Years ago I posted something online and asked for help deciphering it. I was young and not good at googling things but some friendly renoiser stepped in and helped.
It was the mid-90’s, and it was my first proper exposure to electronic music: The family had recently acquired a sound card and cd-rom drive for the communal 486, and there was this file called “DS.EXE” on a software demo disk I found while scrolling through trying to find DOOM clones. I’d turn the sample quality as high as the little Intel could handle, and the volume up as loud as the internal amplification would allow, and just sit there mesmerised by these alien sounds every day after school. Had a neato little EQ visualisation thingy and some advanced (for the time) graphics in the background. There was this one particular track that had a really dope breakdown/counterpoint or whatever you call it, but with no way to fast-forward I’d always have to listen to the whole first part of the song to get to it.
Anyway, I tried to find the old post to link it, but it’s lost in the renoise archives or something. Someone helped me extract the mod files from the executable and also did an awesome job of rendering to flac in a true-to-original way so I could listen to the tracks again easily.
Pretty good, now I can re-live that memory any time.
The other day I was idling messing around with some synth noises in renoise and just thought to throw that dope-ass break-down’s synth line in and just kept messing around with it till it sort of turned into something different to the original, centred around the breakdown.
Then I thought to fire up the old DS.exe in DOSbox to see if I could figure out more about the guy who made the original. Tracked some stuff down easily enough this time around:
https://www.scenemusic.net/demovibes/artist/3628/
But here’s the bit that really spun me the f&*? out: After I worked it out, exited DS.exe back to the DOSbox prompt, at this point being aware that the producer’s artist name was “Soundwave”, and see the line:
© 1994 - SW/VV.
SW. Soundwave, obviously.
VV. I’ve seen those initials somewhere else…
https://www.renoise.com/who-are-we
http://forum.renoise.com/index.php/user/560-vv/
Could it be? He doesn’t capitalise the first v, it’s vV not VV… but still, was that the case in 1994? He was active in the demoscene then apparently, and this interview has the little detail of a past handle being VV as opposed to vV
http://amp.dascene.net/detail.php?view=8008&detail=interview
Anyway, if anyone has contact with Vincent it’d be really interesting to find out if he, as one of the early Renoise team, was somehow involved with the exact specific thing that got me hooked on electronic music as a kid, which eventually drew me to creating my own in renoise…
Maybe someone will like the result, but that’s not really the point; the story is probably more interesting than the song itself and wanted to share. Cheers.
Melting Mind by Soundwave / Lasse Makkonen - Original track from '94 (the dope-ass breakdown at about 2:15) -
https://1drv.ms/u/s!AqzMNKPYW_JDnGIcEKYqhCopJzuw
Re-envisioning/tribute (it’s a bit slow to start; exploring the sounds of the original - it’s the same tempo/key so the idea is I can easily mix the two live. Picks up a bit around 2min) -
