TW #29 — Faces in the Crowd #4: Smeghead (Master of Darkness)

"Faces In The Crowd: The Publication — Interview #4", conducted on Saturday 30 September 1995 by master-of-darkness, now an FITC interviewer, with smeghead of Terraformer; an 18-title release listing follows. (Interview #3 does not appear in TraxWeekly.)

Key claims#

• "My alias is 'the smeghead', my name is David Oranchak, my group is Terraformer" (the listing spells it "TerraFormers"); composing "a little over a year". From Fayetteville, NC, studying at Virginia Tech, where he met Kiwidog, Terraformer's founder/coder, who liked the tunes he released in the summer of 1994 (Pollution) and asked him in; the other members are from Northern Virginia.
• Musical background: used to play guitar, "not all that good". No theory: "i don't believe songs should fit some sort of defined 'theory'." Guitar has not transferred to tracking — "it is very very difficult to get a decent guitar sound out of a MOD or S3M … unless you've got 1000k of pre-made guitar riffs". Master of Darkness: guitars in modules are looped samples, good only for chords, "other than big-jim" (big-jim).
• Tool: scream-tracker-3 — "it's usually just stream of consciousness that drives me and screamtracker 3".
• Style: "my tunes are my tunes"; he tracks techno "because it is easy to track" and his non-techno tunes "end up sounding strange"; also a neo-classical piece and mellow tunes; mood pieces Donovan's Carnival and Parliament of Eternity; energetic tunes "are easier to make". "For every good techno tune, there exist 20 that are terrible"; demo music "requires chord progressions and all that crap" (crap = "stuff", he clarifies); listeners prefer his techno — "the adrenaline component".
• Tracks "out of sheer boredom", for fun: "i'm just a big kid with a big toy"; the fun element is lost where groups "blow their own horn", but demos are getting "lots of original effects, and more artistic components". Inspirations: LizardKing, PM (purple-motion), skaven, necros, CCCatch.
• Ratings: would like "a decent rating for a change in demonews"; "four guys voting on the songs of the scene ain't exactly a precise measurement", yet a one-star verdict is right "90% of the time" (Master of Darkness has had "a 1 1/2") — see hornet.
• Terraformer's FTP site: gremlinx.bevc.blacksburg.va.us, a tf/terraformer directory, "not up all the time".
• Releases on the Hornet archive (all S3M): the three-song disk smegpol1.zip; Another One Over My Head, TwoSpace, Attention Span, Scatterbug, Donovan's Carnival, Dystfunction, Effervescence, Generica, Epileptic Machine, Full Circle, MindStream, Martian Twilight, Opiate, SwineFlight, Parliament of Eternity, Rivet, Transition.

Practical takeaways#

• Guitar in a 1995 module meant sampled riffs, not single notes — the same route Necros took with sampled passages (see the-grey-note).
• Techno is easy to start and hard to make stand out; the second half is the work.

Notable quotes#

• "i'm just a big kid with a big toy" — Smeghead.
• "for every good techno tune, there exist 20 that are terrible" — Smeghead.

Relevance#

Another ST3 stream-of-consciousness tracker of 1995; the Hornet ratings seen from the receiving end; sampled riffs versus notes for realism-in-tracked-music; Master of Darkness's move from interviewee to FITC staff.

Pages touched#

smeghead, master-of-darkness, traxweekly, scream-tracker-3, hornet, necros, skaven, purple-motion, big-jim, the-grey-note, realism-in-tracked-music, 20-minute-chip-compo.