TW #42 — Interview with Balrog (Kosmic)

zinc interviews balrog, a kosmic trance tracker from Quebec who had "never been interviewed" because he released little during a bad year; the piece records his tracker history (ST 2.23 → ModEdit → X-Tracker → FT2), a wish list for the scene and a dream team of trackers.

Key claims#

• Samuel Cote, 18, first-year computer engineering at Laval University (Quebec, Canada); runs the BBS Imagina. New-year resolutions: a job, gear, and a vinyl or CD release by the end of 1996.
• Believes he was the first Canadian to join Kosmic; other Canadians in it in January 1996: Krystall, Gooroo, Barrye. Kosmic was his second group after a local one that "never went anywhere".
• Path: bass and guitar for about three years, dropped; interest in tracking from 1991 through friends' Amiga demos; techno; collected mods by modem, found "scream tracker v2.23 i think", then "majored" to ModEdit 2.0; used MMEDIT "back when ST3 was only a rumor". ST 3.0 "was buggy as hell on my machine", so when D-Lusion gave every Kosmic member a copy of X-Tracker he used that until fasttracker-2 came out. FT2: "a great tracker, tho the interface takes a while to get used to … with all those envelopes and things, i just couldn't resist". Started with MODs and STMs, makes XMs now.
• Three changes he would make: replace the GUS with a card with "a fast programmable DSP, loads of mem and digital outs (sounds like the AWE32)"; make newbies stop releasing every song they track; make the scene friendlier — soundcard/OS/tracker arguments are "nothing short of futile" — with more cooperation between musicians "like what they did in FM".
• Dream party: everyone's flights paid, a week long, on the beaches of Goa, live acts between compos, "eased-out rules" and on-site compos.
• Dream team, PC: necros, basehead, maelcum, Chuck Biscuits, skaven, Mellow-D, Keith303, plus Zodiak and Dune; Amiga: Audiomonster, Dizzy, Jogeir, Heatbeat, 4-mat, Nuke.
• Style "pretty close to what you'd call trance": fat pads, "lots of acid", smooth beatless parts, groove. Influences: Hardfloor, Eat Static, Koxbox, Spicelab, Resistance D, The Orb, Aphex Twin, Cores, Sour Mash, Explizit, DJ Misjah & Groovehead, Sun Electric, Tangerine Dream; classical: Bach, Stravinsky, Orff, Mussorgsky, Prokofiev, Saint-Saëns, Mahler.
• Gets his music from ftp.cdrom.com, ftp.arosnet.se, kosmic.wit.com and ftp.germany.eu.net; used to call the boards Spasm-o-tron and Trancentral2.
• Young tracker with a future: "Sybaris/TiME's stuff is VERY good".
• Modules in software have a future, "mostly in games": better than General MIDI, "MUCH smaller than pre-recorded songs", and they leave CD-ROM bandwidth for video; tracking is "an easy and inexpensive way to compose music".
• FT2 colour scheme: dark blue and green desktop, the rest mauve and light green.
• Greets include Maelcum "for letting me into kosmic and not kicking me out because i didn't release much", doomsday, Krystall, Cyre, White Wizard, chuckb, Necros, Basehead, Flossy, Phoenix, Maral, The Finn, Diablo, Ior, gd, ms_saigon and "the rr crew"; hopes to see everyone at NAID 96.

Practical takeaways#

• Envelopes were the feature that moved a 1995 ST/X-Tracker user to FT2.
• Release less: "make sure the quality stays at a decent level."
• The case for modules in games, in 1996 terms: size, quality over GM, CD bandwidth.

Notable quotes#

• "All that arguing about which soundcard/os/tracker/sampler/soda is nothing short of futile." — Balrog.

Relevance#

A Kosmic member's tool history through the pre-ST3 era (STM, ModEdit, MMEDIT, X-Tracker), an early wish for a DSP-based card over the GUS, and one of the few explicit 1996 arguments for modules in commercial software (see commercial-tracking). Cross-checks the wiki's 20mc tables, where Balrog placed 3rd in compo #2 and joint 2nd in compo #6 (s-tw032-20-minute-chip-compo), and the December 1996 mass interview that lists him as Ultrabeat (s-tw080-trax-mass-interview).

Pages touched#

balrog, kosmic, fasttracker-2, scream-tracker-3, gravis-ultrasound, commercial-tracking, tracker-scene-history, five-musicians, ultrabeat, zinc.