Dr. Pravda’s Ultimate Amiga Rave

Thanks to Unibomber, I found out about Dr. Pravda – one of the most blunt Amiga music on record. No fancy tricks or subtleties, this is pure unadulterated tracker rave! Most of the samples seems to be ripped from other Amiga mods also, which add another dimension to it. Like the guitar-sound from BIT Arts’ Wasteland that he uses in Operation. Although I can’t place all of them, I used a lot of these samples myself back in the days. It is an obvious consequence of the ‘open source’ distribution of Amiga mod-music. If you wanted to sample your own sounds in 1994 you needed to buy or build a sampler, but also struggle to find the records or machines that you wanted to sample. And wasn’t all that easy to get the optimum sound quality either. So obviously, when you were listening to other people’s music in Protracker, it was quite convenient to simply save the samples you liked and tweek them into your own music.

If you wanted to be elite you weren’t supposed to do that though, but what did Dr. Pravda care about that, and look where it got him! He released three 12-inches in 94-95 and appeared on numerous compliations on labels like ZYX. His music was not obscure by any means. Actually, “abfahrer” claims that Dr. Pravda’s Krankenhouse is the most played song at a single Mayday rave ever, “cause his minimal but very effective sounds kicked the crowd better than every other track at this time”. Can’t argue with that!

For me this is almost as Amiga-rave’93 as it gets. Compared to e.g. Aphrodite who  used the Amiga more ‘professionally’, Dr. Pravda could have been released in the demoscene both techically and aesthetically. As far as I know, there were not many crossovers between the demoscene and record labels. One example I’ve found is Cybermouse, who released gabber on Fischkopf that also appeared in an Amiga diskmag.

Now let’s get happy in raveland and then get an operation in the krankenhouse! Rave on, rave off!