TW #67 — Interview with U4IA (Mage)

Mage (Glen Dwayne Warner) interviewed u4ia by e-mail over "a month and a half or so" — "a well-known Amiga musician" whose name, the preface says, is "known throughout the internet by trackers everywhere, despite his never having entered a compo"; U4IA corrects that he did release musicdisks in his Megawatts days. Nearly 6,000 words; the facts are kept here, the life story only in outline.

Key claims#

• James "Jim" Young, 27, system administrator for the Bristol University Computing Service ("You could almost say I'm a net cop"). Handle chosen with a friend in Manchester "after a fair few cans of McEwans Export"; other names over the years: Fugazi, Stasis, Doozer, U4iaJnr, U4iajoplin, The Uninvited Guest, F8 — used partly to test "if it was the music or the name" people followed.
• Groups: formed Megawatts with Bosco; then CryptoBurners, then Mad Dancers Make Art; groupless in 1996, talking to [CUBIK] about a new PC group. Never entered a demo or music compo — "It's sad the way people vote for names instead of the music sometimes".
• Started "around 7 years" earlier on an Amiga A500 with SoundTracker 1.0, without any manual — six months of "accidentally dropping a 2 in an efx column"; released "over 150 or so" tunes, written "in the thousands", many abandoned after six patterns on floppies (never owned a hard disk; in 1996 no computer of his own).
• Theory "not very" important — used once, in "1993.mod" (a Pachelbel canon variation): "If you're following a theory, then surely you are only creating what has gone before!!?"; "Just write what sounds good to you".
• Strengths then and now: as U4IA, "variation of samples", weaknesses "the lack of quality and channels" ("8 bit 4 channels was the top") and "listening to much to other people"; as F8, "the sound of the underground" and not caring what people think.
• Own top five: "Silence Is A Rhythm" (unreleased, 8-channel fasttracker-2 XM, ambient breakbeat), "Klim's Theme" (4-channel piano piece for a friend who took his own life), "Jungle Bells '93" (Enya and Muppets samples; its beat "featured in nearly every rave hardcore mod for about 3 months after"), "Take a Trip From Me (Mobieus)" (released with ProTracker 3.10 by CryptoBurners and Maw on an Amiga Format cover disk — see protracker), "Lioth's Theme" (over two years in "the top 100 mods list"). Others' tracks: Maruku's "Above Ground" and "Steve Spam", Walkman's "Klisje pas klisje", Heatbeat's "Scrambled Minds", Babydee's "Beautiful People"; "people with talent": Jam & Spoon, H0llyW00d, [CUBIK].
• Style "underground dance related"; listens to Radio 1 essential mixes (LTJ Bukem, Billy Nasty, Coldcut, Nick Warren), "angry house", intelligent breakbeat; "I hate lyrics in a song; they get in the way of the music".
• Equipment (1996): at work a 486-33 with 8 MB and an SB16 ("just changed from the Audio Trix Pro card as nothing supports it"), Walkman-style tape and CD players; at partner Skye's "mini studio" an Atari STe (2 MB) running Cubase, Akai S-950 and E-mu ESI-32 samplers, a Cheetah MS6 analogue module, a Roland JD-990, an Alesis Quadraverb, a Studiomaster 16-channel mixer, a Yamaha MIDI keyboard.
• Trackers: fasttracker-2 2.06 — "looks and feels and reacts like a tracker from my Amiga days. Why should I confuse myself learning a new way, when I already know another way that works?"; FastTracker 1 lacked cut/paste and sample editing ("Leave Me Alone" was written in it); FT2.06's volume envelopes and panning are "so close to CD quality"; scream-tracker-3 "far too much like Word Perfect... Alt shift F4 when the moon is high and the tide is out and you might just get to the sample load screen", and no mouse; ModEdit (about 1991) "rough".
• Sampling voices: Annie Lennox ("Sampled Annie", "U4IA's Dracula") because her voice "alters much like an analog synth does. The sound progresses instead of sounding the same all the time"; "diva" voices, Naimee Coleman, Celine Dion; "some things are just begging to be messed about with" (a jungle remix of Oasis's "Wonderwall").
• Why he stopped in 1994: the A500 died in February 1994; the CD-ROM market "whipping stuff off ftp sites and selling it" — stopping releases was the only way to keep his work off them; 30–40 e-mails a day demanding music ("a MOD machine"); dissatisfaction with his progress; a four-month drug binge. "Leave Me Alone" carried the message "This will be the last ever mod from U4IA... I don't even have a computer anymore."
• The comeback as F8 was "a con" with Dr_phuqt (Pete Mills): breakbeat/jungle/acid/hard-house tunes dropped on rare FTP sites ("in new Zealand and then in Finland") until people hunted them; when they came clean "nobody believed that F8 was actually me". An Australian band had taken the name U4IA (and SGI used it for graphics files).
• Ripping: "'Borrowing'... of a sound from a tune to be used in a different manner, I think is fine"; reselling a reconstructed tune deserves "the wrath of the copyright laws"; "people who say 'hey that's my bass drum' really need to get out more"; vocal samples deserve respect — "a creation of nature, not a creation of computers"; the dance industry was built on unlicensed samples and record bosses' hypocrisy (sample-ripping).
• Commercial: demo tapes For God's Sake, Give Us a Chance and Mind Your Head (US$20) got no label response; refused £200 per tune from a band — "I'm not in the business of making other people rich from my work"; friends Tim Bran (Dreadzone) and Willy Henshall (Londonbeat) rate his music; member of the Res Rocket Surfer online band (over 2,000 members, 25 core jammers); goal: "To make a living writing music. And that's it." (commercial-tracking)
• Would remake "Leave Me Alone" in "16-bit 44Khz" for CD.
• Advice: "distort your samples and be happy"; "If you like it, it's music. Experiment and don't go for the norm all the time."

Practical takeaways#

• An Amiga-generation composer's reason for FT2 over ST3/IT in 1996: ProTracker familiarity, plus envelopes and panning (fasttracker-2).
• A working musician's 1996 sample chain — hardware samplers and analogue modules into a tracker on a 486 with an SB16 — for comparison with recording-samples.
• Vocal samples work when the voice "progresses" like a synth; the same criterion applies to any sample chosen for instrument-design.
• Distribution ethics from the author's side: free spreading welcome, paid BBS/CD-ROM access "nothing more than theft" (commercial-tracking, sample-ripping).

Notable quotes#

• "you lot have it easy today. I didn't even have a manual or text document to tell me what all the commands did." — U4IA, on SoundTracker 1.0.
• "Samples are the most innovative design in music for millenniums. But then, I would say that =8*)" — U4IA.

Relevance#

The Amiga jungle/breakbeat lineage seen from the PC scene; SoundTracker-era learning; FT2 versus ST3 from an outsider; the CD-ROM exploitation that also drove basehead's and kosmic's disclaimers; a pseudonym experiment about names versus music (tracker-scene-history).

Pages touched#

u4ia, fasttracker-2, scream-tracker-3, protracker, sample-ripping, commercial-tracking, recording-samples, instrument-design, tracker-scene-history, traxweekly.