12.
Listen carefully
Music has always been one of my escape routes.
We lived in a house where there was always a record or the radio
playing. While I had precious little talent at producing a racket
of my own the brother seemed to be able to turn his hand to any
instrument he could get hold of. By the time we moved up to Felixstowe
he was packing drums, keyboards and a guitar or two.
We’d experimented with music on the speccy,
but I’ll admit that mostly music and Spectrum didn't go
well together. Some of the tunes appearing in later games were
truly astounding though. Step forward Tim Follin for work on titles
such as Vectron and Agent X. So we had listened in awe, dabbled
with a SpecDrum and even looked in to the costs of a MIDI interface,
but that was about as far as it went.
I had a light-pen for my Amstrad, it
was rubbish
Then, sometime while I was away at College the
brother got bitten by the computer music bug properly. He had
already spent some serious time with the ST, delving in Public
Domain libraries to find ways of getting his ideas out there when
along came a disc from Sweden. Some bunch of hackers had been
pushing back the boundaries of what they could get the hardware
to do. I'd not come across the demo scene before, and when I popped
home for a weekend I was frankly flabbergasted by what they were
getting out of the ST. OK, so they had the misfortune to name
themselves the Care Bears but other than that there was not a
foot put wrong. Swirly colours, smooth scrolling, stupid messages
full of in-jokes; it was all there. Along with music that made
everything else I'd heard the Atari make seem tame. I wanted to
know more. So did the brother.
By the time I came home for the 1991 Easter
holiday he had some answers. And he had a sampler for the ST too.
As well as a bunch of tracker programmes and he was using them
well. Inspiration flowed like oil. My record collection was fair
game for snippets of speech, isolated instruments and the like.
Anything he could use to make his tunes sound a bit different
from the ones that had flooded in from magazine cover discs and
heaps of PD modules. I started off just listening to the tunes
he'd obtained and thinking how different a lot of them were from
what I had on the shelves across the landing. If nothing else
I thank all those module creators out there for breaking down
the final barriers in my head that were saying good music needed
guitars. I'd been wavering for some time on that front, but now
I was ready for an electronic invasion of my headspace.
The final term of the second year flowed by
and before I knew it I was looking in dismay at the QL brought
home by the Dad, researching my dissertation, planning the comeback
of the original Spectrum to get me through the final year and
also selling my soul to Argos for hard cash.
The other side of Felixstowe is much
nicer
By the time I'd got the QL shipped safely back
to whence it came, I'd done all my interviews of people at the
docks, ploughed through a bunch of books on the history of Felixstowe
and its port and also beaten my longstanding score on Lunar Jetman.
As mentioned last time, I had discovered the joys of IK+ on the
ST, and unless I am very much mistaken (I could be, but I'm buggered
if I'm going to look the dates up) some game called Llamatron
also came along that summer and turned things upside down by offering
some superb two-player co-operation. What I can't recall now,
12 years on, is how I managed to fit any of that in to the all
too brief summer holiday period. I was working full time stacking
catalogues, selling stuff and counting stock. I know I was, I
have the payslips filed away somewhere to prove it.
Because, despite the work I must have done to
earn the amount of cash I funded my lavish third year student
lifestyle with, despite the games I know we played, despite writing
numerous letters keeping in touch with college friends, despite
working my way through the latest works of William Gibson, David
Wingrove, Melanie Rawn and others what I can remember most about
the summer of 1991 is this:
Sitting on the sofabed that lived in our study/guest
room while the brother made music on the ST.
We argued about what samples to use, I suggested
different arrangements for the patterns and textures that went
in to the tunes. I even named some of them; although all the hard
work and inspiration was his. I know why this has remained fresh
in the head; it’s because of a TDK C60 known as "Cellular
Automata" by an artist calling himself Protozoa: my brother
and me.
One of my favorite retro shots in all
of WotR
We sampled Kennedy talking about the moon race
for "Moonshot", Punt & Dennis found their way into
"Oddbeat" along with a chicken. Semi-ambient epic "Groove
Two" featured Steve Hillage, The Prisoner, The Pretty Things,
The Orb and others. "Nexus 6" drew on the Blade Runner
soundtrack, and elsewhere in that hour of music were found bits
from the Wonder Stuff, the Monkees and the Thompson Twins. We
even managed to find a way of squeezing dodgy thrash metal group
Slammer in to a send up of Acid house known predictably as "Alkali".
The tape went with me when I finally returned
for the final year of College. It followed me in my Walkman when
I graduated, came home to the seaside and I found myself walking
with it to work at Argos again. It played in the car when I moved
stores to Ipswich. There was no leaving it behind a couple of
years later when I moved in with the future MrsB and even last
year it reared its head again for another listen.
It doesn't get played any more though. I found
a tracker player for the PC and got the brother to dig up the
old files instead. So now Cellular Automata the extended version
plays when I feel like music while I type. Listen carefully and
you might hear it too...
*coming soon - the music itself!
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