Passionately fucking the scene: Skrju

Skrju is a (Russian?) demogroup founded in 2001, still releasing brain-smashing ZX Spectrum demos unlike any other demogroup I’ve seen. Their demos are usually noisy and greyscale, sad and dark. Pleasently uncomfortable. Let’s get sucked into their world with Fuckyouscene (2003).

It makes me think of Alih’s C64-demo Fuck the Scene, which is another kind of alternative to the demoscene aesthetics with its fucky appearance but complex code. But to me Skrju’s works are more consistent, and is definitely not only a rebellion against the scene. Check their 20-second invitro for Chaos Construction 2004, which they made in 2005 (!).

You have to give credit to a group that works primarily with greyscale ZX Spectrum, right? At first, they used colours and a more demoscene-ish aesthetics. Lovemaker (youtube) is a teenage angst poetry trash demo which according to their website was inspired by Fairlight’s Drop the Basics and its childish graphics. For Summermilk (youtube) they mention a Replay-demo (with a classic Radix/Loonie song) as inspiration. After this they started establishing their greyscale-style with Why (2003).

After that they released their Fuckthescene-demo, which I think appears a bit different in the light of their past productions. It’s not just an outside thrashing of the scene without consideration of its traditions. They are not just “making some glitches” but building on the demoscene ‘canon’ (see the end here). Atleast that’s the way I see it. The excellent demo Mother (youtube) is perhaps a bit of an anti-demo, but then Ussr2185 (youtube) features plenty of rotating cubes. Had it used more pixels, colours, and sounds, it could’ve been a quite typical PC-demo, right? Here’s Idiot from 2004.

This demo makes me think of the PC-demo _ by $, which caused quite a discussion in the scene about what a demo is supposed to be. Shanethewolf finally said “let’s give up what once was a target of the demoscene.. high quality real-time multimedia.” Although Skrju are perhaps more traditional than $ in some ways, there are also some similar tendencies in the comments of Skrju-demos at Pouet. Perhaps it’s because they undermine a technodeterministic definition of demos, where demos can be anything as long as they obide by certain technical details (filesize and format, platform, etc). This is proving to be a problem in demoscene-archives such as CSDb, where it has to be discussed what constutites a ‘scene release’. Why is Jeff Minter’s Horses a scene release, for example? This also applies to the chipscene in many ways.

Anyway, let’s go back to Skrju. The current members are sq, nq, kq and t. Their musician, nq, has a website and also did a ZX noise release on Ubiktune called Onomatopoeia. Among their latest releases is the 256-byte story of a lonely cell (youtube) which pre-dates Viznut’s Dramatic Pixels. There’s the dark Reminescence (youtube) and also We are (youtube) which, again, reminds me of Hollowman‘s work, and also Wrath Designs.

Some randomly semi-similar thing-stuffs: tbk – bl, eerie norwegian demos, chip noise, disco calculi, put on your goggles, jodi, hatebit, ZX Spectrum Orchestra, Lukas Nystrand’s “crack intros” or check out the noise category here. Hardcore will always die!