The Archive and the Scene

I wrote an article about the C64 scene archive CSDb a few years ago together with Jörgen Rahm-Skågeby and it was recently published by New Media & Society: The archive and the scene: On the cultural techniques of retrocomputing databases. 

CSDb is one of the most impressive documentations of a subculture that I’ve ever seen. It holds artefacts and information that goes back to the very the very first days of the scene. There are a few people who are extremely dedicated in finding, buying and preserving collections of floppy disks to find artefacts that have not already been uploaded to CSDb. Others spend their time correcting and organizing information across CSDb. The collective effort is pretty mind-boggling and it seems to work really well, for the most part.

There are almost 200,000 releases in CSDb and most of them contain information and links that connect them to people, groups, events, etc. All of these are scene releases. It’s not a collection of everything ever released on C64. You won’t find games or tools in there unless they were made by a scener, cracked by scener (and therefore becoming a scene artefact) or is otherwise seen as relevant. This is not exactly straight forward, but CSDb has an explicit vision of archiving the scene and nothing else. Therefore it needs at least an implicit definition of what the scene is. Even if this works fine most of the time, there are fundamental questions that can be difficult/impossible to give neutral answers to. Is this person a scener? Is this thing a demo? Is this badly cracked game a crack? Is this event a demoparty?

This is not a demo.

While I did the interviews for the article, I realized that there is an underlying conflict between seeing CSDb as part of the scene, or as an archive. There are people who upload their latest song or picture directly to CSDb, and there are those who disapprove of that. They want CSDb to stand “outside” of the scene and document that which is released in the scene. I find this really fascinating. I can certainly relate to the ideal of being an objective observer and document things without interfering. But it’s an ideal, I think, that can’t be reached. Particles are affected by observation and C64-sceners are affected by CSDb. :)

Let me give you an example. One of the things that makes CSDb so powerful is that it links people and groups and try to keep track of when people change handles and groups. That’s extremely valuable for me as a researcher. For me as a demoscener who sometimes releases things under alternative names… let’s just say that I’m less impressed. Some of my “secret” songs have been attributed to me by scanning the data to identify the player used (and since I was pretty much the only one using defMON, it was attributed to me). It’s annoying and great, it’s okay I guess, of course, sure. Nevertheless, it shows how the archive feeds back into the scene that it wants to archive. It adds new information to the thing it wants to archive, and it cleans up and removes ambiguities and mysteries. Something goes missing there, some sort of underground/magic/weirdness that I always loved about the scene. But perhaps that’s a small price to pay for such an impressive subculture archive?

Note that the numbers and statistics in the article are from 2016 when it was written. Academia does not have any 0-day release groups.

This is apparently a demo.

The First Megademos?

I’ve always liked the term ‘megademo’. It hasn’t really been that popular since its demise in the early 1990s, but my group Hack n’ Trade has kept the tradition going. Why? Well, the megademo form comes with some pretty convenient advantages:

• It doesn’t need a theme. What comes next can be a complete surprise in design, sound, text, etc.
• Megademos require user interaction: the user has to press a button or key to get to the next part.
• The viewer tolerates a break between parts (loader/decruncher, a loading part, a menu).

At least that is the way many see it today, and how we saw it in the mid 1990’s when we did our first megademo. “It’s easier than making a seamless trackloading demo without interruptions”. But I’ve come to realize that not everybody agrees with this idea…

The Early Days

It looks like the megademo word was first used in 1987. Janeway’s megademo category lists four Amiga productions from that year, and they describe the very bare bones production Megademo Disk by United Software Rebels (West Germany) as the first Amiga megademo. Since it was released just a few weeks after the Amiga 500 was launched (!) it seems like a reasonable assumption.

At the end of 1987, Sodan (the Dane who pioneered demo coding on the C-64) and Magician 42 released Techtech Demo. It’s a pretty great demo with several disparate parts like a typical megademo, but it also has a track loader (loading the next part while the current one is playing to minimize pauses for loading). So from a technical perspective, Janeway could have categorized this as a trackmo, like they did with Sodan’s Star demo from earlier that year. The third demo on the list, Some Demo Codes, could have been categorized as a pack disk rather than a megademo, as they mention in the comments.

For my purposes, the current categorization of demos are less interesting than what they were actually called back then, by the authors themselves. Now, I haven’t read through all the scroll texts from 1987, but there is one Amiga demo explicitly named and introduced as a megademo: Megademo by Antitrax 2010 from December 1987 (with music by Karsten Obarski). Interestingly, it supposedly competed in a specific megademo competition at the FCS-ECC copy party. That sounds unlikely to me but I can’t confirm or deny it with the links at Demozoo or in the invitation letter, courtesy of the lovely Got Papers? project.

 

 

To my surprise, the C64 has several explicitly titled megademos in 1987, judging from a search at CSDb.

• Megademo by 6581 Crew (Denmark)
• Megademo by Megasoft (Denmark)
• Megademo 5 by Xenon (Sweden)
• Megademo I by Night-Mode Cracker (?)
• TSF Megademo by The Scientific Frontiers (Netherlands)
• Megademo by Finland Cracking Service (Finland)

All of these have several disparate parts with breaks. Most of them are essentially several demoparts/intros linked together, many of them including ripped game songs that you can browse through. Finland Cracking Service (FCS) stands out from the rest with some fairly impressive code and custom music (self-composed and hacks/remixes of game music). A slightly absurd detail that I appreciate is that you don’t exit the parts with space like in other megademos, but each part has its own specific exit key. In the demo, FCS sends some “comments” to Fantasy Cracking Service (FCS) in Germany who organized the party mentioned above, about stealing their acronym.

Does this mean that megademos were first popularized on the C-64? Well, not really. The chart below compares the amount of megademos on the Amiga and the C64 (ie, releases in Janeway and CSDb that have ‘megademo’ in the name). 

As you can see, during the so called golden years of the demoscene in the late 1980’s, megademos were clearly more of an Amiga thing. It is possible that the term first appeared on the C64, but it is also possible that the first megademos on the Amiga haven’t been preserved and archived.

Meganormal

Megademos became the new norm on the Amiga and 1989 saw one of the most iconic megademos on the Amiga: RSI Megademo (see below). I like Scoopex’s Megademo from the same year, which has a similar vibe of acid house rock. 1990 saw another one, called Budbrain Megademo. All of these used a specific loader part while loading the next part, but they never interrupted for loading/decrunching. To many, this became a defining feature of megademos.

When you remove the loading part (like Sodan did in 1987 already) and use a track loader for seamless progression, it makes less sense to call it a megademo. This is perhaps most clearly expressed in Scoopex’s notorious demo, Mental Hangover from 1990:

Even so, the term was sometimes used for seamless track loading demos (trackmos). King Fisher just told me that he called Red Storm (one of the earliest C64-trackmos) a megademo, for example. I suppose it was a way to separate it from the majority of demos on the C64, which had interruptions for loading/decrunching. On the Amiga, it made more sense to separate megademos from trackmos, because they were both popular at the same time. Scoopex didn’t want people to call it a megademo, because it was “better” than that.

I’m not sure. This certainly requires some more digging into by the global megademo research community. In any case, megademos gradually faded in popularity and status and a few years later they were predominantly ironic, funny or “fake” productions.  Luckily, that’s when me and my group Hack n’ Trade stepped in and started to dominate the megademo world. In 1996/1997 we were almost alone in using the term. What a success! 

Expanding The Norm

What I like with the megademo concept is that it’s not seamless. It’s chopped up in confusing bits that don’t really make sense together. It’s rough, it’s weird. And if you follow that train of thought, then perhaps our latest demo Essentials can be seen as a form of megademo. Parts are loaded randomly, they score very low in the rational sense making tests, but they also contain tools and music software? Yeah, have a go:

Panoramic Designs masterpiece Psykolog from 1991 has a similar spirit, and particularly the end part that starts about 16:30 into the video. 

Okay, that seems like a good ending to this post. If you have any information or ideas on the megademo topic, please let me know. Especially if you know things about other platforms than ye ol’ C64 and Amiga.

Unknown Chip Music Album From 1999 – Or Not?

If someone asks me when the chipscene began, I say “around 2000”. At that time chip music was mostly a thing in the demoscene, just like it was mostly a thing in the games industry before that. To be brief. But in 1999 something else started to happen. In the timeline we can that

• Micromusic.net was formed
• Bodenständig 2000 released an Atari-album
• Role Model released an Amiga-album
• Alec Empire released a Gameboy-album
• Nanoloop appeared

Three die hard chip music albums, a new Gameboy music software (that was not a tracker), and a brand new online community for a community that didn’t even exist yet. Pretty wild! The previous years, as far as I’ve found out, don’t even come close:

• 1998: Bodenständig 2000’s Atari-album Hemzärmelig
• 1997: Horn of Fanyulo’s abstract multiplatform album Chatarra Informatica
• 1995: The Electric Family – a compilation with SNES Mario Paint music

That’s pretty much it, for the (becoming) chipscene, anyway. There were other things like a myriad of Amiga-made gabber/hardcore music that was not chip music, there were songs and tools in the demoscene, game soundtracks (on the Gameboy, for example), and so on.

But okay, getting to the point: I was surprised when a friend (thx Margaret Montreux) showed me a chip album from 1999 that I didn’t know about: Attract Mode by COiN. So even more chippy things happened in 99? Behind the name is, well, another name: Thermos Malling. He had been playing drums for Bob Log III in various constellations and then, almost out of nowhere, he releases a chip music album in January 1999. Play the video – it’s the full album.

The first thing you hear is a jingle from Arkanoid. Sampled. Yes, COiN sampled C64 game music, cut it up, manipulated it and added other sound sources like drums and Apple’s text-to-speech for vocals.

THAT’S FAKEBIT I can here the chipsters roar. Well, it’s certainly not the most authentic form of chip music. Back when this was more of a purist blog, this album wouldn’t have made it into the timeline. Maybe it would have made it onto the badly named plagiarism page, though. There you can find die hard plagiarizers like Laromlab who performed, sold and promoted other people’s songs as his own. But there’s also artists like Monotrona who sampled old 8-bit songs, mangled it and added her own work to it. That’s not plagiarism in my book.

So is COiN more like Monotrona or Laromlab? To be honest, I didn’t actually recognize too many C64-songs in COiN’s material. I thought that maybe he played around so much with the original material that it became unrecognizable? I needed to compare it with the original C64-songs so I decided to turn to a higher power: the CSDb forums. It didn’t take long until JCH, demoscener since 1986, replied. He actually identified one of his own songs in there – and then plenty more. Check it out.

00.00 Arkanoid subtune by Martin Galway

00.14 & 00.39 Knackdick by JCH

06.51 Hawkeye by Jeroen Tel

06:56 Scroll Machine (subtune) by Yip

11.08 Bodyslam jingle by Tim Follin

11.15 Turbo Outrun subtune by Jeroen Tel

11.45 Hotrod subtune by Jeroen Tel

Here JCH was fed up with it, but other people chimed in with:

14.41 Clystron subtune by Thomas Detert

15.15 Another Turbo Outrun subtune by Jeroen Tel

18.30 Another Clystron subtune by Thomas Detert

The list will surely grow longer, but we can already conclude a few things. First of all – I was wrong. The original C64-songs haven’t been mangled, mixed and mashed together. But COiN has clearly cut and edited quite a bit to rearrange the songs themselves and to insert parts from other songs. And of course, there’s plenty of added material on top as well. Secondly, COiN is not just sampling game music as he claims, but also demoscene music. Remember when Timbaland sampled a demoscene song and said that it was from a video game? Yeah that stuff can get you in trouble…

Ok, so does that mean that COiN should be listed in the main timeline? Or will he be handed over to the plagiarism page of doom? And what about Monotrona? What will it beeee? Well, I need to sleep so I’ll just leave you hanging but if you have any ideas, feel free to comment. :——)

Btw, COiN’s second album, Architects of Character, is also available in full on YouTube:

 

A Small Computer Plays Some Samples Of Mozart’s Dice-Composition Music

Here’s a pretty great find of early mini computer music, released on vinyl in 1967. It was made by T.H. O’Beirne on the SOLIDAC computer that was produced and used at Glasgow University. The “samples” are of course not sampled sounds, but generated music based on Mozart’s piece.

Utz, who pointed me this way, shared a link to an article about this work and information about the music software that he wrote for the SOLIDAC. You can read more at Physical Impossibility whose images and sounds I’ve linked to here.

 

Mapping the World of Amiga Samples

Mod Sample Master is a new project to look into samples in mod-files, and how they relate to each other. This is pretty amazing because it lets us delve into 30+ years of a digital music movement, to see how samples have traveled between songs, people, time, place. 75,000 songs and a million samples.

At the moment, the method for matching samples is very simple. Either it’s a perfect 100% match, or it’s not a match at all. For example, if I copy a sample from someone else and crop even just a fraction of it, it is not a match anymore. Still, there are plenty of matches. A lot, actually.

More than a third of the samples were used in two songs or more. Many of them are from the ST-01 sample pack that was extremely popular in the early Amiga years. Others are “chip samples” – tiny samples that are looped to produce beeps and stuff. Here’s a top-5 list to give you an idea:

• 1200+ songs: hihat2 (ST-01)
• 1100+ songs: “chiplead“
• 800+ songs: “chipbass“
• 600+ songs: popsnare2 (ST-01)
• 500+ songs: bassdrum3 (ST-01)

Great to finally see Popsnare2 in the charts! And looking further down the charts, ST-01 (and 02) keeps popping up. It’s not surprising, because there were a lot of people making mod files in those days, and it wasn’t easy to record your own samples or modify them.

What surprised me was the prevalence of chip samples. I didn’t really think that people making chip mods would just reuse the same sounds over and over. And, well, then I remembered that’s how I do it myself.

I, the Triangle Thief

Here‘s a chip sample with a triangle waveform, used by 51 songs in the archive. Most of them are mine. I remember that this sound used to be part of my “palette” back in the days. (still is, tbh) I don’t know where it came from. But looking at other songs using the sample, it’s safe to say that I didn’t exactly sample it myself. 4mat used it for chip mods like Anarchymenu_06, and I’m pretty sure that’s where I blatantly stole it from. So my thoughts and copyright prayers are with 4mat in these troubling times. I hope he can find it in his heart one day to forgive me. :–)

Samples don’t really have names in mods. I mean, they do, but they are mostly used for writing messages to the listener. So when millions of sample names are listed alphabetically you get stuff like this:

On the other hand, if you list all the names that a sample has been given you get fragmented poetry like this:

It was common to make a sort of animation with the sample names. As you scrolled through the sample names, it would look animated.

Some listings are a bit like ASCII art:

Well, I’m pretty sure I’m going to spend way too much time playing around with this. And I hope this project will continue to grow. Some ideas moving forward could be:

• Set “master names” to known samples (ST-01/02 in particular)
• Include artists in the database, so you can see eg which artists that use the same samples
• Expand the “exact matching”
• Playing samples
• Links to mod-files

Big up to Fred for making this!

Early Amiga chiptuneries

The terms chipmusic and chiptune was sparsely used during the 1980’s and started to become popular on the Amiga around 1990. It seems like it referred to both synthetic Amiga music (hypertracker “soft synths”) and sample-based chip-modules made in soundtrackers.

I came across the Dexion Megademo from 1989 the other day, and it has some interesting examples of songs that are both synthetic and sample-based. This was common in the early years of the Amiga, before soundtrackers became the dominant standard. But perhaps some of these songs were made in soundtrackers? In part 3 it sounds like a typical soundtracker technique of setting an arpeggio on the first step of a sound, but leaving the rest of the sound clean.

Maybe this can add to the history of chip-modules? If anyone is up for some detective work to find out which software the music was made in, let me know what you find.

About the demotalks at DATASTORM

So a few weeks ago we did another DATASTORM, a party for oldschool computing. The venue we’re at has had some recent troubles with the Swedish authorities because of bla-bla, but in the end everything worked out fine.

One thing that I was particularly happy with was the demotalks. We invited people who had made iconic and noteworthy scene productions, and got them to talk about it. This idea was inspired by an interview I made with Joe (for a forthcoming paper on CSDb as a “memory machine” for retro computing). He talked about how there is a gap in the history of the scene: we don’t really know so much about how demos were made. What kind of decisions and processes led up to these artefacts?

Some sceners are only interested in the tech stuff. Amusingly, when we announced Budbrain as speakers, someone questioned our choice because the coding was not complex enough. The kind of this-is-not-real-scene-stuff-attitude that still pops up every now and then… Such dedication!

But the tech stuff is really not the main point about this, to me. It is of course interesting to learn about the mathematics and all the smart coder tricks, or clever composing tricks, or pixeling styles. But maybe not for an hour? At least not on DATASTORM that is quite far from a nerdy conference (eh, I think?). So we encouraged the speakers to tell stories about the process, about what happened around the demo making.

Triad’s Red Storm was a pioneering demo in a technical sense, as one of the first “trackmos” – where the user didn’t have to press space for the next part. But it was also a pioneer in bringing in politics, poetry and other kinds of pop culture than the usual metal, acid, fantasy stuff that was everywhere in the scene at the time. King Fisher talked extensively about this, and you can see the slides here (turn on the notes!).

Budbrain, who made a Megademo that broke the tech-focus in the scene by bringing in humour into the mix (and imo very high quality graphics and music), talked a lot about their unusual position in the scene. On one hand they had a demo played on MTV, while on the other hand they were criticized by a lot of other sceners.

Mahoney talked about two music disks that he made together with Kaktus: Sounds of Gnome and His Master’s Noise. As usual, Mahoney did a great presentation and this time he made a competition between the two, with a bit more tech aspects than the other presentations, but with lots of charisma and humor to make up for it. :)

You can see video recordings of the talks over at SceneSat who once again have documented the whole thing. \o

So what I realized at the party, especially in a conversation with Hollowman, is that a demo’s connection with the rest of the world is what makes it extra interesting to hear about. Sure it’s about its place in the scene and its influence within the scene, but how it takes in the outside world, or how it relates to it, is at least as important.

So I hope to see more of these presentations in the future. Copy copy copy!

First photo by Kristian Tjessem

Trackers from 1981 and 1983

It is common knowledge that Soundtracker or Soundmonitor were the first trackers. But it’s not necessarily true. In the 1960’s computer scientists and Fluxus artists made things that were rather tracker-like (here, here) and there are probably precursors from hundreds of years ago.

But talking computer software, we can have a look at for example Muzix81, released in Hungary in 1983. This was a CV sequencer for the tiny ZX81, and was apparently used for a few mainstream record releases. The manual reveals that Muzix81 has a similar layout to eg Soundmonitor, with a list of hexadecimal instructions. At the top left, “1. 0B” means duration 1, octave zero, note B. “+” means sharp and “*” means accent.

Muzix81 has many similarities with a tracker, but it uses explicit duration. The user sets the duration of each event instead of using a fixed time for each step (like a step sequencer). Most trackers don’t do this, but there is a strain of trackers with explicit duration that are sometimes called editors. (note that Muzix81 has a step sequencer for drums though)

Irrlicht Project recently told me about a similar program, released even earlier. Electric Duet for Apple II came out in 1981, and was made by Paul Lutus in USA. It uses the same basic principle as Muzix81: on each step the user sets duration and note.

What makes this tracker-like, as herr Irrlicht himself notes, is that it uses a vertical time line (not sure if Muzix81 does?) and that it has text notation rather than sheet music. These two factors taken together, means that it is as much a tracker as the myriad of C64-editors from the 1980’s and 1990’s are. But this is from 1981.

Following this terminology, we could say that Muzix81 is a hypertracker (as the musical output depends on the settings on the external hardware) and Electric Duet is more of a soundtracker, since it simply plays the data that the user has typed in. But I’m not sure if that makes sense.

If you know of other early tracker-like software, feel free to send us a fax!

More on intended uses

I heard some anarchists had some feedback my post about intended uses of technologies. They disagreed with my claim that we don’t know the original intentions of Facebook. So let me expand a bit on the previous post.

I have this slightly mystical idea that humans can’t fully and perfectly understand what a certain media is (following Kittler). So I don’t think we should go all anthropocentric and claim that we know exactly what this is, like objectively dude. Maybe aliens know it better? Eh, for example. Our understanding of something as “simple” as a Commodore 64 clearly changes over time, as we discover previously unknown details. So we should at least be a bit humble and keep an open mind about the media’s substance.

That is not to that say some media aren’t made with specific intentions from its human inventors, which might be obscured from the end user. It’s a very important discussion too, but a somewhat different one. Maybe Facebook was intended to become what it is today already from the beginning, as these anarchists claim to know, but how can we be sure? Spotify is easier to speculate about, because we know that it didn’t start with the idea of streaming music. They wanted to stream something. Whatever. Peer-to-peer something. But they knew that they wanted to sell ads. So maybe that was the original intention?

We can and should speculate about these things. Especially when we talk about the politics of media. After all, Spotify becomes something else when its history doesn’t start with “let’s revolutionize the music industry in our underwear” but instead “let’s sell ads by streaming stuff” (in Swedish). But I’m not sure that we should put too much focus on the origin.

In the end, it feels like a particularly Western thing to look for an “original intention”. A singular origin. The “one man, one idea” kind of thing (yeah, those stories are mostly about men). It’s probably more complex than that, right? Lots of people involved, economic interests, unexpected events, failures, power struggles, ideology, and so on. Even if we can define one point of origin, it seems pretty unlikely that any intended uses would be so firmly embedded in an object or in a company that it would withstand the pressure from decades of political and economical changes. Or, you know, from your friend Steve who turns your computer company into a walled garden.

To me it seems fairly obvious that a human-made object can take on a “life” of its own that the inventors cannot anticipate or explain, and that the inventors don’t own. And it’s also fairly obvious that there are psychopath inventors and structures that don’t care/know about what they destroy.

Gif from Black Flags by William Forsythe. Just-in-case disclaimer: I don’t dislike anarchists.

Who decides what “intended uses” are?

For the last year or so, there has been a growing mainstream critique of social media. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors are raising their concerns about what Facebook and other cyber gangs are doing to society. See for example the Center for Humane Technology. The recent concerns are often embedded in a discourse that “Russia” has abused Facebook to influence voting. But did they really abuse it? Or did they merely use it, as an article in WIRED recently put it?

It’s an important distinction, which has everything to do with how we talk about chip music and low-tech art. I’m doing a talk in Utrecht this summer, which has brought me back to these ideas. And they feel highly relevant now, with discussions about what social media are and how they should or should not be used.

Once upon a time the App Store rejected a Commodore 64 emulator because its BASIC interpreter could be used to program stuff. That was unacceptable at the time, but these policies later changed to allow the fierce power of C64 BASIC. It makes the point clear enough: what the iPhone and other iOS-devices can do is not just conditioned by its hardware. The possibilities of a programmable computer are there, only hidden or obscured. But there are ways to get around it.

And this is true for all kinds of hardware. Maybe today it’s even true for cars, buildings and pacemakers. There are possibilities that have not yet been discovered. We rarely have a complete understanding of what a platform is. My talk in Utrecht will focus on how the chip- and demoscenes over time have unfolded the platforms that they use. What is possible today was not possible yesterday. Even though the platforms are physically the same, our understanding – and “objective definitions” of them change. And it almost seems like the emulators will never be complete?

With a less object-oriented definition of these platforms, it’s reasonable to define the 8-bit platforms not only as the platform itself, but as an assemblage of SD-card readers, emulators and other more-or-less standard gadgets for contemporary artists and coders. The Gameboy, for example, might have been an inter-passive commodity at first, but after development kits were released, it changed. It used to be really difficult or expensive to get access to its guts, but now it’s relatively easy. So it might be time to stop framing Gameboy music – and most other chip music – as something subversive; something that goes against the “intended uses” of the platforms.

Sure, the Gameboy was probably not designed for this, in the beginning. And Facebook was probably not designed to leak data, influence elections, and make people feel like shit. But that’s not really the point. These possibilities were always there, and they always will be. But perhaps the Center for Humane Technology will push such materialist mumbo jumbo to the side, and re-convince people of the “awesomeness” of social media.