Warning - Most of this has been freestyled more or less out of this uneducated short-circuiting dome, it may contain some inaccuracies but that is hardly the point
In the mid 80s apparently personal computers infiltrated the captive minds of everyday consumers through the West, within this new generation of PC they contained many innovations, most importantly they became the first computers to introduce a generation to computer based music production. In 1987 a team of German programmer/nerds would create Ultimate Sound Tracker, the first music production Tracker.
Initially used for video game soundtracks to make most of the lite and humble file sizes, the Tracker would become an under appreciated and eventually, more or less forgotten, yet invaluable development in music production. I’d argue, a piece of software uniquely significant in the progression of electronic music.
By the 90s Trackers would grow and develop into almighty 4 channel brains of the studio, sequencers with midi capabilities and sometimes machines with the ability to hold 8 bit samples to be loaded and triggered too. With the spirit of music producers as sound scientists at the frontier, they were more than enough to be full fledged workhorses for music production.
The likes of OctaMED, Fast Tracker II, Impulse Tracker, Jeskola Buzz set the standard for Trackers through the 90s before Renoise took the low poly torch and marched the niche production tools forward to a the new generation of Tracker. Nowadays we even have hardware Trackers to appease the dorks of old (and new) like the Polyend (see below video), Dirtywave or Nerdsynth.
Trackers would inspire some of the greatest video game music and unique, manic and droll dance music birthed through 90s to the dot com era to today’s uncertain, flailing and possibly pathetic year, 2022.
-Cop Killer- The Maus all time classic borrowed many elements from the classic Skaven (of Future Crew) tune “Crystal Dragon”
The vertical timeline glides over a column of numbers and letters like a low poly Playstation 1 waterfall, command based fx and shortcuts that make you feel like a faux coder and hexadecimal counting system gives off an initially intimidating impression, but once you crack the code and realise how simple and effective a tool it is, you will find a liberating and intuitive way to make your stylistic noise of choice .
I can’t be bothered running over a detailed history because it is long and far more eloquently documented online but I briefly want to butcher history with a background of the early days of Demoscene.
Picture It
Fluorescent office light harshly disperses across the small shared space filled with CRT monitors and cables, you can hear the fans of the computers whirring in overdrive as they struggle to keep the computer cool. Pizza boxes are stacked up, pots of coffee and empty soft drink cans litter and loiter across the stuffy room like the inhabitants. Frenzied electronic music is being made one of the greased up computers locked and loaded with a 4 channel Sound Blaster with its overlord hunched over the keyboard in a trance. They sit punching in number after number into a vertical sequencer which is set to flow at terminal velocity.
Across Europe and famously Scandinavia, teams - small businesses - of coders were busy at work refining their AV works combining code, art, music. Not only are they producing the works of music and art but they are coding or modifying many of the programs they use to make the work. They enjoy breaks from their piety with cracked and cracking of video games. The demo’s are executable files, ones they would often place as add-ons within games once they have removed the games copy protection. The demo’s digital graffiti would generate and play in real time.
They refer to each other with pseudonyms and distribute their work often through Golden Age bulletin boards, competing in a digital war against other manufacturers of Demo’s. To the outside it would appear the coders were a Corporation producing the work with their logo’s and stiff presence but it were often a humorous group of savvy, young anorak pirates. Bizarrely it turns out some of the more prolific groups of the community were a hermit team of one posing as a wider Corporation, producing code, images and music of great complexity alone.
The digital community would self assemble every so often irl to showcase their latest bits of software, art and music in COMPETITION!
Less of a battle but more a gathering of OG computer tans and those experienced with LAN’s, these Demosceners would battle it out (so to speak) to see who was most proficient in technical ability and artistry, they would push the computer, music and moving images to its limit in a battle for digital-age supremacy. Semi-sophisticated but ambitious works of Rave music and low poly art would decorate the screens at these conventions across many levels of competition, this tradition is still somewhat kept alive.
I’ve always thought games looked a lot better when they looked worse. Maybe its like reading, you fill in the blanks inside and with this, the world infects your mind like a virus or better yet a cancer, slowing killing your mind and itself with it.
To be labeled Elite was the high honour bestowed upon thy dorks, I say this with endearment as without knowing it at the time, these crews were paving part of the wide reaching path the electronic musician and god forsaken “DJ” would slosh down in future times, seeing double after a night of submarine ketamine and a so called gig, one eye closing from time to time to stabilise its weary night-vision, many of these hikers have forgotten or dismissed those who had paved this way for them to wander over - empty inside, many of them have walked the wrong way altogether.
July 1992, Future Crew released their demo ‘Unreal’ which won the MEGA-Leif Convention held in Sweden. In 1993 they would release the iconic ‘Second Reality” demo which can be seen below.
Honestly contains better visual fx and design than the fried digitally homogenised (adj) you see at ‘doofs’. IMO the music is better too, psytrance is generally wack, modern psy is some of the worst music you will come across.
I would say these coders were not necessarily concerned with making a soundtrack for the future, they were concerned with utilising the technology of the time to stretch it to is outer most limit.
Despite the intense competition and pseudo professionalism they projected, the scene openly shared software and their own MOD files which can still be found and downloaded in the original and vast archives online which resemble the archives of a forgotten civilisation, maybe catacombs in more appropriate. Many early scene members have had careers in video game music composition, dance music, design, making games and CPU Tek.
The old Demoscene communities offer a glimpse into a unique and often overlooked slice of the electronic music history-cake, my intro here is hardly even that but it may open the door to some new music (and digital art) for you, there is a lot to be found out there in the depths.
The music nerds of today with Abletown, infinite channels of audio and midi and endless minute hardware reissues owe something to these creators. The spirit of creation, competition and community is significant and something I wish were documented in higher detail than it is, you can find a few docos and video essays on the tube which are quite cool plus many nuggets of information, original music and history through forums and dusty old websites still online.
I suspect it may not have been a glorious and aesthetic time to document by a wider industry like some communities were, it’s also possible they were standoff-ish people too busy working and did not care for something like this. Nevertheless, the music industry is grotesquely superficial and in every direction you will find deep neurotic narcissism.
Digging into the music to come of this scene you will find albums of bizarre washes of 8 bit ambient white noise, heroic rave epics, space westerns, orchestral goblin themes, oceans of alchemy, prosthetic memories and dank Medieval jams.
This is just one of the communities who used Trackers, I’ve not touched on Gabber/speedcore, breakcore, (idm), chiptune community or video game music which utilised Trackers with the great Yamaha YM2612 sound chip to make many classic game soundtracks.
The Tracker style would spawn new developments in music but my interest is mainly with producers who made hardcore & jungle in the early to mid 90s.
From Beyond
Through electronic music of the early 90s you will find producers who used Trackers and Samplers to make noise and still, you can find producers who keep this dusty tradition alive. Learning to work in this way was until recently largely up to trial and error if you didn’t have some sort of mentor, most of what you could find online was vague or esoteric advice within old forum posts if you can dig through the nostalgia and petty arguments to find it, on top of this finding the right old computer is very difficult. I get the feeling a lot of these producers and online commenters who knew what they were doing were holding the secrets close (don’t do this).
As of late this has started to change with an assembly of online producers who use Trackers openly and they share their raw tracks and crusty setups on youtube.
They share their take on jungle in video form all made with faithful re-creations (or at times straight original setups) of studios of the era. I am a sucker for youtube videos of Amiga’s with OctaMED, Romplers, Rack Samplers showcasing experiments and projects of sleek hardcore Jungle, almost daily they rattle my neighbours downstairs.
Phineus II x XSM (Xtra Spicy Mikey)
Bizzy B, vinyljunkie07, Amiga Junglism, Si Goes Retro, N4 Records, 12 Bit Jungle Out There are just a few of many channels run by beautiful tragic’s who have goldmine youtube channels of productions, mixes, tutorials and anecdotes about music, 90s hardware and the parts of music they appear single mindedly obsess over, new channels pop up each month.
The Trackers role in Jungle is a curiosity to my lowIQ mind. Many of the most interesting Jungle records were made with a Tracker sequencer, sampler + sample CDs and a couple of cheap synths. The cheap-ish nature of the setup opened the door to many producers in the early to mid 90s either at home or in shared studios and as a result there was a boom in wild aural productions being unleashed to hunt down unsuspecting prey.
Despite only having 4 channels in an OctaMED, producers, in the spirit of Hardcore and Jungle, pushed these sequencers to the limit and through portals into new worlds. They made the hyperactive soundtracks to an exciting digital age (before it all went surveillance on us). It’s a music that pulls samples from the archives of reggae and dub, soul and funk, techno, post punk, hiphop, jazz and at times straight off of movies or television.
The sound was very much a homage to the music the creators grew up with but there was an equally competitive train-spotting nature to it for those who liked to dig deep for new breaks and samples to flex outside the commercially available or classic known samples. In a lucrative era when you could sell numbers of records to go beyond making your money back, many studios emerged which were run by labels and engineers who all promoted their own unique take on the sound.
They would bring everything they were into outside the genre to the style of jungle they produced, as you should.
I’ve heard greats myths of Omni Trio hooking up 2 PCs to get 8 channels of OctaMED (tho this was pre sync so they had to start at the same time manually) and studios going through all night marathon chemically fuelled benders to make bigger, badder, weirder trax. Stories of computers (often without an undo), crashing, forcing producers to resequence their song to meet tight deadlines, rival DJs going to the end of the earth or deep into enemy territory to seek out unknown tunes they were tipped off about and the furious races make the best dubplates or VIP mixes to play that week on the air and in the club.
Not all but many producers had little understanding of music theory but you often didn’t need this if you were a producer of this computerised future music, the ghosts of Dada and no-wave watch over with jealousy. You needed an interesting idea, the ability to use a computer and if anything, access to records to sample from - maybe a contact to buy the good sample CDs and an eye and ear for structure.
The fast-action sequencing ability of a Tracker lends itself to programming manic, holy un-human/inhumane drums which is an iconic jungle characteristic when slapped over the sound design from misused/abused Rack mounted samplers and their sample processors, slide in glossy digital synths and a few fx and you are halfway there. Metallic time-stretching and 12 bit sampler aliasing which really shines through when pitching a sample either direction in octaves is a religion for some depraved souls who enjoy this psychotic hunt and/or paranoia of being hunted.
These disturbed tracks gifted the world music which was mixed and mastered in a unique way, often to the taste of the producer in control, the soul sucking standardisation of mixdowns, loudness war and over-engineering was yet to come, many producers only knew how to do it they way they had figured out largely through trail and error, listen to some older Dillinja and you will hear a madman who seemly demanded the mastering and cutting engineers break rank and push their high-end equipment into overdriven territory, I would have loved to see their faces.
Parallel to Tracker of the 90s, what would become traditional DAW’s such as Cubase were developing and being adopted by producers across the world, what we now know as the regular computer based sequencers grew in popularity possibly due to its open and visual timeline which rolls left to right in time, this came about with growing midi technology so you could sequence, all on one screen, many more channels than the 4 of OctaMED, it makes sense why you’d use a DAW over these stone age trackers.
Still many producers I admire use Trackers to make music : Phineus II, Paradox, Venetian Snares, D’eon, Legowelt, ASC, Rolando Simmons, N4 Records/Pete Cannon, Bogdan Raczynski + others many I enjoy speculating on. Modern Trackers like Renoise are incredibly functional, lightweight and modern DAWs which can do more or less as much as any laggy CPU intensive DAW (+ more).
"I love music by people who dont know wtf they are doing…its the best…why i liked certain periods of jungle so much before they learned how to use machines properly.
Doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy music made by wise people but I think your more likely to learn something ‘new’ by someone who doesnt know anything as opposed to someone who has been doing it their whole life."
Don’t question why the short circuiting wiring of my brain loves to know the background of the things I engage with but I’d encourage anyone interested in using a tracker to read about the history of these things because you will find a world of music tucked away like an old scroll via MOD file, its waiting to be loaded up to the free player you downloaded which has not had support for a decade or more, the files will likely not work properly but you tried, you can probably just watch them being played on youtube.
Make music with the blind spirit and divine carelessness of these often not-so-musical digital hero’s. Absorb the past before unplugging its data from your mind, let it settle into your subconscious and make music from the endless fire and intuition you were gifted with as an ape with shoes.
I was going to make a Renoise tutorial on how I chop Breaks but thought a tiny peak into the world of Trackers as I understand them would be a good starter, it got out of hand.
You can download the free demo version of RENOISE here which lets you play but not bounce however, the full license for the software is about $115 AUD, not bad for one of the best sequencers ever created!
Coming soon will be a dive into how I chop my drums in Renoise which I will put online with a new Jungle EP