Do you remember the 1990s big beat and Fatboy Slim’s Rockafeller Skank? Well, one of the official remixes was made on Amiga by Mulder, and here’s a video of it running in Octamed! (the released version used an external sampler though) What I find fascinating with these clips is that the jungle I listened to as a teenager could very well have been made on Amiga. Sure, a lot of Protracker demoscene music was good enough to be released on record. But it wasn’t. And the world of records was something completely different. Maybe it’s a bit like realizing that Michael Jackson was making his music on a Sega. C:
Mulder also recently put online the drumtrack of Amazon II – Booya (Open Your Mind), which was synchronized by click-track to a second Amiga running the rest of the audio. Amazon II consisted of Tony B and Aphrodite, who also made music as Urban Shakedown that also released records with Amiga jungle.
This is perhaps irrelevant for what we call chipmusic today. Aesthetically and culturally, it surely is. (I really like jungle though). But technically, it uses the same Amiga “soundchip” that 4-mat and the others utilized to make the sample-based music that was chipmusic in the 1990s. I’ve touched on this semi-absurdity before and by including Osdorp Posse in the timeline. Selecta.
CHIPFLIP 
December 10, 2009 at 12:05 am |
[…] Jungle on Chip Flip: https://chipflip.wordpress.com/2009/12/09/octamed-jungle-with-mulder/ 1 hr […]
December 10, 2009 at 12:56 am |
NICE!
although octamed would be my #1 choice for doing professional stuff on amiga, can’t even imagine programs like Bars’n’Pipes resulted in any cool releases, would be great if someone could prove me wrong though :)
only exception i know of is KCS which is extremely powerful, recent gossip says this tune as well as all old DJ Kristus beats are made using A500+KCS
December 10, 2009 at 9:01 am |
My associations go to cases where “real” musicians made “real” music for games, such as Nation X11 (Gods) and Bomb the Bass (Xenon II). Dunno if that ever happened before amiga/digitized music though? I guess there must be some examples of this for the C64 too (I don’t count that recent game soundtrack by for the.. uh.. that Super CPU shoot’em up, whatever it was called, by whoever it was who did that), but in those cases my bet would be that it sounds more like typical C64-music than any sort of “real” music genre?
Anders Carlsson har en enastående förmåga att göra skarpsynta analyser av en del av verkligheten som vi inte visste fanns! Hans bok om chipmusik kommer nog att öppna ögonen på många föräldrar som undrar varför telefonräkningarna varit så höga sedan det där “Modemet” plockades fram ur presentpappret på julafton.
December 10, 2009 at 2:49 pm |
@yonx: but kristus is a majorna man, right? meet him at mariaplan and get a briefcase of hot KCS-info!
@ftc: yeah, that’s a good phenomena! there are rumours about michael jackson’s involvement in sega games. but no, other than that i think it’s all sample-based stuff – usually involving bitmap brothers and rhythm king records, or coldut(‘s programmer). nation 12 had members from ultravox and bomb the bass!
Mats Andrén har en enastående förmåga att göra skarpsynta analyser av en del av verkligheten som vi ser hela tiden! Hans bok om gester kommer nog att öppna ögonen på många föräldrar som undrar varför telefonräkningarna varit så höga sedan det där “Gestikulerandet” plockades fram på julafton.
December 14, 2009 at 3:49 pm |
Back then when the whole jungle rage was on, I think the best way to chop up a sample like an amen break was a tracker, you would basically use sample offset commands, or separate the sample yourself!
We didn’t have all those tools we have today that make it easy to slice a break, and I guess most people were not able to buy an Akai MPC machine, and why do it if you could replicate similar functionality at home with your Amiga?
As far as I remember, most of the original Jungle heads were using Amigas for production. You linked to a video of Paradox before, where he was using Octamed in a liveset not so long ago, but nowadays he sequences a sampler with it.
I loved the Fatboy Slim remix video… 4 channel powa! But there’s not much tracker prowess going on :) Surely these mods are not related to chipmusic or chiptune save for the hardware they run on. It still might have some relation to limitations, but these samples used are pretty big, I bet.
June 23, 2010 at 4:20 pm |
[…] the previous clip came from the cool Chipflip blog I just found. They also did an article on Octamed Jungle which includes a youtube video posted by Mulder of the original drums for a classic Aphrodite tune […]
June 23, 2010 at 4:26 pm |
Great article, just reposted one of these videos on my blog. My site is about oldskool rave/jungle not amiga stuff specifically, but I love old MOD/MED files (never had an amiga but I used to mess about with scream tracker and FT2) so it’s great reading about these. Also great to read you got the lowdown from Mark N about exactly what Bloody Fist tracks were made with Amigas, and what Bogwoppa/Dance Bass tracks.
June 23, 2010 at 4:43 pm |
Thanks! There were some very talented breakbeat/jungle people in the demoscene in the 1990s (and, today aswell of course). Most of the stuff I remember is from after 1994 or so, like e.g. Mortimer Twang, Randall and Skope.
Yeah, I’ve spent quite a lot of time finding out about Amigas in breakcore/jungle. Still haven’t implemented the huge list I got from Patric Catani :) I’ll stay posted with your blog, seems real nice. And keep up the good music, btw!
July 30, 2010 at 7:32 pm
There’s a huge list?!? I really want to take a look at it! Post it up somewhere or something!
June 30, 2010 at 10:16 am |
Red Alert & Mike Slammer and Omni Trio also used Amiga trackers
June 30, 2010 at 10:39 am |
Okay, nice! Do you know if they used it as a MIDI-sequencer exclusively, or also the internal sound?
August 5, 2010 at 3:32 pm
Yeah definitely the internal sound, though I think Omni Trio probably would have switched to a hardware sampler relatively quickly – Vol 2 and earlier stuff sound quite rough, whereas vol 3 onwards seem a bit clearer.
October 9, 2010 at 2:05 am
yeah I could maybe imagine those records on PARLIAMENT RECORDS being made on an amiga but surely none of the moving shadow stuff really?!
December 18, 2010 at 12:13 pm |
I knew alot of the jungle scene was on AtariST’s + MIDI + samples, this is however, mindboggling
January 13, 2012 at 10:13 am |
[…] the 1990′s you could use chipmusic tools to make dance music hits. It was r rare to hear 8-bit songs in public before that. With a few […]
October 18, 2016 at 1:08 am |
Hey guys. This was a really good read and made me realise that there was so much more than I thought to octamed. I mean protracker aside there was quite a few UK underground bedroom producers back in the early 90’s banging out 8 bit anthems like nebula 2 classic confusion.
It still amazes me that I find more and more people and tracks that were produced this way. I recently discovered that all of ‘mole the dipper’ release’s were made using 2 amiga’s using octamed that were synced together. The used a lollipop to get them both to play at the same time. (Bit like some justice)
I’m off to Datastorm in Feb. Track on. I’m out.