An Interview with Oedipus

My all time favourite musician is Ben Daglish, closely followed by Johannes Bjerreegaard, Reyn Ouwehand and Thomas Mogensen.

To name a few of the classics: Switchblade, Knucklebusters, Stormlord, Last Ninja (any), Firelord, Ark Pandora, DMC Demo, KamiKaze… And some slightly obscure ones: Slightly Magic, Ballblazer, Adidas Football, Galaforce 2

I had an Atari ST and the demo scene was rapidly approaching the state of rigor mortis. I moved to the PC which at that time had a fairly active demo scene (remember the Hornet archive?). Anyway, I discovered great stuff like Fast Tracker & SidPlay. I loved music but didn’t know anything about composition. I thought I might learn something by analysing the works of the masters (like you do in artschool) so I followed the footprints of Jochen Hippel and started porting C=64 tunes to Mods. The first thing I did was Bangkok Knights by Gray… it was terrible!

At the moment, Propellerheads Reason (Monty & Vindicator tunes). Before this I was using SB Live with custom soundfonts. The sequencer I use is Cakewalk 6, I prefer it to newer releases because it’s simpler to operate.

Mostly I try to pick tunes that I think will fit my style. Also if I spot how a tune can be easily extended to a full arrangement. I’m sure all remixers have found themselves stuck on some tune because it simply didn’t work in another environment. This happens a lot tom me. For every tune that I release there are about 5 others I have abandoned in mid processing. Chiptunes can get away with being much more minimalist than traditional arrangements.

Le aoleil est pres de moi by the French band Air. Simply beautiful! Ask me again in two day’s and I will probably say something else.

Usually my latest release… so right now: Auf Wiedersehen Monty and Vindicator 😉

What annoys my the most are wrong notes in (other peoples) remixes 😉 There are some remixers who take pride in not using converters, such as Sid2Midi, who occasionally do serious mistakes. In my experience this is fatal to the tune every time.
I usually don’t like sampled bits from the original SID’s. An exeption to this are C64 samples (Stay awhile, stay forevvveerrr!) and percussion or sweep effects. Sampling the bassline is just being lazy!
I usually like it when the remixer does something new to the tune like blending another tune into it, writes a new solo or gives it extra swing or shuffle. Some good examples of late are Puffy64’s Zak MCommando Kracken tune or Mahoney’s Spellbound (Swing mix).

Seeing as it binds the whole scene nicely together in one website, I’ll have to say Jan Lund Thomsen’s remix.kwed.org is vitamin A. Chris Abbott with his C64Audio gives us something to aspire to and now Remix64 provides nice coverage on the inside of the scene.

This is a subject I can’t say I have formed an opinion on. It seems to me that the remix term is much more technical than cover. Cover is IMO more appropriate when the artist in question releases own material. Call the tunes conversions, arrangements, remixes or covers, it doesn’t really matter as long as you can still call them music 😉

My top 4: Eric Pochesci, Jeroen Breebaart, Puffy64 and The Dead Guys

Ballblazer! And Puffy64 doing Knucklebusters.

As I’ve only heard 2 so far I don’t have much frame of reference. I won copy’s of Back in Time 2 and 3 in the Fred Gray competition and thought they were very good.

Ah, the world of portable computers… You could drop them to the floor without it having any effect! Just try that on your PC 😉

Obviously I am influenced a great deal by the music of C64, ZX, ST and Amiga, this might be the reason for my minimalist chip-ish sound? 😉
I'm listening to a wide range of music but not much of it gets through to the remixes. I went to see Rammstein a few day's ago and right now I'm listening to the Congos but I doubt this will have much effect on my own work.
What does get through however is the early synth music I like: Tonto's expanding head band, Wendy Carlos, Perrey & Kingsley, Dick Hyman. Some more influences/recommendations are: The Shogun Assassin soundtrack, William Orbit's Pieces in a new style, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Pluxus, Moog Cookbook and Martin Denny's Exotic Moog

Some stuff I have ready but unreleased is Adidas Football by Matt Cannon, Galaforce 2 by Chris Abbott, some Last Ninja tunes and a different approach to Giana Sisters.

I'd like a Roland Juno 106! My brother has one. The sound is just about the fattest smoothest chipsound ever!

Some things that put weight on my scales are chipstyle sounds, loud bass & drums, a nice funky bounce and so on… I generally dislike midi- or cheap synth- sounding tunes but I have to say that if you have a good idea, you can get away with lower quality production.

Don't be too hard on newcomers, their work will improve over time (heck, even mine does!).