TW #35 — Interview with Loki (Trifixion)

Trifixion's first real TraxWeekly article, an edited IRC interview with loki, a 17-year-old Oregon tracker who had just joined zinc's group Radiance. Printed under General Articles, outside the Faces in the Crowd series.

Key claims#

• Charles Odom, 17, of Albany, Oregon (a street address is printed; omitted here). Tracking "about 1 year and a half"; listening to mods for two or three years; an old school friend gave him ST3 in 1994; internet account for about five months. Entered MC3 — placement: "let's not talk about that".
• Groups: SPiCE, "which dj_moses put together with HFR (Happy Fetus Records)" — one musicdisk so far, member for about three months — and Radiance, "put together by Zinc and imager", joined in the previous two weeks.
• First mods heard: dirt.mod from a local board, then nolimit.mod, "a really killer toon" he was still looking for.
• Influences: "I phear skaven hardcore", breakbeat and techno, "mostly traxx stuff", u4ia; commercial: 808 State, Marilyn Manson, Depeche Mode, Erasure, Steve Vai, Joe Satriani.
• Why: "music was my first true love … a nuclear core in me that aches to get out"; he would rather be blind than deaf.
• Scene: "getting pretty intense"; competition between groups "aspires people to do better, and more". Future of tracked music: "midi is too expensive, and analog sounds so much better" — some company will notice "there's some money to be made" and "some of the REALLY good trackers will get $$"; he fears the scene becoming "a big exploit like 2 Unlimited". He does not track to get rich — "I do it for the love of music"; praise is nice "but I really don't care".
• Styles written: classical, easy listening, techno, breakbeat; favourites classical, then breakbeat — "classical is a deeper outlet than techno". Favourite own tune "Father" (l-fthr.s3m); all his files are prefixed l- and were to go on cdrom.com. Does origami.

Practical takeaways#

Nothing technical; the piece is a portrait. The l- prefix is another instance of the 1995 habit of author-prefixed filenames (compare ZNC-, V-, fdn-).

Notable quotes#

• "Midi is too expensive, and analog sounds so much better." — Loki, on why tracking has a future.

Relevance#

A second account of Radiance's founding (Zinc names Jake Blues and Acidfrog in s-tw032-interview-zinc; Loki names Zinc and imager), the existence of SPiCE / Happy Fetus Records (dj_moses), and an early "someone will pay trackers" prediction for commercial-tracking.

Pages touched#

loki, zinc, skaven, scream-tracker-3, commercial-tracking, compos, acidfrog.