For years I've thought I'd never have anything worth telling about my artist nickname 'Aeuk' which was a nick I used actively especially in the so-called tracked metalscene for countless metal tunes, from 1997 into 2005 or so. But hey, never say never ... as seems to be the case.
This will be a rather long intro into this blog.
Let's begin with a question: You might know what "tracked music" (or mod music) means / is? If you don't know, you could check out for example some wikipedia basic info from <here>. Well, I experienced mod music first time in the late 1980s, beginning from 1987-1988 with Amiga 500, first in Amiga games of course, then soon also in demoscene's demos, megademos etc. But I remember clearly what was the starting point of me myself getting into tracking music myself: I learned I could open games' music mods with Sound Tracker in early 1989, and an awesome breakout game Crystal Hammer had not just great game content, but also a music piece I really liked a lot (check it out <here>).
So, it felt downright amazing to be suddenly able to open Crystal Hammer's title music / mod in Sound Tracker, to be able to play it there, and especially see the tracker view, how the view is rolling over notes and stuff. I had received Sound Tracker from some Amiga pal, and I also had bunch of sample disks, actually as much as perhaps 10-20 disks at some point. So for some reason seeing how the notes flew in tracker view, Crystal Hammer music, I went into checking the samples and another "wow!" effect being able to simply play the samples separately by keyboard. I had sample disks which I hadn't really used before and suddenly I understood I could swap some samples in the CH song from the disks I had ... that's what I did and it was like a game in itself. The next "game" effect was about ... going into pattern edit mode, and trying what happens if I "put a bunch of notes into the drums' channel" (word "editing" certainly wasn't in my known words list then!) ...
... I had been into heavy rock / heavy metal since a kid from early 1980s already, and around 1989 my excitement for speed metal and thrash was about to go into more extreme, as I was on the edge of finding out bands like for example Napalm Death, Bolt Thrower, Death ... so should I say "of course" in a twisted way I tried to "make Crystal Hammer's beats extreme". It happened easily and something clicked inside of me. It was like a light had been switched on. It's quite descriptive for the situation, that when I was first toying with Crystal Hammer mod I had big bro who was at first as interested about it - but where light went on with me, in his case that was the only experiment with tracking he ever had, period. Well, he is 10 years older than me, and I was about 13 years old when this Crystal Hammer case happened, so ... probably he had bit more interesting matters at hand back then, things which weren't interesting nor possible for pre'teenager. :)
But yeah, you might guess what I mean with "light went on" in my case. Crystal Hammer begun something that never truly ended. Tracking. I haven't been actively tracking full music pieces in years (well, if not counting chiptunes for Chipfusion) but I still track drums actively for bunch of music projects of my own.
In my case it's just bit twisted, that even that it all started with Crystal Hammer, relaxed Amiga game music - I myself started tracking metal right away in 1989, I didn't even try to create anything like typical Amiga game music (don't ask me why, I loved lots of Amiga game music!) though not just some heavy metal mods but I went directly into something probably no one other did back then with mod music: Extreme metal. The heavy / rock mods in itself were somewhat common in Amiga scene, also in some games like take for example Super Cars 2 (check out the original music <here> and my cover of the piece done in 2002 <here>) but yeah ... it felt like I was completely on uncharted territory and tracking (or trying to!) extreme metal mods was literally extremely difficult and in some ways downright impossible, at least in a believable way. You gotta remember that back then the maximum amount of channels in mods were 4 channels, period. Think about extreme metal for a second, or just think about fast drumming: Doing music so that you have channel for guitars, bass, drums ... only 4 channels, and guitars took 1-2 channels, bass 1 channel, so you had 1-2 channels for drums. Bassdrum, snare, hihat, crash, toms ... all into one damn channel. Yeah! You can bet one had to be rather innovative with "how to do it" ... and stil the results didn't necessarily impress that much. And yet at the same time it felt so "great" that you could create such noise. :)
It showcases how alone I was in tracking extreme metal in around 1989-1990 as I was part of few demogroups too, and I was also part of forming few groups (and my name ideas remained even after I myself left the groups when I sold away my Amiga 500 in 1991 summer already) - I was originally part of the teams where I was, as a musician, guy who was tracking music for demos. Pretty soon my "job" turned into swapper, because the mod music I made (extreme metal experiments) was so extreme that the tunes I made, never got accepted into the demos our groups made. Ha!
But already back in those early days in 1989-1990 I believed heavily into what I was doing with Sound Tracker anyway and there's one example how the other team mates in our demogroup got burned about it, so to speak: There was this one fella with whom I bonded pretty good for 2-3 years (Amiga days), he was our demogroup's leader and a good friend then, too. Nice fella. But he hated metal music, and the more extreme it was the more he hated it. He literally couldn't stand my tracked metal pieces, but thought it's complete garbage, with no musical idea in it whatsoever. So, ... this guy had a relative living few kilometers from his home, a guy about 10 years older than us, who was also a musican, he knew music theory and had bunch of instruments, home studio of his own (while I had pretty much nothing of this, and I knew nothing about music theory especially). We went to pay a visit to this musician fella, because my friend, this team leader guy wanted to showcase to me about how he is right that my music contains nothing "musical" in it, no musical ideas whatsover, it's as brainless as those zombies in your fave zombie movies. I was like okay, let's go - I wanna know too what you musician relative thinks about my tracked metal! So there we went, and at the guy's music studio loaded my tracked metal mods into his music system, proper stereos etc and he hit the play. My friend was smiling widely, expecting so much to beat me at it, that my music is "nothing". So, the musician guy listened the two of my songs through, not commenting yet anything but listening with concentrated face. When he started commenting, my friend's face was a sight to see. Musician went like ... "Well I have to say this is pretty interesting stuff. I don't like this type of music, but you know, you have some really interesting things going on here, you have used <add music theory terms here> and you change the tempo in exciting way, and the mood goes from this to that, really interesting artificial harmonics towards the really slow end of the song. I don't like this music, but I like how you have some crazy and exciting things going on here, musically speaking." ... Needless to say, my friend who was going to prove that my music shouldn't exist at all ... he no longer went on with his "your music is just noise!" comments. But my tracked metal music never made its' way into our demogroups demos in any case. It was too extreme for that back in those days! :-)
I probably could write a book worth of stuff about those ancient tales and things happening, games and music and stuff, but I can actually cut the damn long story much shorter and at the same time continue it in an interactive way, kind of: Years ago I put up a brief collection of selected 'Aeuk' tunes in finnish online music service Mikseri. Beginning from 1989 and ending around 2007 - and I've written descriptions to the tunes there, also in english so ... if you want to read a bit more and listen the "sound experiments" you might want to check <this> out for now.
I will write more later ... not about just past, but about how past is coming alive, in a way. I'm currently working on first remixes package of 'Aeuk' material. I have tons of Aeuk mods, but selected cuts means selected cuts. This first package of selected cuts I am working on is unsurprisingly extreme material (though not all Aeuk's tracked metal mods were extreme metal, there were shitload of Amiga style "heavy rock" tunes) - this forthcoming package is mainly about sewer metal experiments done in 1999/2000, which inspired me to begin music project called Scumfusion in 2000 summer. In reality Scumfusion started in 1999 with these so-called sewer metal releases, which pretty much carved a path towards project which became Scumfusion.
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