TW #111 — Interview with Khyron (again =) (Jeremy Rice)

Jeremy Rice catches khyron of kosmic on #trax — "a respected name in the Demoscene" who, the introduction says, was there when "the #coders people wanted all the musicians to stop flooding the channel with music talk and [they] created #trax". The "(again)" refers to Psibelius's "Khyron Unleashed" in #30 (12 October 1995), which is in the raw archive and not ingested. The editor's note: "Damn! I wish everyone were that easy to interview!"

Key claims#

• Paul Schultz, Cincinnati, Ohio — "without my job being here I'd leave it in a minute": he works for "the resurrected Moog Music, Inc.", building synthesizers and doing some sales ("about 80 hours last week"). Owns a Moog Liberation; had a Minimoog home from work for the night; the old Moogs have no MIDI, so he has only sampled them — "any analog synth with a guitar strap is a hell of a lot of fun". Handle from the Robotech villain.
• Tracked "about 3 1/2 years"; "havn't actually tracked anything new for a few months" — now MIDI sequencing on "my loan payment synths". MIDI versus tracking: "that's the beauty of tracked music, you can be completely broke and just steal samples and make some great music with it"; MIDI gives "realtime effects on the synthesizers, poweful sound programming capability you can't do with just straight sample playback"; for his Eno / Aphex Twin-style ambient experiments "working with real gear is MUCH more suitable than tracking". Wants to get into trance, which "takes a lot of work" to sound great; "I can do cheesy shit demo-techno pretty good, but that's not really the direction I wanna go" (midi-in-trackers, realism-in-tracked-music).
• Theory: "very little" — two years of bass in a punk band, the rest "as I went along"; the trance he likes "has a lot of chords to it, which takes some very basic thoery"; techno "doesn't rely so much on how much thoery it takes to make the riffs, but more on the arrangement side of it.. like ok drums go out here, slowly lead up a big crescendo into a big booming break with a kicking 909 kick" — "arrangement and production more than anything else" (arrangement).
• Scene quality in 1997: "a LOT more good musicians out there now than there were a few years ago.. but there's also a ton of really bad people"; a random download is more likely bad "even tho there's more good stuff now than ever".
• Favourites: basehead "for a while", Mellow-D ("a sound all to his own.. no one else tracks just like him"), B00MER, WAVE, "some guy in ultrabeat" (ultrabeat), "my oldskool favorite c-quence"; "anything from the TP3 4-channel compo"; lately more influenced by signed artists than trackers; not happy with his recent tracked work.
• A demo CD for labels would contain no tracked music: "I'd want it to sound as clean as humanly possible.. working with a 1 meg GUS doesn't leave much room for all 44.1k samples (i've done MIDI stuff with 18 megs used up on my K2000 before)" (gravis-ultrasound, commercial-tracking).
• History: first demo Amnesia by Renaissance (seen "sometime in 93"), then future-crew's Second Reality, "which of course at the time everyone went apeshit over"; started with MMEdit in 1994; joined RAM ("really awful music, they meant it too") with his first mod, under the handle Burger Death, then the ANSI group ACiD, and in late 1994 the KLF — "now know as Kosmic or KFMF" — when it had "only like 13 members and everyone knew each other"; its members "don't show an ego about anything (except Maelcum ofcourse =)"; would go groupless rather than join another. Music groups today are "kind of like a little cheesy version of a record label"; demo groups differ because they build "a big badass final project".
• Still grabs the winning demos from parties; "I used to be able to kick phoenix's ass in scenetriv, now I don't even stand a chance"; real work and responsibilities replaced "coming home at 3pm and tracking after getting a snack".
• Best modules: "200 miles from earth" (k_earth.xm), "wormhole" (k_worm.xm), "DreamState" (from the Restless scene mag).
• Advice: "if you're still young with lots of free time, bum around.. do whatever makes you happy. Once you have to go to work every day you'll miss it."

Practical takeaways#

• The honest 1997 trade-off between tracker and MIDI studio: sample-RAM ceilings (1 MB GUS versus 18 MB on a K2000) and real-time synth control against cost.
• Techno and trance are arrangement- and production-driven more than theory-driven — the same point hornet's rating staff made from the other side (arrangement).

Notable quotes#

• "that's the beauty of tracked music, you can be completely broke and just steal samples and make some great music with it." — Khyron.

Relevance#

A Kosmic member's account of the group in late 1994 (13 members, "KLF"), the #trax origin story, and a musician moving from the tracker to a Moog workbench and MIDI gear. Khyron dropped out of 20-minute-chip-compo #6 in 1995 (source: s-tw032-20-minute-chip-compo) and met liam-the-lemming at The Party 5 (source: s-tw066-interview-liam-the-lemming).

Pages touched#

khyron, kosmic, midi-in-trackers, gravis-ultrasound, commercial-tracking, realism-in-tracked-music, arrangement, tracker-scene-history, phoenix, maelcum, basehead, future-crew, hornet, traxweekly.