Amiga Music Preservation -

Interview

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TLb. ,dMP' all rite, now you get the chance to read

TML.dMMP some facts about some of the major amiga

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,#MP'~~XNXYNXTb. the scene and their plans in future.yes,

,d~' dNNP `YNTb. that's meant to be read while listening to

,~ ,NN' `YNb their modules. read 'em over and over and over..

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1-Hello Tecon. Can you briefly present yourself ?

hiya! sure Asle.. I'm born and breastfed in Norway, and turned 36 years recently. yikes!

2-AMP stores an impressive collection. Do you think there's more than 142 music from you ? :)

for sure AMP is always hard core, taking care of business! Well, ofcourse I do.. As with anyone who's struggled to learn musics and tracking, I've got my share of early tracks and patterns that is meaningless garbage.

3-I understand for the "garbage", although, that's a matter of taste, what of unfinished stuff ? Or do you mark these for some forthcoming event ?

right! ehm, well, perhaps =) I did find some useful bits and pieces that could be fun to work on, so I wouldn't rule out a 'spur-of-the-moment' thing happening.
Mind you, amiga and its scene (past and present) has always remained a good source of inspiration for me, and I powered up the old a1200 about a year ago to investigate it's capabilities once again and maybe use it for some projects. Unfortunately it broke down some months ago and I haven't been able to fix it yet. Which suxx! The idea was to have it work as a flexible soundsource (f.x as my special amigaVST =P)

4-Music wise, we could go back to 1992 with the like of 'MOD.bedtime my love'. Can you tell us how you ended up with doing musics and comment your first works ?

Entering the scene, then as now, one should find a purpose for oneself and contribute somehow. Mine started with swapping and gfx, but a friend of mine in class (later Nique of Proxima) had access to a 2400 baud modem once in a while and used to dial up this Crusaders BBS in Lillestrøm. He mostly downloaded modules and musicproductions, and the eurocharts ofcourse, and he introduced me to the Soundtracker.

At first, we were just listening to the music, made by the likes of Dr. Awesome, Fleshbrain, Anders Hamre and Walkman, Nightshade, Peter, Share and Enjoy musicdisks, M&K and many many more as our collection grew. We would think these guys were geniouses, and we could actually see the music they had written, in this program! So they made us want more, and to learn how to become as good as them =)

Ofcourse the first baby steps were crappy, to be polite. By 92 I might have learnt to compose something recognizable as songs. Up until 94 there's really nothing much but for curiosity, really!

5-do you think you've reached your goal then, to become as good as those geniuses, as you say :) ?

hehe! I don't know about that, coz I ended up making music in a different way anyways. The goal sorta changed by itself as practice makes one able to better realize his own ideas. The real goal is to just keep that in mind as you walk the eternal road to (im)perfection =)

6-Up to 1997-98, then in 2003 with this great chip remix of Interface's hit (MOD.butterfly chip). So, a 4-5 years of intense work, a break, and a little come back. What led to a stop then a come back ? Basically, What ended you Amiga Protracker carrier ?

(Hehe, now this question begins funny =) I suppose you mean that "you were active "up to 97-98, then in .." )

Thanks! I just loved that tune so much =)
Yep, guess that's about right. Did the military services in 98, but after that I was still scening and tracking a bit up to 2003-4, only at a much slower pace, and mostly on #amigascne hehe. There were some bits of action left in our group planet.jazz still - and we had that little pimptro release which swedish coder Olle brought to the Grep-party in '03.
I basically quit when I moved to Kristiansand for some french studies - though I found a couple of tunes I might have done afterwards, coz they seems not to have surfaced elsewhere ;)

7-French studies! I wondered when seeing various French words in your sample texts :). So, basically, there's this real life curse striking again :) So, going forward, some musics are very accomplished, like your Gathering'95 entry (MOD.a_six_sense). Was this done on purpose for a given compo or

Hell yeah! that one was tailored for the audience.. totally ripping Jogeir's style!

8-Yes, Jogeir :) There's a part of MOD.wanderer in there ! Anyway, taking your TP99 entry as another party example (MOD.in_media_res_tp99) shows yet again some impressive work. But then, while I understand the "tailoring for the audience" part, isn't it a little bit frustrating at time ? I mean, you're not as free as you would have wanted.

It's a bit different I would say, yes, but can be as fun too (there are different ways of tailoring ;)

9-Let's talk about type of music (call it genre). There's a wide variety of genres, from experimental (MOD.diffused_vision) to plain chiptune (many), atmospheric (MOD.discourage) or plain noise :) (MOD.powyzowy_e-mix). Is this pure inspiration or did you have some sort of plan prior to beginning a music ?

It's just a result of mind splatter! No really it's mostly about doing what you feel like, and test your skills.
Attacking the tracker with a plan didn't work out as often for me as it did with the combination of sheer inspiration/exploration/joy of tracking. Most of the times a plan would grow out of the experience in 4-channeling ideas spun out of those variables.

10-So, pure inspiration and fun. My kind of things :). All right, what about coops ? You've made a few (with Optic, Laxical, Stoo and Mr. C as far as we could trace). Half a dozen musics in this case. Why so few ? Is this a difficult process to do a coop ?

The local composerfriends took a move to the PC, but I stuck with Paula which made me the lone wolf around here. I guess I was too lazy to bother, except for at parties.. Optic-coops were done at parties or groupmeetings, and was good fun =)

11-We could trace you at various parties (Kindergarden, The party, The Gathering). What can you tell us about entering a music at a party ?

From my experience, not much to strive for. The people who had interest in compos grew shorter and shorter towards the new century, so it wasn't much of the compo-feel left at the parties I think. The Kindergarden compos were fun tho!

12-You apparently even entered some IRC compo ? (mod.damn_wam-bam-jam)

Yeah, sheer inspiration coming from the challenge itself, and a nice little community happening.. a cool thing to do any given sunday =)

13-141 MOD, 1 AHX. So, it's mostly Protracker (a few Digibooster edit as well). You were in Proxima for some time and thus met the likes of Oce or Calvin who produced, at the time, some PC tracked music. Did you try any other tracker ?

the protracker was a cheap and "exciting" enough solution for me. For a long time I was more of a protrackermusician than a musician, you could say! The Proxima things happened thru Nique who run a BBS for them. And Calvin/Anders, Yitzak, and Jade(?) hung out a lot with Cpix in and around our appartment in oslo, and they were my very first outspoken fans that weren't my friends haha! Hello t'yall if you stumbled down here =P

14-But then, there's this AHX. Any fun story behind this one ?

It's one of only three ahx-experiments, and the one that came out allright. I believe I ripped the samples from Pink too, just to be on the safe side!

15-Despite the impressive number of musics, there are not that many which were feature in demos. There's the Gut Gut serie on PC, The Trilobyte 5 musicdisk by Nuance (dedicated to you), some PC diskmag like SubKult #4, this AHX that was in Klub Diznee 3, various Devils packmenu, etc. . Why so "few", if I may ?

I couldn't code hehe! Don't forget our little group planet.jazz's productions also! I did the organiser-part so I was finally able to push the coders and subsequently sneak in a couple more pieces to be released =P But most of the time I were in groups that had more experienced composers.
Although when I rejoined my first group Eremation in the middle of the 90s, there was this 'fruitopia' musicdisk we released all thanks to the help from Olle/Factor and the danish gfxian Dr. Zulu / Giga Productions. Also, sceneproductions became fewer in numbers, and mostly aimed for partycompos. Us jazz'ers pulled of a stunt at the gathering 98 and jammed out a partyslide released AT the party - See, we were babysittin' the mainstream norwegian scene and had to say "suck on this!" (hi eph, ctz, apt etc!)...

16-Was there any plan to go professional, or actually get paid for ad-hoc compositions ?

nope! But that has changed =D Anyone interested should get in touch coz I'm always broke!

17-All right, that's clear enough I guess :). Going on, how would you reflect, today, your scene years ? The good, the bad, friendship, party, etc.

It was a crazy ride! Lots of good times and much, much creative awesomeness! A playground that was very dynamic. An action somewhere caused a reaction elsewhere.. sometimes it got too serious and it turned out bad, and you could get a scent of it all in the diskmags and scrolltexts. Competition was strong, and groups seemed to go out of their way to present something new and/or spectacular to "the scene." It was rather powerful, I'd say. Much energy and willpower, reason and wisdom, quality and quantity, bla and bla bla... you've heard all the reminiscing stories =)
In the end I think friendship prevailed over competition, and kept the party going!

18-Did you keep contact with these people ?

I've come in touch with some of the jazzers, and Ramon B5 brought me into this group of old dutch and their global gang of pandas, on faceb.

19-I guess that's it. If you feel like adding anything, feel free.

yeah, I gotta give it to those who have been kickin it ever since the scene-tide turned, keeping things running and making it available.
Special kisses to (if you ever read this) Brainwasher/ERM, Ramon B5/DSR, and my groupmates in jazz: Optic, Olle (also massive thanks for the personal '060-fix of pt2.3d), Morbid, Sublett, Crisp, and Dvize the aussie. The local sceneposse consisting of Axe/Proxima, Zike/Retire, and Shade/TRSi (rip).
And thank you Asle for taking an interest in my tracking-endeavours - truly appreciated! =)

If you ever wanna be exposed to the modern day tecon (comes free of charge with a portion of slimey sequencing and moist brainfarts), it's right here: http://www.soundcloud.com/smace ..there's even a recent remix of mod.alien_romance there even, which btw was a hint to 'indian romance' by you know who and from what demo, right? ;)

Take care and be well!

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This interview was kindly sent to us by Tecon via email in Feb 2013. thx!
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