TW #54 — Interview with Quantam Porcupine
zinc interviews quantam-porcupine (properly "Quantum Porcupine", as he points out at the end), a 17-year-old pianist-turned-tracker who came from Music Construction Set on the C64 through Whacker Tracker to scream-tracker-3, and who argues for using as few channels as possible.
Key claims#
- Joshua Shagam, 17, computer-science freshman at New Mexico State University; also codes. Eight years of piano lessons from age 5, "of my own free will"; composing for piano from age 7.
- First "tracking": Music Construction Set on the C64. Real tracking from 1992 with Whacker Tracker, found after the
.MODcollection bundled with his first sound card, a Pro Audio Spectrum 16 — "if I hadn't heard Klisje Paa Klisje, I probably wouldn't have hunted .MOD-related stuff down". Tried MODedit ("too user-friendly"), found ScreamTracker 3.01 on AOL and has used ST3 since, now 3.21. - No particular style; would like to write like purple-motion's earlier Inside Out or Sundance, "but it never comes out quite right". Influences: the Beatles, Phish, Matthew Sweet; Mozart, Beethoven, a little Bach. Many of his songs parody whatever is overplayed on the radio — On That Happy Note mocks the Foo Fighters; High On Prozac; Keep Refrigerated (an unfinished Offspring parody). Remixed Live's "Lightning Crashes" and the hidden track on the Offspring's Smash.
- Channels: "I've always preferred when people optimize it for as few as possible" — a favourite is Purple Motion's Minimum Velocity "because he fit it all into just 2 channels"; he "can't stand people who use 16 or 32 channels", with exceptions when all are put to good use, e.g. Me Tarzan, You Jane by MiG / Weird Magic.
- Impressed by MiG (who sends him prototypes) and necros. Does not hunt tracked music; hears most of it in demos.
- Direction: semi-acoustic and more mellow; reworking his first S3M, "a mellow guitar/flute thingy". Nobody offline has heard his music; distribution via IRC and his pages (
http://web.nmsu.edu/~jshagam,http://infinity.beve.blacksburg.va.us/~porcpine). Thanks MiG, Mellow-D, Rabite Man.
Practical takeaways#
- Channel economy as a value: fewer channels, each fully used (see channel-interleaving).
- A path into the scene typical of 1992–96: sound-card bundle of MODs → a first tracker → ST3 via an online service.
Notable quotes#
- "I've always preferred when people optimize it for as few as possible." — Quantam Porcupine, on channel counts.
Relevance#
A pianist's reasons for ST3's keyboard-driven editor, a C64 Music Construction Set origin, and one of the few explicit statements of the "fewer channels" aesthetic outside the chiptune compos.
Pages touched#
quantam-porcupine, scream-tracker-3, channel-interleaving, chiptune, purple-motion, commodore-64, tracker-scene-history.