TW #16 — Interview with Populus (Psibelius)

psibelius's farewell interview with populus, one of traxweekly's founders, on why he is leaving the newsletter and on the "dumb techno" he sees flooding the scene in mid-1995. The issue prints a disclaimer before and after it ("a controlled viewpoint, of one person's insight").

Key claims#

• Nicolas Roberge, aka Populus; member of epinicion and defiance; studies computer science. "I founded TraxWeekly with Neurosis a while back": he set up the WWW page and the mail, then, short of time, "put popcorn in charge (which he wanted to do)" — but kept being asked for everything on the channel; on top of that he lost his account (his provider, LLC, went from C$30 to C$51 a month for 40 hours). He is "leaving TW for good" and no longer has to bug maelcum for his column; the last issues are "a superb job". Reader mail was mostly complaints about the ASCII art making the newsletter too big.
• Style: "I compose what I feel"; likes realistic-sounding tunes within his equipment's limits; Wild Amazon on the Otherness disk came from a "hotel bar mingo" feeling and a big bottle of beer. Against necros's stand that being drunk while tracking is bad: "when you're drunk you forget your surroundings and feel alone with the tracker".
• The complaint: "Music done with no soul. People trying to track a dumb bassdrum on 2 tracks" — "big dumb phat techno", a bass drum hitting at the same intervals on two channels, no melody, no mood; new composers get acclaim for it, so it floods #trax and the hornet archive, and "some of these songs pass through Epinicion". Psibelius adds that XM's >64k samples "added to the noise" (see xm-format).
• Good techno is possible: Maelcum "and some of his gang have made it very smooth and complicated"; basehead, Krystall, Maelcum, Mental Floss, Inspekdah Deck "did very good techno", and Basehead's article in #15 parodied the bad kind. Other names: the old Amiga musicians, Zodiak, Necros, Basehead, Jak; Necros's KFMF tunes "were very good (except for that bugs in my head thing)"; DRUNK.S3M; Moby (Frederic), jugi and HMW (Zane) as examples of what is disappearing. Of the Belgian group Pure, Blue Adonis, Blaze Runner and George released the best music while some post-merger members "have just saved up dumb .XM files for fun". Mazurka's disk is "a souvenir" of NAID — some nice tunes, some awful.
• Advice: "Techno music can be easy to do. But try to do little harmonies, even if it's harder"; "make your songs in the intent that you will listen this in ten years. It has to have a mood"; the old Amiga musicians (Hollywood, Moby, SideWinder) were "very bad in their beginnings" and evolved unique styles; "don't take the easy lane".
• The new Demonews "has no style anymore … just an email message written by many people".

Practical takeaways#

• The anti-pattern of 1995: the same bass drum on two channels at fixed intervals, nothing else moving. Give a techno track a mood and small harmonies.
• The ten-year test: write what you will still want to hear in ten years.

Notable quotes#

• "Music done with no soul. People trying to track a dumb bassdrum on 2 tracks." — Populus.
• "Make your songs in the intent that you will listen this in ten years." — Populus.
• "We are doing our best to deliver free of charge this newsletter. It's from our hearts." — Populus.

Relevance#

The founding of TraxWeekly in its founder's words (Populus and Neurosis; the hand-over to Popcorn), and the earliest printed complaint about the techno flood — a precursor of the 1995 chiptune-glut and the 1996 realism debates. Composition advice for tracking-workflow.

Pages touched#

populus, traxweekly, epinicion, defiance, psibelius, maelcum, basehead, necros, jugi, blaze-runner, tracking-workflow, xm-format, hornet, tracker-scene-history.