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.

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.

Members of Mayday on Amiga

Mayday is one of the most famous rave festivals in Europe, and has been running since 1991. One of the founders was Westbam, who formed a duo called Members of Mayday together with Klaus Jankuhn. They played at every Mayday until 2014.

It turns out that one of their releases had an Amiga remix. An 8-bit four-channel Protracker remix, to be specific. It was made by Jan Pravda, who I recently got in touch with (and could after 7 years confirm which of his releases that were made on Amiga).

So yeah, enjoy Pravda’s Amiga remix of We Are Different by Members of Mayday. Bring on the crunch!

There’s many, many more connections between Amiga and rave culture. If that’s your cup of tea, I have a YouTube-playlist, and I’ve written about it several times in this blog. And the timeline is full of examples by now – just search for Amiga and drool at all those rave, gabber, and techno releases from the 90’s!

Top Amiga Music Countries

Hally recently announced his Japanese book All about Chiptune which looks like a really good treat. He has also started a new blog: VORCuration where he posted an interesting chart. He used data from Amiga Music Preservation (AMP) to show how many composers there are from each country.

Chart by Hally for VORCuration

Germany, Sweden, Finland, UK and USA are at the top of these statistics. Most tracker people are from Northern Europe so this makes sense, although USA’s position was surprisingly high. On the other hand, USA’s population is almost half of that of Europe, so…

But how would these numbers change if we take population size into consideration? Which countries have the largest share of Amiga composers? I divided the amount of composers with the country’s population, multiplied it with 1,000,000 to get rid of all the decimals, and got the list below. (In brackets is the current population size, taken from Wikipedia)

1. Finland, 271 (5,5m)
2. Sweden, 154 (10m)
3. Norway, 151 (5,3m)
4. Denmark, 99 (5,8m)
5. Hungary, 38 (9,8m)
6. The Netherlands, 37 (17,1m)
7. Poland, 23 (38,5m)
8. Germany, 23 (82,2m)
9. UK, 17 (65,1m)
10. Switzerland, 15 (8,4m)
11. Belgium, 13 (11,3m)
12. France, 12 (67m)
13. Czech Republic, 10 (10,6m)
14. Australia, 9 (24,4m)
15. Canada, 6 (35,2m)
16. Italy, 5 (60,7m)
17. Spain, 4 (46,4m)
18. USA, 3 (325m)

The Scandinavian countries are all in the top. They usually place high in scene statistics, but since they have such low populations, they really stand out from the rest here. I’m happy to see Finland as a clear “winner” because many of my favourite Amiga composers are from Finland. Suomi on maailman paras!

Update: Apparently Hally already had the same idea, so he made a diagram for that too:

I think these numbers make sense with a lot previous research, but we should also bare a few things in mind:

• We don’t know if the statistics show a composer’s country of birth, residence or citizenship. Or something else. About 17% of the composers in AMP are marked as unknown and not mapped to any specific country.
• As Hally noted, AMP is skewed for Europe and North America. I’d say it’s most likely missing plenty of Eastern European composers too.
• AMP focuses on the most popular 20 or so music formats for Amiga (and some PC). That means that hundreds of less popular formats are excluded, but I’m not sure how that affects these figures.
• We don’t know how many composers are excluded in AMP. There might also be some people who are in AMP more than once, because of using several pseudonyms.

On a slightly different note: I think there is a sort of snowball effect in action here. Wherever there is a strong scene, there is probably more preservation, so that more composers will be remembered. In other words: you’re much more likely to be remembered as an Amiga composer in Finland than in, say, France.

Anyway – cheers to Hally for compiling all this info from AMP! In his blog he posts the numbers for the countries with less than 100 composers too, if you’re interested.

—

Very btw: Qebec (sic) is listed as a country in AMP. Does that mean that AMP supports the separatist movement to make Quebec independent from Canada?

1989 Appearance of the Chip Music Term

Who first started to use the chipmusic term, when and where? I once wrote that 4mat’s first chip music disk from 1989 could be one of the oldest mentions of the term. But nobody knew where that music disk was. Until now. Exotica found it!

It’s a music demo called Chip Music, for the Amiga. Since the Amiga pretty much only plays samples, it doesn’t have a sound chip in the traditional sense. What people did was to synthesize sound in software, with SIDmon and other programs. As you can see in the screenshot, “playroutine by 4-mat” indicates that he made a custom player to make this chip music. In the scroll text of the release, it reads:

OK YOUR PROBABLY WONDERING WHAT CHIP MUSIC IS – UNLIKE SOUNDTRACKER WHERE ALL THE INSTRUMENTS ARE SAMPLES PLAYED BACK     CHIP MUSIC PROGRAMS THE SOUNDCHIP DIRECTLY.     NO NEED FOR SAMPLES !!!!!!

Sounds good. But the thing is that all of these songs were actually made in Soundtracker. Using samples. 4mat told me he changed the labels in the Soundtracker player, as a bit of a joke. Maybe it was a wink at the die hard future composers on the Amiga who used C64-like hypertrackers rather than the new era of soundtrackers. 4mat and other early pioneers proved that it was possible to make chiptunes in a soundtracker, as well.

This production hints that the word chip music was already in use at the time, and it seems to have meant “synthetic” Amiga music. It’s also symbolizes the change of the meaning of the term, to mostly refer to chip modules – sample-based soundtracker music – for the next decade or so. At least from what I’ve been able to find out, but would love to hear alternative facts on this!

Yeah, and then McLaren and the early 2000’s chipscene decided that real chipmusic was made on PSG soundchips and forgot all about the 1990’s chipscene. But that’s a different story.

Obvious disclaimer for the obvious disclaimees: This is not to say that chipmusic per se did not exist before 1988, only that the term wasn’t used yet.

Celebrating ST-01 and ST-02

1987 was a good year for amateur music makers. The E-mu SP-1200 sampler came out and was a crucial element in the golden age of hip-hop, because of its reasonable price, decent interface and the characteristic crispy 12-bit/26.04kHz audio quality.

In Europe, a different technology spawned a sample-based revolution in music: The Ultimate Soundtracker for the Amiga. Thousands of kids started to make music using the sounds from the two floppy disks that came with the program: ST-01 and ST-02. They were packed with samples from synthesizers like Roland D50 and Yamaha DX21, and were so heavily used that they became “the sound of the Amiga” for several years.

Soundtracker was later hacked and modified to be less buggy and more user-friendly, most noteably by Mahoney & Kaktus’ Noisetracker in 1989. The tracker standard was set free, and spawned a sort of remix culture where open source mod-files were spread around the world for free. This was a thriving movement through the 1990’s and beyond, leaking into electronic genres such as gabber/breakcore, IDM, UK hardcore/drum n’ bass, and so on.

Meanwhile hip-hop had a different development since it relied on record labels to release music. It was vulnerable to copyright mongers and money makers who crippled the use of samples, and today you need serious money to sample famous recordings. The “tracker scenes” never had problems like that since it used its own distribution channels, and was never as $-relevant as hip-hop. Pretty much everything was free.

ST-FM is a celebration of this culture, and the original sounds of the ST-01 and ST-02. I invited old legends and fresh talents to make new songs based (to some extent) on the original ST-sounds. It comes as an online music disk (“the computer equivalent of an album“) and as a cassette available through Bandcamp.

ST-FM includes early pioneers (4mat, TDK, Enzo Cage, Omri Suleiman) and younger talents (Linde, Firedrill, Svetlana), modern performers and sceners (Vim, Tero, Ingemar, Zabutom, Qwan, me), and two italo disco Amiga heroes (Dr. Vector, Balboa).

It’s released on protoDATA, a new sublabel to Data Airlines, run by me and Dubmood. You can expect more juicy releases in the future, be sure of that.

Can’t get enough of the sounds of ST-01 and ST-02?

Here’s some weird suggestions:

Listen to songs by Karsten Obarski, who made The Ultimate Soundtracker and ST-01 and ST-02.

Soundtracker-songs at Modland (not necessarily using ST-01 and ST-02)

Download wav-versions of the samples at archive.org (but do read the comment first) or use Chipslapper or Chipsounds in a modern DAW.

Mazemod – the online Amiga radio with a careful selection that includes some ST-smelling tracks.

Some 90’s eurodisco reminds me of early tracker aesthetics, like Getaway by Maxx.

The soundtrack to Liquid Sky was made with the Fairlight CMI, and sometimes sound like dorky Soundtracker experiments.

I once managed to get some ST-sounds into an indie movie soundtrack. Check the end credits in ANGRY.

This Atari ST-game with MIDI weirdly has some ST-vibes.

Cartridge Music – the Best of Two Worlds?

Releasing music on a cartridge that needs an old 8-bit platform to work, might seem like the worst way of releasing music today. But if you think about it a bit more…. A cartridge takes the best parts of the software-world and the hardware-world: You get a good-looking physical object, and it doesn’t have to contain only static recordings that are the same forever and ever.

The first cartridge release I heard about was Vegavox, a NES-cartridge made by Alex Mauer in 2007 with a basic interface to select songs. The follow-up, Vegavox II (below) was more refined with custom moving graphics for each song.

This looks similar to music videos, but under the hood it’s actually quite different. A video is a recording – a stream that plays from A to B the same way every time. Vegavox II on the other hand, is code and instructions that requires a very specific platform for playback. It’s more like a theater than a movie. Potentially, the user/viewer can ruin the whole thing by interrupting and destroying.

In the 1960’s this was a politically fueled idea that became prevalent in the computer arts to come. The power of the user. Today there are of course countless apps, games and sites with playful audiovisual interaction. But there’s not a whole lot of musical apps and situations where the composer really tries to give the user power over their own composition. Ah, the neurotic narcissism of music folks, eh? ^__^

+++

In the mid-1980’s, people started to rip game music and make compilations for the user to choose songs and trigger sound effects. The teenagers in the burgeoning demoscene started to make their own music, and by 1991 the music disk was an established format with quality releases such as Bruno’s Box 3, Crystal Symphonies and His Master’s Noise and plenty of gritty hip house megamix type of things, like Tekkno Bert.

These music disks normally pretended to be recorded music, even if it wasn’t. Under the hood there were notes and instruments being played live by software/hardware. You can see it in The Top Boys’ music disk above, where the notes are “played” on the keyboard. Theoretically the user could change each and every note, unlike a video where you can’t change the music at all. Music disks normally didn’t allow that, but commercial releases like the Delta Loader and To be on Top did.

While musical interaction almost seemed (and seems) a bit sinful to the genius music brain, visual interaction was (and is) more common. Back in the 1980’s there was 8-bit generative visuals like Jeff Minter’s Psychedelia (and other acid-ish stuff hm) that taps into earlier things like Atari’s Video Synthesizer.

Returning to the topic of cartridges and jumping ahead to 2016, RIKI released the Famicom-cartridge 8bit Music Power with music by eg Hally and Saitone. The user could interact with the music aswell as play games, and there were visualizers for the music. It’s like a mixture of a music disk and interactive music games.

Musical user interaction is still a rather unexplored field. Perhaps the user can mute instruments (8bit music power), move back and forth through a timeline (jazz.computer, dynamic game music) or trigger sounds/visuals in a game/composer environment (Playground). One recent interesting example is Yaxu’s Spicule, where the user can change the algorithms that compose the music in realtime.

A while back, Ray Manta at DataDoor came up with the idea to make a C64-cartridge and continue this exploration. So me, 4mat and iLKke got to work (and also did this). DUBCRT is our attempt to merge ideas from these different eras. There’s some music disk vibes to it, but in a kind of abstract and 1960’s modernist way. For each track there is a visualizer that spits out PETSCII-graphics, based on the music that is played.

The interaction is not all rationally easy to understand, but you can change the parameters of the visuals and (in a hidden part) change which audio sequences are played for each voice. You can also superimpose audio waveforms onto them, which means that you can pretty much ruin the song completely. A big plus! Nobody’s in charge. You can hear an example in Tim Koch’s remix in the album-release on Bandcamp.

All of this fits in 64 kilobytes, which means less than 8 kilobyte per song/visual. 4mat is known to only need 23 bytes to make good C64-stuff, and I tried to optimize my songs to fit aswell. All of ilKke’s graphics are in PETSCII, which also helped to keep the filesize down.

Here’s hoping to more absurd musical power interactions in the future! And since DUBCRT sold out in three hours, it actually seems like more people see this is as the best of two worlds. He he he…

Black Dog, Swedish House Mafia, Anthony Rother – New Old Sceners!

After I published the rough blog post draft Famous People who Came From the Scene I received hundreds of suggestions of sceners who moved on to the music charts, the cinema, the gaming industry, and so on. The “success stories”. A bit overwhelming, and I had to try to decide which were relevant to include or not. I didn’t have time to do a thorough job, unfortunately.

But I learned a lot of new things! The Finnish games industry seems to be even more riddled with ex-sceners than Sweden is. I was also reminded that the softsynth company AudioRealism is from an Atari-scener. And that several sceners started to make 3D graphics and visual effects for Hollywood-style movies.

What I found even more interesting is that Anthony Rother, one of the bigger names in European “oldschool electro” scene especially 15 years ago, used to be in the C64-scene as Anthony R/Online. He didn’t release much it seems – there is just one song on CSDb – but he went to the legendary Venlo party in the Netherlands, December 1988. Although he never got there. He was stopped at the border because his passport was in bad shape. So Anthony and his group mates in Online ended up hanging around in Heinsberg until the discotheque opened as Paradroid put it. Thanks to Tero for digging up this information. And here is Tero’s C64 signed by Anthony, btw:

Other sceners chose the mainstream, or eurodisco specifically. In Finland, Captain/Frantic was involved in the euro disco group Dance Nation (check this video!) and he probably even made some Smurf eurodisco. Thomas Detert, a famous name in C64-music, also made eurodisco in Activate (see video below).

A related genre to eurodisco, progressive trance (oops, dodging glow sticks from angry trancers once again), also has some big acts with scene backgrounds: Infected Mushroom and Logic Bomb. And in the real modern version of eurodisco, EDM, there is also some scene influence. Axwell of Swedish House Mafia used to make Amiga music as Quazar.

But what made me most happy to find, thanks to Tim Koch, was the old Amiga productions of Black Dog Productions. The two original members (now active as Plaid) made a few mysterious yet harmless Amiga “demos” before they pioneered the early 1990’s “intelligent techno” that led to IDM.

Fractal Factory #1 from 1990 (above) is way more hip hop inspired than most scene works at the time. Loopy and “trancey”, the rhythmic and harmonic approach has many similarities to their seminal Warp-album Bytes from 1993.

The Pharaoh amiga demo (above) is more rave-culture oriented. The music has these loopy, mysterious and monotonous beats and the visuals have.. well.. loopy, mysterious and monotonous animations. :)

They used a very odd music software. The comments on the Pharaoh-video (recommended reading) leads to this video of the Pharaoh-song playing in a tracker called MultiMedia Sound. This seems to be one of the least popular Amiga music programs ever, judging from SOAMC. To be fair though, there are hundreds of songs made in its predecessor, SoundFX.

Black Dog released more Amiga-stuff. Fractal Factory #2 was on a CU Amiga disk, for example. Interesting to note is that they released it in the public domain and not in the scene. While that might seem nitpicky, these were two culturally separated fields at the time. For sceners, the public domain was lame. You wouldn’t want to be caught dialling into a BBS full of PD-lamers! Although PD-people watched and distributed demos, afaik there was some resentment towards the cracker-parts of the scene. This distinction can still be seen today, for example in arguments about whether Compunet-productions should be on CSDb or not.

Black Dog had their own BBS called Black Dog Towers. I can’t find much info about it on the web, but I remember reading a log from a local trader who called the BBS using a Calling Card (w0w). He got to chat with Ken Downie who made some a snarky remark about the trader’s handle. Fair enough perhaps, becase he used the handle aPH3X tW1Nn. :)

Right, enough for now. Feel free to explore the list of “famous” sceners and add your suggestions to this neverending project.

 

Cyber Punk Rock and Lucifer, 1977 & 1994

In the 00’s, people liked to compare chipmusic with punk. No one more than Malcolm McLaren, who was the manager for Sex Pistols when they released their first album in 1977. That same year, Duncan Lewis Jowitt formed his first punk band and played in various constellations until 1994. That’s when he discovered the Amiga and became Lucifer.

His first release was Cyber Punk Rock. It was a bootable floppy with two Ramones-covers. The originals didn’t have much vocals, so Lucifer was able to fit two songs with vocals on one 880kb floppy disk. The second song is also available on YouTube. Cyber Punk Rock Volume 2 came out later in 1994 and was a double-floppy release with four Ramones covers and one original. CU Amiga wrote: That’s quite cool. The music’s not that good but it’s a nice idea. You could order the floppies for £2,75 from Scribble PD. Public Domain Punk Rock!

Well, I like it. And I was quite happy that his four floppy releases 94-95 were recently re-issued as MP3-downloads: Cyber Punk and Cyber Zone. Highly recommended! The music was made in OctaMED. Like most other people who made Amiga music, he ripped sounds from other Amiga songs. So his music has traces from both scene music and game music. It sounds like he used a guitar sample from Lotus Turbo Esprit Challenge, for example.

Vocal Amiga rock music had been around atleast since 1989 in games, demos and as standalone songs. But this was something pretty different. It was executable music not aimed at the scene, not aimed at the 1990’s multimedia bubble, and not aimed at some sort of “music industry”. Or the punk scene. It’s actually not easy to say who this was made for. Which makes it even better! Anyway, here are some examples of vocal Amiga rock from 1989-1994:

^ Minä Omistan by Groo (April 1994). Hard and odd. 455kb.

^ Anarchy in the UK by Bannasoft/Melon Dezign (1993). Rocky and lo-fi. 295kb.

^ Fuck the Norm by Chromag (1993). Rage Against the Machine-y. 276kb.

^ Jumping Jackson (1990). Curiously soft rock.

^ Trash-Collector by Walkman (1990). Great lyrics! Released in the demo Sportmad by Complex. 88kb.

^ Slemmig Torsk by The Lynx Crew (1989). Samples the full song “En slemmig torsk” by the classical swedish punk band KSMB.

Bonus: Sonic Youth’s Youth Against Fascism that my neighbours made in 1993 to hate on a local demo group.

More linkage:

• About chip rock in general
• The rocky part of RSI Megademo
• Lotus Turbo Esprit Challenge
• Supercars II
• Chuck Rock