TW #54 — Interview with Scirocco
zinc interviews scirocco, a groupless fasttracker-2 user at 4 a.m. in Manhattan on his first real night in #trax — a self-taught "lurker on the sidelines" with a five-star XM on ftp.cdrom.com and advice about quality and networking that he wishes he had followed himself.
Key claims#
- Ian Lyman, 20, film-production major at New York University; grew up in Billings, Montana.
- Tracking since 1993, when he got his first Sound Blaster Pro and "spent a hundred bucks on Bram Graveland's Tetra Compositor 4 channel tracker"; then MTM; then FT2 from early 1995. About twelve releases, no permanent group, and "the distinction of having the only XM on ftp.cdrom.com with a rating of 5 stars — although I think that I really didn't deserve it" (see hornet).
- Violin from age 5 to seventh grade; saxophone from fourth grade to the present, jazz band, jazz/blues.
- Advice: "the most important thing is quality. Don't upload tunes unless you are really proud of them. The second most important thing is networking. Spend as much time on #trax as possible … your name = your name."
- Styles: technopop, industrial, classical, rock. Tracked influences: purple-motion, Lizardking, basehead, The Krakken; non-tracked: KMFDM, Machines of Loving Grace, Enya, Loreena McKennitt, Depeche Mode, U2, Wagner, Beethoven, Dvořák, Utah Saints, Single Gun Theory, Meat Beat Manifesto.
- Would change "the gulf between the european and american ends of the scene", most visible between the big names on each side; Europeans "seem very bitter about the fact that the US has entered into a scene that, until a couple of years ago, belonged solely to them", but Americans "are just as much at fault". Zinc agrees ("Those Euroz act like snobs sometimes").
- Learned with no outside help, "picking apart other tracker's work to figure out how they do what they do", assuming Purple Motion and Basehead were sick of mail from beginners.
- Everything at ftp.cdrom.com and linked from
http://pages.nyu.edu/~igl2670; thanks ParticleX, GliTch, Xerxes, Tobbe, Diablo. Would rather lose smell than hearing ("I would die if I were deaf").
Practical takeaways#
- Release only what you are proud of; be present where the listeners are.
- Learn by dissecting modules you admire (the same method Pariah, Daedalus and the tips articles recommend).
Notable quotes#
- "Don't upload tunes unless you are really proud of them." — Scirocco.
Relevance#
A tool path through the pre-FT2 shareware era (Tetra Compositor, MTM), an outsider's release advice for tracking-workflow, the only sourced claim of a five-star XM on the archive, and the Europe/America divide for tracker-scene-history.
Pages touched#
scirocco, fasttracker-2, hornet, tracking-workflow, tracker-scene-history, purple-motion, basehead, zinc.