An Interview with Axel Melzener

The usual suspects: The Maniacs Of Noise, Rob Hubbard, Ben Daglish and Chris Hülsbeck - absolutely amazing. I also admired Martin Galway, Mark Tait, Jonathan Dunn and Matt Gray a big deal.

There’s so much great stuff to choose from that it’s quite hard for me to specify my preferences. But I think one of the greatest musical achievements on the C-64, a sort of magnum opus, has to be the Last Ninja trilogy, each soundtrack being a well-conceived masterpiece of its own, adding epic flavor to the exotic virtual locations. The many great composers involved really nailed the dense atmosphere of the games and left their individual footprints on the final product. Another SID that doesn’t cease to amaze me is Shades by Chris Hülsbeck. It just sounds marvellous and really shows what the SID chip was capable of. I think it was quite revolutionary when it came out in the mid-‘80s, nobody had heard anything like it until then. If my memory doesn’t fail me, Chris sent this tune to a German computer magazine to participate in a contest. Of course he beat the competition. It has been hailed as an evolutionary step in 8-bit music, at least over here in Germany, and it’s still an amazing piece of work. I have especially fond memories of Master of Magic by Rob Hubbard, because it was the first music generated by a home computer I ever heard. After friend of mine got his C-64 for christmas - god, how I envied him -, he used to play that game all the time, and when I dropped by and heard that main theme, the sound got me hooked and never let me go again. That was in 1986, I think. Master of Magic is catchy, almost hypnotic. Driven by a complex, somewhat unorthodox rhythm, the sounds have a mysterious, slightly medieval touch. It’s as magical as it was supposed to be. Still one of my favourites.

I’ve been very busy with my own work and haven’t heard much. But judging from the small previews on kwed.org, there are some extremely creative people around, and a lot of the remixes are truly great. It’s amazing how many people still care about this stuff. Retro computing seems to become a serious hobby these days. That’s great in a way, but also a bit frightening. Musicians seem to run out of ideas these days, they’re looking backwards too often, maybe because there’s not that much to look forward to.

I only did three. But I think Cobra is, and will always be, my best.

I prefer artists who actually put some thought and effort into what they do. I mostly listen to movie soundtracks by the likes of Jerry Goldsmith, Ennio Morricone or John Williams because they’re outstandigly talented people with an own musical language. I really love film music, but I adore the classics as well: Mussorgsky, Holst, Debussy and many others inspired generations of composers that followed, including the former ones, and I respect them deeply. Regarding contemporary pop music, I dig the freaky electronic stuff Daft Punk, The Chemical Brothers or Les Rythmes Digitales put out. When I started composing in the early 90’s, Vangelis and Jean-Michel Jarre were also among my favourites, and although my interest in their work slightly waned over the years, their way of approaching composition is still rooted in my system. Yet, I don’t just want to copy my role models, but find an individual style instead. If people said, That has to be Axel!, I knew I would be on the right track.

I really don’t know. I think I’d never do this. Not even hypothetically.

The core system is a Pentium II 350 with 64 MB RAM and a 8 GB hard disk, including a Turtle Beach Pinnacle sound card with a nice Yamaha DB-50 XG wavetable chip. I’m using Gigasampler for about 80% of sound generation and have circa 4 GB of AKAI patches stored to my hard disk. For the arrangements, I’m still using the buggy old CuBasis Audio 1.0 because VST is too complicated for me - I’m not really a tech person and don’t know anything about plug-ins and all that stuff. I also have some external hardware: A Korg Prophecy synthesizer which is great for lead sounds and basses, a Behringer Eurorack 8-channel mixer and an Ensoniq DP PRO effects processor which I use for compression, equalizing and spatialization. That’s it. Pretty out-dated, but it works.

I always try to find the most logical solution by giving the tune what it was originally lacking. If the original SID sounds are fine, I keep them. If I don’t think they’re appropriate, I replace them. I don’t like to violently change or twist or bend the music to make it fit; instead, the music itself tells me what it needs to be. A SID with a natural grooviness, like, say, IK , seemed perfect for a house remix, so that’s what I did. The first level tune of Last Ninja 2 already rocked in its original form, all I had to do was to add a drum loop, and whoops, there you are. With Cobra, it was the same thing. Ben Daglish‘s original SID always sounded like film music to me - slow, romantic, and a bit sad. I don’t think a dance remix would have worked. Only an orchestral re-arrangement could do the original justice, so that’s what I went for, and I think I proved my point.

I don’t know. I’m not even sure if I stay in the remix business and I seriously thought about quitting. The three remixes I did were hommages to the great original SIDs that they were based on, I always wanted to do these because I especially liked them, so it was a dream come true. But now that it’s true, it’s over. Of course there are hundreds of other tunes waiting to be updated, but I don’t feel the urge to do so. Actually, I don’t think I can surpass my Cobra remix so it might be better to stop. It may be a long time before I do another remix, so don’t hold your breath.

On the one hand, it was a premiere: I think it was the first MP3 cover of Cobra ever released to the web, at least I didn’t find another one on kwed.org. People were curious, which was good for me. On the other hand, SID remixes featuring a classical orchestral arrangement are pretty rare. My Cobra was a departure from the usual and sometimes boring pop/eurodance/house routine, and I think the listeners enjoyed that, and they really liked the sound because it was closer to a real orchestra than they expected it to be. I’m very pleased with how the tune turned out, it became more sophisticated than I hoped for. Cobra is better than my other remixes because it closely resembles the original work I do. I’m very fond of classical music and I still think that a symphony orchestra is the best way of transporting musical ideas. I have had a musical education as a concert guitar player and I grew up with études and allegrettes and sarabandes, not with house tracks. Pop music has never been my cup of tea, and I think that’s really obvious if you compare my remixes to each other. Still, I owe everything to Ben Daglish, who wrote the SID. All I really did with my remix was to show how good Ben’s tune actually is, I just provided a new musical texture for his core composition. I’m sure my version is quite close to how Ben originally imagined the music to be if he had the same technical possibilities back in the old days, at least I hope so. And if Ennio Morricone hadn’t inspired me with his A Fistful of Dollars-Soundtrack - I actually sampled the heys and hohs from it -, my remix could never have been made.

The only thing I dislike about it is realising how damn good the original tunes are and that I’ll never be in the same league with the original composers. Many great SIDs sound very simple, but musically, they’re not. They’re complex and enormously sophisticated. Just try to re-compose any of Hubbard‘s or Daglish’s great classics note by note - the first two minutes of Bombo, for example - it’s wicked. These guys are wizards, real geniuses. I’m not. And I feel humiliated each time I notice. Actually, remixing isn’t that great of a thing to do, let’s be honest. After all, we’re just rehashing other people’s work. If we were that great, others would be rehashing ours!

I’d like to have access to a fully-equipped studio. I could need a good new multi-effects processor and a decent finalizer. A bigger PC sporting more RAM and a multi-channel sound card with Digital I/O would be a good start. My equipment is actually pretty low-tech. But I’ll promise to upgrade as soon as I can afford it.

I don’t know anything about the scene because I’ve never really been involved in it. I never felt the need to join a demo group and get a phoney handle. I never thought it was important.

I’d like to hear different takes on Cobra because I’m curious what perspective other arrangers have on that. R-Type by Chris Hülsbeck is an amazing tune, I’m still waiting for a decent remix; I did one, an Air-like ‘70’s disco version, but it wasn’t good enough to be released, so you never got to hear that. And I still miss a good take on Airwolf. That’s a pretty tricky tune. Much tougher to remix than it sounds. I would also appreciate a great remix of Master of Magic because it’s one of my favourite SIDs, but that’s a tough one, too. There are some tunes which are almost impossible to remix without risking to loose the essence of the original.

I need reasons to compose music, and the challenge of remixing SIDs provides me with those reasons, it motivates me to further develop my abilities. Besides, a lot of tunes don’t sound as good as they should, and many can be improved upon. Some SIDs scream for real punchy percussion or a funky new bassline with filter sweeps. When the original composers published their music over ten years ago, their imagination was limited by the technology. They couldn’t use samples, at least not to full extent. This barrier is now gone, and other composers, including myself, try to lift those great songs to new heights by the use of modern equipment. But I don’t think we always succeed. Sometimes, we make things worse. Many SIDs are perfect the way they are, and we should never dare to touch them.

The C64 turned quite a few heads when it came out. It was an affordable, but cleverly constructed product which became very hip and was dearly loved by its owners. Furthermore, it was a sought-after lifestyle item of the 1980’s one just couldn’t do without, a new social phenomenon that was symbolic of the post modern man/machine-relationship. I think it was hugely popular because it helped democracising technology a big deal: Suddenly, computers turned from scientific machines into consumer electronics, they were sold to the masses, everybody could become a programmer, everybody could become a creator of digital content, everybody could become part of a new community. It opened a door to another world unlike any home computer after it managed to. That’s why it became a legend, and that’s why it’s still very well-respected.

One of the ‘90s games that really got me was Diablo, and I thought the music was excellent. It impressed me very much. Another title I thoroughly enjoyed is Starcraft, a superb game which also had a very solid soundtrack. Most releases by LucasArts sport pretty good soundtracks, too. The big challenge for the composers back in the old days was to create something beautiful using very primitive technology, and they really worked miracles with a mere 3 channels. With the arrival of CD audio and MP3, that challenge is certainly gone forever, but new ideas emerge with new technologies. I wouldn’t say that game music has become worse, it just has become different, and there’s just more of it around because more games get produced, maybe the quality suffers a bit from the quantity. I’ve been composing game soundtracks myself for seven years, by the way, and I still take a big liking to doing it.

A good remix is only good if it’s better than the original. If it’s not, it’s meaningless and shouldn’t have been made. Unfortunately, there are many bad ones. Especially in the pop music charts. Don’t you just hate how some glossy boy groups destroy ‘60’s classics with their interpretations? By the way, many original SIDs weren’t even originals, they were remixes, too. Yie Ar Kung Fu was actually a cover of Jean Michel Jarre’s Magnetic Fields IV, and Mark Cooksey’s 1942 was ripped from the score of the war film 633 Squadron, originally composed by Ron Goodwin.

I’d like to thank all the people who spend hours in front of their computers, using their creativity to entertain others without expecting to get paid for it. Such a degree of idealism has become very rare these days. I’m happy to see that there are so many guys out there who love music just for its own sake and dedicate a part of their life to it. These people deserve to be called real artists, and I whole-heartedly admire their spirit. But I’d be even happier if they used their enormous creativity to create something original and had as much, or even more, success with that.