guest of the project, "carte blanche", Guillaume Richard have been invited to give his personal view about the actual history and relationship between music and home computers ::
" noCo...mmencement : demoscene
Once upon a time, there was no Internet.
No really, I'm being very serious. I'm talking about the 80s.
There even was a time where cat pictures weren't necessarily captioned, where computer were funny-looking machines and video-games really were inventive and challenging.
During this time, the few lucky enough to have a computer at home were often friends of each others at school and called "nerds" by the others who weren't really understanding the whole thing about swapping floppies instead of caring about "normal social interactions".
And sometimes, when they were not swapping videogames, they were swapping demos!
To make it short, demos are executable animations.
It's calculated real-time, like a videogame but you can't really interact with it… you just sit in front of your screen and watch. Eventually, you'll wave your arms and even dance if you really enjoy the music but anyway, people will never understand why you just love watching these "plasma stuff" and "moving typos".
As I've been saying, there was no internet. Some people were starting to make graphism, illustrations and music on their computers and what was the best way to show your style?
Yeah, I guess you get it: Get a coder, a graphician and finally, a musician, make a production and meet at a demoparty!
There were sceners in many countries of Europe, on many different platforms… c64, amiga, Atari ST, Amstrad CPC to name a few.
Back in this time, making music on computers wasn't as common as nowadays since having your own home-studio was expensive. Still, there were tiny applications named "soundtrackers" that would allow you to create tunes with only a computer and nothing else aside. On some platforms, you would have to create your sounds using the sound chip of the computer and on some others, you would only load samples that you could finally rip from other "soundtracked" music. In any cases, you would just enter notes on rows and here we go, you made your first catchy (or not) tune!
People using soundtrackers were called trackers (yeah, I know, it's a bit messy) and finally, some of these guys became famous for decades amongst other trackers.
Some even worked and are still working for videogame companies, some others joined labels and some decided to enjoy their life another way… sadly. " ...
01/03 - to be continued
>> 02/03 the tracker scene
actor involved in recent developments of online music, Guillaume Richard, aka Kaneel, is a musician and a label coordinator.
:: mynameiskaneel
:: petite&jolie
:: the questionnaire
:: discogs
