Mods Anthology 2

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Text File | 1996-01-16 | 28KB | 528 lines

This text comes from IMPHOBIA Issue XI - December 1995 ======================================================== ++++++++++++++++++++ The REW of Nostalgia talks with Moby / nOoOn ++++++++++++++++++++ Hi fans! :) Welcome to yet another great story which is based on 100% true facts, welcome to yet another great mindcrashing adventure of The REW, welcome to yet another one of those conversations The REW had with the Scene's TOP musicians. Exclusive - for Imphobia readers only. Man o man! You won't believe me what happened to me this time. I mean, I know you can handle a LOT (otherwise you wouldn't be reading this after the previous two interviews I did), but this time it's really spooky! Last week I woke up in the middle of the night. My body was completely paralized, and there was an enormous bright light in my room! In my head I heard voices... strange, unhuman voices, though I could understand what they were saying... I wasnt scared at all! Ofcourse not! Musicians are never scared!! (At least, that's what I was told when I registered my first tracker!:) Anyway, all of a sudden my bed was surrounded by several pale looking creatures with no hair. They were smaller than humans, let's say 1m50 in height. They had big eyes, a small nose, and a very weird mouth. Man! Were they ugly! And they were very FAT too. One of the creatures was *SO* ugly, that I wanted to kick it. But I couldn't, cos my body was paralized, so I coulnd't move any part of my body in the direction of the creatures to hit them. Suddenly I felt that I was lifted from my bed. Everything was white and I seemed to be sucked up by some lightbeam. I didn't know what was going to happen next, cos they never show that part in The X-Files.:( Some moments later I found myself hanging a meter above the floor in some white room. I still wasn't able to move my body, though I could move my head in all directions of the room. When I moved my head to the right I saw that there was some other dude hanging in the sky next to me. I asked him who he was and what he was doing here. He moved his head in my direction, and said his name was Moby ^ nOoOn, and that he was waiting for some train. WOW! That happens to me! I am abducted by some alien race, and who do I run into? Moby!!! So I asked him if he was *really* serious! 'Yeps!', he said, 'I am *really* waiting on a train, though I have this feeling that it won't come!'! Hmmm.... I didn't know what those aliens had done to him, but clearly his sense of humour wasn't taken. :) Ofcourse, I took this opertunity to ask Moby several questions for some Imphobia interview thingy, so I immediately started to ask all kinds of silly questins. REW: Hey! This is a great opertunity to do a cool interview thingy for Imphobia right? Moby: Uhhh... guess so.... REW: In that case, I make up some questions and you answer them yes? Moby: Is that the first question? REW: No it wasn't. I will ask much more difficult questions than that! But, if you don't know the answer you say 'pass' right? Moby: Pass... REW: First, when and how did you got interested in tracked music? You were in there from the very beginning weren't you? Moby: We should go back to 1986 when I bought my first Amiga! I bought it in order to do music with it. I first tried a score based music program called Sonix. Then, I heard a few tunes made by a guy called SLL... I was wondering how he made them when I got my hands on a piece of software called Soundtracker. I tried it, and loved it... REW: So, you started to make music, and then you joined a demogroup I suppose? Moby: Yes, I joined my first group in 1987. It was called Impact Inc. Alan, the coder, now works with me at Mindscape in France. He's coding on the Sony PLaystation. I've also been a member of Apology, Dragons, Alcatraz, Dreamdealers, and last but not least, Sanity. REW: Then you saw Second Reality, bought a PC and and joined nOoOn? Moby: hehehehe.... no, I didn't really moved to noOon. This group was created by Ra and me, in order to produce good PC demos with the help of two great coders whom everybody knows now : Barti! and Karl. We just wanted to mix amiga demomakers' knowhow with PC coders fast routines. Actually, I don't even own a PC myself, so it wasn't a big change for me. When I need to use a PC tracker, I use a PC at Mindscape :) REW: You know it's so funny. First there's the Amiga Scene. Then the PC Scene comes. The PC Scene rips everything from the Amiga Scene. Then Amiga Scene does gouraud, and PC Scene does gouraud... at the same time... then PC Scene starts to use the processor power and Phong / Environment mapping is born, and it *seemed* we beat the Amiga Scene. Guess what happens next? Amiga Scene members move to PC and we're beaten again.... :( Moby: Well, I didn't want to say that... but I am happy that you do.... ;) REW: Now tell me about your butt. Moby: My what? REW: I mean that tune you composed for Party 4 Music Compo? Moby: That's called BUD! REW: Oh... sorry... bud, uhh... but it was composed by you and Ra? Rumours said that it was that you didn't have a PC yet, so you had to make that tune at Ra's place? Others say that's the famous trick when you are not present at a party, but Ra was? Moby: Rough guess hey? Well, this tune is a 4 channels tune made in late 1992. I just added a fifth channel in order to compete in the multichannel compo, as we needed a GUS MAX :) REW: Argh! I hate those Amiga musicians! They have a four channel tune, add *1* more channel and tadaa! 2nd place at The Party 4! MULTIchannel compo!:) Moby: But as I couldn't come to the party, Ra presented it for me... People might say it's not fair, but everybody's doing that, and I REALLY wanted a GUS MAX. REW: I can imagine that, and you're right... it's an often used trick. And for some reason Santa Claus doesn't do anything about it, so I guess it's allright! ;) Though I noticed some text in that BUD tune, something like 'this is real Moby - beware of fakes'.... what was that about? You don't like it when people rip your style? Moby: No, that's not it.... It's just because I've found some tunes made by other Mobys in some Moby directories on various FTP sites. For example VISIONS.S3M is not by me... I've never done any s3m, and I'll never do one. "Moby" has become such a common handle that people don't believe I'm Moby of noOon when I use this nick on IRC. REW: Correct... there's a dude on irc claiming to be Moby all the time, and I don't believe him! Moby: A shame, cos I choosed this handle because it was so stupid that I thought nobody would ever take the same name ... REW: You're right again! It's a stupid name, but appearantly not stupid enough. I choose a more stupid name and the result is that there's only *1* REW in the scene! ;) Why don't you change your handle into something more stupid? Moby: No! REW: For example. Though I believe there's allready a demo called No!... :) That reminds me! The NO! demo and the second place at the music compo with BUD was your 'breakthru' in the PC scene (though most people already knew you from the amiga). Are you familliar with other pc musicians? What do you think of them? Moby: Well, I don't know much of them. I've liked some tunes by $volraq. Jugi's tune in "Dope" is rather nice (but he comes from the Amiga anyway...). Some tunes by Skaven are really good too. Zodiak's "Reflecter" is very cool. There must be some other good ones, but as I'm not really "into" the PC scene, I don't know many of them. REW: That's weird... who are your favourite musicians on the Amiga then? (You *do* know some of those rite?) Moby: Yes I do! :) Without any doubt Dizzy/CnCd is my favourite musician. Bruno and Heatbeat are also in my Top 5, together with Walkman who is one of the biggest legends on Amiga. Chrylian is also a very good musician, especially when it comes to Jazz Rock and Acid Jazz. REW: Aha... so are you inspired by anything/anyone? What non tracked music do you like? Moby: It's very hard to say by what or who I am inspired. I suppose there's a bit of everything I'm listening to in my music... I listen to a lot of different things. I like acid jazz (Corduroy, JTQ...), jazz rock (Uzeb, Didier Lockwood...), metal (Pantera, Machinehead...), funk metal (Infectious Grooves, Red Hot Chili Peppers...), movie soundtracks (Danny Elfman's Batman, Nightmare before Christmas, Vangelis' Blade Runner...). You might be surprised to know that I hate any kind of fully computerized music, other than modules of course. REW: Then how do you compose a tune? How does it start? With samples, and then a melody, or first a melody, then samples? Tell me. :) Moby: Pass :) REW: Don't worry, most musicians find that a difficult question. Let's do some easier ones: do you play any instruments? Moby: Yep, I play a bit of guitar, a bit of keyboards, and a lot of bass :) REW: And how do you sample? On the amiga? On the pc? Do you own instuments? What do you think of people ripping samples? Moby: I mostly sample from my synths or from my guitar or from my bass. I think it's ok to rip sample when it's not to obvious. For example, Purple Motion has very obviously ripped most of his samples from Amiga modules, and that's not too good in my humble opinion. REW: Hmmm... I think I know what you mean. Moby: I sample with a PC now that I have one at work. It's more effective to process a 16bits 44khz sample and then to downsample it. I use a sample editor called Cool Edit, and believe me, it's really cool!!! REW: You only have a PC at work? Moby: Yes... I'm in-house musician at Mindscape France.I'm making a living on game music since 4 years now. When I was a freelance musician, I was going to see the game before starting the music. But now I work in cooperation with all the staff who works on a game... It's a very interesting job. The boring part is that I also have a lot of sound effects to do. It's sometimes very funny to do (like it was for [Savage] Warriors), but it can be very painful in some occasions... REW: I have heard a couple of tunes from Fury of the Furies. It sounded different than the usual Moby stuff! Moby: Talking about Fury of the Furries, if you're speaking about the Adlib tunes, they were made with an Adlib tracker coded by Karl, and the tunes are in fact amiga modules a bit rearranged, that's maybe why they sound "quite different"... Still, I believe that some of the 4ch mods in Fury of the furries (Amiga and Mac versions only...) are some of my best ones. And still under 50K :) REW: Yes yes... I was referring to the MODs... (REW does not AdLib you know! ;) But I think some of the fury MODs are indeed some of your better ones! Especially because most of your tunes are guitar mods... especially the ones you entered in compos! Moby: A compo tune has to sound different than other computer tunes to catch the audience's attention. "Cortouchka" is not a masterpiece, but the guitar intro was catchy enough to make the audience shout and clap their hands. REW: /me claps in his hands! :) Moby: Elekfunk is not a masterpiece either, but the guitar sounds good, the rhythm is funky, and once again it made people move their body. But now, everybody is doing guitar tunes with very good samples ($volraq and Zodiak seem to be quite good at that :). So it's now time to find something different. It seems that Skaven has, but I haven't heard his Assembly tune yet... REW: It's a cartoon like tune, very good! But.... Are those compo tunes of yours deliberately guitar tunes? Like, 'when I enter with a guitar mod I usually end up high, so let's try it again'? What type of song do you think will do good in a music compo? Moby: Heheheh... Yes, I did that on purpose, because I love guitar, people love guitars, and I think I'm not too bad at making guitar modules... O:) REW: Even the music in both nOoOn demos is guitarish! Even though the Stars demo came, surprisingly, without Moby music. (actually, the style of GROO's tune was kinda moby-like though)... What happened? Bad tongues even say that you were kicked from noOon? Others say that you don't have time anymore due to your new job? Explain. :) Moby: Well, I haven't been kicked. My free time is just too short and I didn't manage to complete a tune for Stars. Moreover, our tracker is still too buggy to be fully usable, FT2 is just unusable, Screamtracker is just unbearable... REW: Hey! Those are some sharp remarks in a PC magazine dude! Moby: Forgive me, but I can't forget more than 8 years of Amiga protracking. :-P (oh my God, 8 years..?? Please don't call me Granpa !) REW: Ok, I forgive you. Actually, I agree with you. :) Moby: By the way, Groo's music is groovy, I like this one :) REW: I agree once more. It fits the demo well. But you were talking about your own tracker? Is it any cool? Tell me. Moby: Moka (abbreviation for Moby / Karl) is not better than anything yet, mostly because of bugs. Karl and I should stay at least one week in the same room to finish and debug it. But we don't want to :). REW: Maybe you and Karl get abducted some day? Like us here now? Moby: Ehhh... Moka may not be better than any other PC tracker, it's just better for me. It's the exact conversion of the Amiga protracker with more channels and some extra features... REW: So... with a busy job, no PC at home, a buggy tracker, and Groo doing music for NooOn demos, what is the future of Moby? More music? Entering music compos (wired?). Moby: Moby's future is quite uncertain. REW: Ok, but let's assume these aliens here put us back in our beds ofcourse! Moby: Still.... I'd say less music, or maybe even no demo music at all. The demo scene is full great groOoups, peoOople, demoOos, musics... But at a certain time, you have to say stop, or this scene eats your life, man! REW: So.... then I think it is time to say 'thank you Moby, The Scene Loved your music and you have helped making this scene to be blah blah blah blah' Suddenly a bus stopped, Moby got in and left. Bye bye. [Since I didn't have enough time to write a full report on the Moby/REW abduction case, I made up that part about the bus Moby took. Besides, you wouldn't be interested in what those Aliens did to us anyway... would you? ....... The REW / Nostalgia]