Ultrabeat
A music-only techno "tribe" founded about March 1996 by injekted and subhuman — "no coding, no graphics… just the music" — for ravers and "foreign techno heads", with a proposed five-member cap and the five-musicians as its structural model. The main source is Cerulean's traxweekly interview after the first release (source: s-tw054-interview-injekted-and-subhuman).
Facts#
- Members in April 1996: Sybaris (a non-scene raver and Subhuman's schoolmate), Injekted, Subhuman, Canned Ice, Cubik (about to leave for his own Norwegian group, Beam) and, newly, balrog. "Structurally based on FM: limited membership, music only"; co-op disks planned with the Swedish group dr3amsource and with Beam (source: s-tw054-interview-injekted-and-subhuman).
- Releases: Lucid (April 1996; with Sybaris's Higher and Higher), rushed out and passed to 60–70 people overnight by XDCC on #trax; planned: the all-acid disk Happiness is a 303 and a two-song Sybaris single. Web
www.open.org/seth/ultrabeat(source: s-tw054-interview-injekted-and-subhuman). - Position: against kosmic's "empire" that appeals to everyone and FM's mainstream, a group whose downloads are predictable in style; "with good samples, you can make stuff that sounds like real vinyl" (source: s-tw054-interview-injekted-and-subhuman).
- Balrog had still been kosmic in January 1996 (source: s-tw042-interview-balrog) and was still listed as "balrog (Ultrabeat)" in December 1996 (source: s-tw080-trax-mass-interview) — the move is explained in the April 1996 interview, so no contradiction.
- Injekted had earlier been Zer0, founder of defiance (source: s-tw054-interview-injekted-and-subhuman).
- Reputation: ryan-sprott and Kleitus (July 1996): "ultrabeat rewls" (source: s-tw063-interview-ryan-sprott); khyron (September 1997) counted "some guy in ultrabeat" among his favourites (source: s-tw111-interview-khyron).
Related#
injekted · subhuman · balrog · five-musicians · kosmic · defiance · tracker-scene-history
Sources#
s-tw054-interview-injekted-and-subhuman · s-tw080-trax-mass-interview · s-tw063-interview-ryan-sprott · s-tw111-interview-khyron · s-tw042-interview-balrog