Kjell Nordbø, We Miss You

In January 2005 the C64-composer Zyron got a package with a 5.25″ floppy disk from his friend in Norway. The disk didn’t work, which was annoying. The guy who had sent the disk, Kjell Nordbø, had been active in the demoscene since 1991 but always seemed to operate in the fringe of this fringe subculture. He mostly made what he called “music demos” - executable audiovisual albums - for C64 and sent floppies to a few people who would spread them to the public. This music disk was only given to Zyron, but since the disk didn’t work and he was in the process of moving, the music disk was forgotten. Some time later, Zyron got an e-mail from Kjell’s father who told him that Kjell had committed suicide by hanging himself. Shock. Zyron found the disk again and managed to fix it. He loaded the disk and saw that the title of the music demo was “Larger Than Life”. Hrmmf. When he loaded the music disk he was in for the next shock as he saw the intro screen - Kjell’s logotype was hanging from a tree….

For those of us who had been following Kjell’s work, this was a terrible loss. After his passing away I couldn’t listen to his songs for a long time, since the dark nature of his work really took a new level after he said goodbye to the world through his last C64-production. I find Kjell’s work to be among the best 8-bit work, ever. I think his music disks are amazing works, combining artistic and technical skills and creating very eerie feelings with music, graphics, programming and text. His way of experimenting and surprising, the way he creates the mosty spooky atmospheres but sometimes also almost disturbingly happy songs. Often his works have very surprising changes aswell, so they are hard to grasp by just fast forwarding through them. I think his music has inspired me a lot, and I would like to make other people discover his work. That’s why I am trying to promote him so much. His first solo music disk starts the scrolltext with “Welcome to my world of prejudices, schizophrenia and pure perfection.” It’s a good introduction to what is to come. Here’s a list of his solo music demos to show his productivity (each collection contains >a lot< of music) and his tradition of naming his collections…

Does Not Compute (1994)
The Magic Flute (1994)
Born Alive Dead (1995)
Relationship Across the World (1995)
Total Insane OK (1996)
Pioneers Are Lonely (1996)
Iron of Steel (1996)
Outsider Seek Safety (1997)
Death or Hell? (1998)
Forces in Alliance (1999)
The Big Leap (1999)
No Compromise Touch (2000)
A New Life (2001)
Journey Through Mirrorland (2002)
Mad Mans Dream (2002)
Ghost Escapes Body (2003)
Larger Than Life (2005)

(note that some of these cannot be run if a cartridge is not in the C64 or the emulator)

A composer with a wide spectrum of styles such as Kjell is hard to get into when there are more than 400 songs to download. I asked Zyron to make a selection of his favourite tracks by Kjell. First he said “it would be easier to select the ones that aren’t that good” but finally managed to get it down to 80 tracks. After Zyron’s list I will also put a less comprehensive list for people with less time. All of the links are to MP3-files at 6581-8580.com which means that unlike the original SID-format 1) the songs won’t loop 2) the ending of the songs are a bit weird 3) the songs are taken from HVSC 4) and most importantly, they are not emulated but played on the 8580R SID-chip (the way Kjell composed them) on a real C64-setup. Hail authenticity!

A Change For
A Length
Trying the Carousel [A New Life #17]
A Place
After Real
All the Time
Best to You, The
Business
Cakes Taste Good
Carry My Weight
Classical
Commodore
Crime
Crunch
Dark Force
Died
Dream Runner
Drifting Away
Dunk Bang Kraesj
Ekorn
Exhausted
Explorer
Fantastic
Frihetsrock
Frode
Future
General
Goes
Happiness Room
Happy Days
Hard Times
Heat, The
Here I Come
Hiding My Face
Holding a Hand
Honey Soup
Hope
Hurry (Someone Needs Help)
I Hate You
I Wave Goodbye
If It Ain’t Love
I’m Fonkey
In a Funky Place
It
Jungle
Kick
Killer
Left Lane
Life Is a Game (But It Isn’t)
Like a Player
Little Big Man, The
Lunatic
Mad About It
Into My Picture [Mad Mans Dream #10]
Master of the Universe
Mind Escape, The
Mysterious Dance
Never Die
Nor Art or You
Over the Edge
Rockhard
Rope of Plastic
Sea Boble
Seek the Truth
Slow Reactions
Snapper
Snofnugg
Spy Spied Me
Starting an End
Struggle
Surrounded
Temptation
That’s MY Girl
This Chair
Touches of Magic
Unlimited Mind
Unlock Your Doors
Use My Fire!
What a Chance
Where Are You

Here’s some suggestions from yours truly, hoping that you can find your way into the world of Kjell. If you like it, I recommend to run his music demos aswell to see his graphics, read his texts, and get into one of the most interesting blends of a human mind and a set of chips.

A song to start with, including many of his styles: Unlimited Mind
Crazy funk: 1001 Ride & Let’s Work
Happyjumpy: The Best to You
Dark action funk: Died & Crime
Rock: That’s MY Girl & Use My Fire! & Atom Guitar
Squirrel jam: Ekorn
Metal funk jazz: The Little Big Man
Rock twist: Out of Nothing
Abstractish: Snofnugg & Surrounded & Touches of Magic & Ann Kristin (Anti Krist) & Clowns & Genuine Madness

Enjoy Kjell, Larger Than Life.

Chipmusic - hardware or software?

After writing about Linus Åkesson’s work, I have been thinking more about the definition of chipmusic. Again. So, his hardware chiptune project is really hardcore - programming a chip from scratch to generate music. But, it can also be seen as the complete opposite to chipmusic.

If we use a technical definition of chipmusic - any kind of sounds synthesized by a soundchip - Åkesson’s project is not chipmusic. The sounds that his program generates could might aswell have been something completely different, that wouldn’t sound like chipmusic at all. But, when you use a machine with a specific soundchip inside it (which computers and consoles had until the mid 1990s), the chip has a framework that you need to adapt to. A Gameboy or a NES can play four sounds simultaneously, a Commodore 64 can only play three.

However, most music software goes beyond the absolute limitations of the soundchips. With LSDJ for Gameboy, one of the channels can play two 4-bit samples at the same time, by mixing the sounds. On this channel you can also use a software-synthesizer, which produces sounds not inherent to the chip. On the Commodore 64, clever programmers quickly figured out how to play samples on a “fourth” channel of the soundchip already in the early 1980’s.

Back in the days, it was important that music could be used in games or demos. Composers could not make music that used a lot of processor power to generate sounds, since programmers needed the power to make cool games or demos. Today music seems highly prioritized in the development of games and demos, but back then music wasn’t supposed to use much of RAM or CPU. (Collins) Still today, a lot of software used to make chipmusic doesn’t use a lot of CPU-power, although it is usually not made for games or demos. LSDJ is one example of a tracker that uses more software synthesis, although it was actually used in the Gameboy demo Demotronic (2002) by 1.000.000 BOYS. (and although I am biased here, I think it is one of the best demos ever)

I still argue that the birth of chipmusic as we know it today was around 1990. Although computer music had been made for almost 40 years already, the term chipmusic was not used. Also, it seems it was around this time that chipmusic as a genre was formed. Before the home computer revolution in OECD-countries in the 1980’s, computer music was mainly made in the name of science and fine art. It seems it was about technological progress and pioneering, or conceptual art based in cybernetics, sci-fi, and social critique. (Chandler & Neumark 2005) Basically, it was a lot more abstract than what we call chipmusic today.

I have not seen the term chipmusic in use before the Amiga demoscene started mentioning it around 1990. The term referred to music that flirted with the game music of the C64 and was essentially used in intros and cracktros. But, the sounds were not synthesized by a chip - it was sampled waveforms. It is a fact often forgotten in contemporary history writing of chipmusic. In its infancy, chipmusic was not about realtime synthesized sounds but rather a musical genre - and I would argue this is still the case. But personally, I like the technical aspect of the term chipmusic as I can easily label my music without saying what music style I make. It’s like saying I make “guitar music”. Very convenient + confusing.

Apparently I’ve missed out on good stuff, but thanks to the c64music blog I found out about little-scale who makes very nice chip-related things. Right now, I want to mention his automaton ep (2008) which uses the same technique as the early Amiga chipmusic composers: extremely short samples. All the songs on this EP are based on a single 11.6 millisecond sample, and it effectively proves that this technique can result in pretty complex soundscapes. I made something similar in a tune called Jonkvrouwe (download). This tune is some kind of quick n’ dirty bleep reggae, but it illustrates this technique in an interesting way. There is just one sample of a a screaming girl and I change the loop-positions of the samples while playing the song. When the loop is short enough it sounds like chipmusic! I wonder if it is?

Hardcore Data Crafting and Demoscene

Linus Akesson, whose hardware chiptune project I’ve mentioned earlier, has done it again!

A few weeks ago, Linus (aka lft) won the wild compo at the demoparty Breakpoint in Germany. This is one of the biggest demoparties that does it the oldschool way, rather than having huge arenas full of LAN-gamers and mega corporate sponsorship (yes, yes, yes). Demoparties are gatherings of people in the demoscene, meeting, coding, drinking, composing, data-dancing, and competing with music, graphics, and demos. It’s complicated to explain what the demoscene is, but in short something like “a rather closed subculture making geek-art for geeks, with their own aesthetics, copyright, status-making, communication systems” - keeping underground since 20+ years. Now, imagine walking into a room full of obscure old computers, an air full of sweat and a myriad of square wave vibrations, and people watching a big screen shouting wildly as a scrolling text says something about IFLI, unlimited bobs, lamers, side borders, etc. It’s really something worth living for. : )

So, Breakpoint is a big demoparty (something like 700 people). Reading on their website, they say that girls no longer get in for free as they are so “many” now. “The goal of attracting girls to the scene clearly has been achieved - girls no longer are second-class sceners.” I remember a certain Swedish C64-party where the entrance fee for girls was doubled, but that’s another story. Anyway. Among the entries to the compos (competitions) at Breakpoint this year was a new release from Linus Akesson. It’s another release that blurs the borders between software and hardware, as he programs chips directly and puts them together into a micro-computer or personal computer, in its true sense. He uses an 8-bit CPU with 1kb RAM and 8,5kb ROM and basically nothing else: no special circuits for video or audio. It’s all hand made. Pure code. Mega data action!

Maybe it is the most hardcore demo ever made, as demos is traditionally about maximising hardware in any way you can. Demos on contemporary hardware has to be system friendly if it’s supposed to work on different hardware set-ups. The old tradition is to make everything yourself with no regard to what you are “supposed” to do. The Commodore 64 demoscene is notorious for exploiting undocumented features with trial and error - ie, utilizing features that the engineers didn’t put there consciously. I am not a programmer and I do not know what is using undocumented features and what is not, but here’s some of the C64-releases I liked at Breakpoint:

• #2 Graphics: Leon - Wanderer [ gif, exe ] For proof of handpixelling, see the workstages
• #1 Demo: Exceed, Resource, The Dreams - Cauldron [ mp4, exe ]
• #13 Music: Lft - Nymphaea [ exe ]

( how-to-run-them )

As we can see, my taste doesn’t always correlate with the demoparty-voters’ taste. But I still like compos at parties, since it’s an interesting challenge to try to win demosceners’ votes. It’s also interesting to see how much noise they can put up with. He he. Anyway. Back to Linus. Check out his page about the demo Craft here, with detailed information, schematics, video downloads, etc. The youtube video has been a bit crowded, but if you’re lucky it is working here. It includes many of the standard effects of the demoscene, but the combination of MHz, little RAM and many colours, makes it look fresh - especially considering the hardware.

Chiplagiarism

The American artist Laromlab has released an album with chipmusic, with the only problem being that it wasn’t his own music. The music was made by YM Rockerz, more exactly Crazy Q, DMA-SC, Dubmood, and Lotek Style. Yesterday (April fool’s day) Laromlab wrote an apology and the record label are currently withdrawing the release. Read more about it at Dubmood’s blog. See what some demosceners have to say about it here (it’s not pretty). Don’t be too hard on the guy..

Update a few hours later: Seeing Dubmood’s comment, I will elaborate a bit more.

I have just written a text about composers in the demoscene forming a sort of cultural ecology. The music distributed in the Amiga demoscene - mod-files - contained all the notes, instruments, and effects. It was open source - the listener had the same possibilities to study and alter the song, as the composer did. Since the demoscene operated essentially in the fringe of society, they had no judical problems with sampling records, movies, tv, radio, etc. This was made to a wide extent - usually without crediting the source. “Re-mediation” was also common - making bleepy covers of commercial hits or sampling and using tricks to make them fit into a few hundred kilobytes. On the other hand, using samples and music from fellow demoscene composers seems to have been considerred a lot more problematic. If you did this, the collective sanctioning of the demoscene would turn you into a lamer, sort of what happened to Timbaland. The point is: the demoscene, with its origins in the crackerscene, didn’t respect copyright outside of its community but had its own internal way of handling property and sanctioning.

The demoscene has its similarities with hiphop and mashups, because we all sample from external sources without being extremely picky with saying where it came from. (Although it is often essential that the listener recognizes the original, as Navas points out) This is made both in mainstream and underground culture, with the difference that most people can’t afford to pay money to do it legally. Money money money. It’s sometimes really refreshing to listen to music which is neither commercial or anti-capitalistic - just music. Chipmusic is a good example of this, or atleast it was. Now it’s not just possible to make money from chipmusic, but it’s also an argument to value how bad a case of extreme sampling (”stealing”) is, for example with Laromlab, Timbaland and Fitts for Fight.

Personally, I’ve had my (Creative Commons licensed) music used without permission/credit in both commercial (MTV) and public service contexts (Swedish radio and TV). I can get money for this, by reporting to copyright organizations such as IFPI, STIM, or SACEM. What I cannot do, without proper time and money to go to court, is making sure that my music won’t be used like this in the future. Although copyright means you cannot play a song for an audience without crediting the original author, the dominant sanctioning system is aimed at the economic part of copyright, not the attributional. Who cares if a song is played on the radio without credit, as long as the owner gets money?

Auhm, anyway. It’s ofcourse extremely silly to take a song and claim that you made it. I really don’t get that, eventhough I like sampling, remixing, mashups, etc. It’s a normal way of creating artifacts for a very long time, but what makes it difficult now is technology, copyright and individualism. There is nothing wrong with demanding people to give you credit for what you do, but it’s worth thinking about why it’s so important for you.

Maybe the way that demoscene handled intellectual property is getting more applicable again, when getting famous with your music is increasingly hard without it being available online, for everybody. Timbaland has been sampling for a long time, but last year the notorious music magazine Rolling Stone asked “Is Timbaland a thief?“. Could this have been caused by a “nerd army” and “the collective pride of a bunch of geeks and their ongoing war with mainstream media”? (xxlmag) I think it’s justified to fight back Timbaland’s arrogance, but since Laromlab is so obviously regretting what he made and probably fucked up future plans about his music making, maybe this is not the place for tabloid-style deamonizing?