007, the allround venue Worm in Rotterdam has housed CEM – a studio that dates back to 1956. Last week, I had the opportunity to spend 4 days there, amounting in around 20 (sketches for) new songs. These will be released over time, but for now you can listen to three tiny teasers at wormstudio.
I used the Arp 2500 and a Commodore 64. I sequenced, played the keyboards and tried different ways of synchronizing them. Eventhough the studio has so many machines to use, I deliberately focused on one in order to gradually improve my trial and error methods (being somewhat inexperienced with modular monsters).
The C64 has analogue filters and is not as deterministic as other computers – something I always appreciated. I saw this residency as an opportunity to amplify and recontextualize these characteristics, in order to take the C64 into a new ultra dimension.
Neither of these machines are optimum for setting exact tempos. Unlike today’s standards they are influenced or even determined by electric currents. On the 10-step sequencer of the Arp, you have a knob to set the tempo, and every millimeter counts. To me it also seemed to fluctuate a bit in the tempo, possibly caused by other signals leaking into the clock signal. (This can be solved, but I like to encourage these things)
On the C64, you normally have predetermined tempo-settings to choose from. If you hear a C64-song, it will likely be in either 125.31 or 150.37 BPM. In European PAL-country that is, because the tempos are derived from the electric current.
However, with my dear Defmon software I can set the tempo with maximum precision – down to a tick of the processor. Going out of the inherent tempos however, has consequences for the sound. You can no longer be sure that envelopes and loops sound the same. To avoid this, I usually have the C64 as master, but this time I adjusted the tempo after the Arp.
The process was this: output the clock signal of the Arp as audio, sample 2 minutes of it, analyze the BPM, convert the BPM into hex-values according to the other speed settings of Defmon, and you got it synchronized. Sort of.
I can hear all you tech-geeks sighing over this lamer solution. But it was wonderful to leave the machines running, hearing them mutate by themselves since they were slightly out of sync, or due to electrical leakages in the Arp and uncontrolled bugs in the C64. From a technical point of view, this might be possible to do with a laptop, but this was sometihng profoundly different from working with über-data-control.
All this amounted to several hours of recordings. Some of these 30 minute improvisations can be cut up in parts, and overdubbed with more C64, to create songs that also relate to eachother quite specifically. But we will see what happens. I already miss that studio with tropical heat and sparkling beats!
