TW #3 — Interview with the Five Musicians (Populus)

Group IRC interview (1995-03-26) with the newly formed five-musicians (FM): Big Jim, basehead, necros and Mellow-D; purple-motion missed the appointment. The editor frames it as the answer to "all the flames" the union had drawn.

Key claims#

• Real names and ages: Big Jim = James Storer, 19, student (Bradford, UK); Mellow-D = Jaakko Manninen, 18, net admin (Finland); Necros = Andy Sega, 19, computer-science major with a philosophy minor; Basehead = Dan Grandpre, 18, musician in a real-life band.
• Origin: Necros and Mellow-D wanted "a new music group with just a few people in it (to control everything easier)"; they asked Big Jim and Basehead; Big Jim proposed the name FM ("we could use it for four AND five"); the band formed on IRC about two weeks before the interview (March 1995).
• Purpose (Necros): the PC scene offered no room for cooperative efforts, so FM exists "to promote each other learning from our individual styles" and to make music with a group mentality rather than one person supplying all ideas. FM calls itself a band because it works in co-ops: "a group is a bunch of people that do stuff independently under a common name, a band is a bunch of people that do music together, as one".
• Necros and Mellow-D left kosmic (KFMF) — Necros because "it is kinda silly to be in more than one music group at once", Mellow-D for lack of time (KFMF, FM, S!P, HDC and a band); Basehead stayed in Kosmic out of loyalty to Maelcum.
• No release schedule: "You just compose when you can". Realization 2 became FM's first release instead of leading Necros's stalled LD musicdisk.
• Specialities: Big Jim — theory and melody; Mellow-D — "the non-theory side", everything by ear; Necros — "chords, lots of chords, big chords, and lots of insane harmonies", demo style because it is purely melodic, plus attempts at realistic-sounding tracks; Basehead — smooth jazz, ambient, slower music, percussion and mood.
• Training: Basehead — years of live piano, drums, sax and "quite a bit of theory"; Mellow-D — none; Necros — five years of piano lessons, ten years playing, five years of informal theory; Big Jim — GCSE and A-level music (A grades), electric and classical guitar.
• Big Jim entered his first PC MOD in Music Contest II and placed 40th in the rookie section; joined Valhalla via Sandman.
• Members' favourites of each other: Mellow-D's Fast Charger 2, Essence, Dawn of the Child, Ruskeaa, Algebra; Big Jim's Hangover, Of a Land Beyond Hope, Forever; Necros's Realization, Bugs in my Head; Basehead's Arcadia 2, the unreleased nfunk; Purple Motion's Starshine (middle section) and everything but Escape from Pori.
• Group structure: none — "we are all equals".

Practical takeaways#

• Inspiration comes in bursts: Big Jim's tracking "increased way beyond reasonable proportions" in September 1994; Basehead wrote three songs in three days the week he lost internet access.
• Necros's sign-off: "a siner and a set of FC ripped samples do not a mod creator make" — a 1995 dig at Future Crew sample rips and sine-generator instruments as a substitute for musicianship.

Notable quotes#

• "Don't take the scene too serious. Nothing you do in it will harm you in real life." — Mellow-D.

Relevance#

Fixes the FM line-up, the reasons for its founding, the members' real names and their theory backgrounds — the base facts behind the necros and basehead pages and the chord-theory debate of #39–40.

Pages touched#

five-musicians, necros, basehead, purple-motion, kosmic, future-crew.