Music Was My First Love by Ghandy/Jurassic Pack Staff

...and it won't be my last. In this fairly private and prolly boring article I'll try to report you which sort of music I heard first as a teenager. I'll try to explain which role music plays in my life, and what the heck this might have in common with computer generated tunes. You need some fastfood while you listen to the fabulous tracks of this musicdisk? Well, in that case - let us not waste any more time and let's get started.

The age difference between my brothers and me is quite big. My oldest brother is twenty-one years older than I am. Around 2003 he went into early retirement and is actually 62 while I'm 41 years old. So, when I was born, he had already left our house for the german Bundeswehr (German Federal Armed Forces) in order to serve his military service. That way he could not affect me with his musical taste. The other one is after all 14 years older and liked to listen to airs from "Simon and Garfunkel". He's also been a quite brilliant guitar player, I heard him often in our house or garden playing a solo or developing own variations of wellknown songs on his acoustic guitar. Unfortunately he later gave up envolving as guitar player in order to concentrate on his studies. So you might bet which sort of music I heard when I was a kid on my own, of course it was "Simon and Garfunkel". My brother also owned a real classical tape recorder from UHER. Not that minimalistic stuff we are nowadays used to. It was quite huge and its tapes were fat and round, The machine moreover looked like a backup station for a very old fashioned computer out of the 80s and not like a device for recording and listening to music.



Where it all began

But back to myself. The first single I've ever bought was "Waterloo" from the swedish group "ABBA". I saw them on TV while they were winning the Eurovision song contest and was totally amazed. The song tells the story of the Battle of Waterloo, where Napoleon Bonaparte and his army was beaten. I loved the lovely voices of Agnetha Fältskog and "Frida" Lyngstad and also the whole live performance on stage. Six years later I bought my first album of ABBA "Super Trouper" and began collecting everything what they had released in the meantime. One of my alltime favourites was the pure instrumental song "Arrival". In 1980 Mike Oldfield made a great cover-version of the song. Both, the single of "Mike Oldfield" and the album had a helicopter on their cover, maybe you have already seen them somewhere. By the way, Oldfield leads us into the right direction. This musician being able to play various different instruments was also one of my favourite artist when I was young and he still is. Listening to what was hot in the charts was one thing. Of course when we were 16, we were all hungry for the next trend, the next good song to cross our lines. But what's happening with the same track after a year decayed? You cannot listen to the same music out of the usual charts very often. It doesn't smell good if it's not fresh anymore. But you can smoothly listen to such instrumental music such as those tunes from "Tangerine Dream", the "Alan Parsons Project", "Vangelis", "Jean Michel Jarre" or "Mike Oldfield". Such stuff is simply agelessly, it never gets out of style. That's at least my humble opinion.

Music for me is feed for my brain, a navigation to direct my mood. When I have the feeling that I need some positive stimulation, I listen to positive songs. The american band "Huey Lewis and the News" is a good example. They have published that sort of music that commands your brain: Come on, feel good! In case I want to feel melancholy or enraged, I listen to something else. I adore "Alanis Morissette" for her song "You oughta know" from her album "Jagged Little Pill". It tells a story about a woman being angry and depressed to see how happy her former boyfriend is with his new woman. She desires to let him know, what mess he left behind him when he went away. In her daydream she asks him "Is she perverted like me", "Are you thinking of me when you fuck her" ?? That's great stuff. Awesome when I want to become in rage. Alanis Morissette is such a petite woman, but very energetic. "You oughta know" was my daily bread after a former girlfriend of me decided to leave me in 2003. She also prefered to be fucked by somebody else, which I could not understand. That questions from Alanis could have been my questions. But finally I had to confess she was a liar. I was part of a sort of test run, if you can call it that way.

Another good example is the german composer Herbert Grönemeyer. His song "Der Weg" from 2002 is perfect for becoming sad. Grönemeyer sings of the death of his brother and his woman. His woman Anna died only two days after his brother passed away. "Der Weg" (the way) is one of the most authentic and agitating songs I have ever heard. I'm sure you do it in the same way - your vibe is fuelled with the adequate music, your vibe can be subdued as well. Some need Rock'n Roll, others Metal, Techno, Hip Hop. The taste is as different as the people itself are. A further good exemplar for funereal music is the song "A day in the life" from "The Beatles".



Scene related music

In case you speak of computer music. Some years ago I often listened to crazy chiptunes from composers such as 911, Dreamer and Heatbeat on my Amiga. The demo tunes from Clawz for productions of Bomb or Complex were quite well, but I could now numerate so many people who have done great music. In this coherence I'd like to recommend you to buy the 4 CD-ROM-Set "Mods Anthology", which was once compiled by the crazy music freak and former Scener called Gryzor. Sadly I have never seen a second part of this compilation, but I know Gryzor was working on it.

Once I saw Dreamer at the "Somewhere In Holland II" party in the middle of the 90s. He ran around there with shoes made of pink plush and was busy telling everybody who he was and that he thought he would have been the best musician in the world. An interesting encounter. Sting of Alcatraz, Exon and me heard a lot from him that we could smile about. Later I concentrated mostly on untroubled music and such 4-channel tunes, that guaranteed an easy listening. You don't want any disturbing music, while you try to concentrate on reading a diskmag. In contrast to a demotune the music plays its role in the background.



Netlabels, Audio-CDs and Internet radio

Maybe that's the reason why I was devoted so much to the music of the netlabel Tokyo Dawn Records. Most of their tunes would have fit perfectly into a modern, well done diskmagazine. Many netlabels also publish loads of crap. And as the impatiently person that I am, after leeching one bad and cheap track I never go back to the place where I got it from. Sadly there's a lot of bad music out there, which was done in a hurry. The reggae tunes from Jahtari.org are very different to the mainstream and quite lovely. I also like the minimalistic style of fragmentmusic.net, their net album "Mammoth" is a true masterpiece. What I can also recommend to german listeners are the releases of the german HipHop gang "Broke Gringos". Go and download their net EP's and LP's at ideology.de. Normally I don't listen to such stuff, but their lyrics are elaborate and really have a message.

Nowadays I mostly listen to a few scene related audio CDs only and rarely to releases of netlabels. As cutting-edge I would appoint the compilation "Audiophonik - music for the scene generation". Darkness, the ex maineditor of the distinguished PC diskmag Imphobia once compiled this masterpiece in 1999. It features music from Moby, Lluvia, Dr. Awesome, Scorpik, Jogeir, Lizardking - to entitle only a few of them. By mischance it's already sold out at synSONIQ Records or lynnemusic.com. At the end you'll find a download link where you get the tunes for free, probably because it's that old and sold out everyhwere. I could also call "Colony" by Bjorn Lynne himself, "Lightflow" from the polish group "Aural Planet" is also a very good example for a brilliant Audio CD being produced by musicians out of the Scene. Their ambient trance on this album simply rocks!


Internet radio isn't exactly what I like to listen to. This way I get easily and quickly distracted and cannot concentrate myself anymore on something that I'd like to do. Also, I've somehow lost the connection to the work of the actual musicians and feel stuck somehwere in the past when it comes to this topic. Of course I sometimes watch recent demos and intros, but in that combination music doesn't interest me that much anymore. It's a long time ago since I copied the mp3 of a recent demo into my directory where I collect scene related music. Except the tune from TBL's demo "Starstruck" from Blaizer, I somehow didn't listen to many tracks of that area that inspired me. But maybe that's mostly because "Starstruck" is such a great Amiga demo and not because of the tune itself. I don't know.



Tracking?

Many, many years ago in the late 80s I tried to track on my own with the Amiga tool "Hearttracker", but I totally failed. I can sing very well, but it seemed impossible to me to transfuse my feelings to a tracker program. I wrote some german tutorials about how to work with Protracker-Clones for the gazette of the association "A.U.G.E. 4000", but that's all I could report about. We distributed our own public domain series, a bit compareable to that one from Fred Fish. But mostly for the german area, not half as big and not so much wellknown as Fred Fish's "AmigaLibDisks". At this point once again I'd like to demonstrate my deepest respect for all active musicians out there, who are able to do that. And of course I am not speaking about those programs, where you only have to click around a bit and your melody has been generated automatically.

Music was my first love and even if my taste has changed during the time, music still plays a decisive role in my life. Guess that will never change, at least it should not. To say it with Simon and Garfunkel's words, I'm "still crazy after all that years". Mostly for this oldfashioned stuff, but generally crazy for music and still crackbrained when it comes to the Scene. Would I else write such a long article for a musicdisk? I bet not.

Ghandy/Jurassic Pack Staff



Links:

Aural Planet: http://www.auralplanet.com/
Jahtari.org: http://jahtari.org/
Tokyo Dawn Records at Scene.org: http://scene.org/dir.php?dir=%2Fmusic%2Fgroups%2Ftokyodawn%2F
Starstruck demotune by Blaizer: ftp://ftp.untergrund.net/users/fizz/scenemusic/mirror/Olof%20Gustafsson-Starstruck.mp3
Broke Gringos @ ideology: http://www.ideology.de/archives/000014.php
MOTOR - Mammoth: http://fragmentmusic.net/release_1.php?rel_id=11
download Audiophonik for free: http://www.fusecon.com/products/audiophonik/