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Vicious (VSL)

entity person PC trackers #person #musician #vsl #aim-higher #toronto #house #dance #1995
aliases Vicious, Vicious / VSL, mike.kameka@realm.tor250.org, V.S.L., VSL
sources TW #31 — Faces in the Crowd: Interview with Vicious (Master of Darkness) · TW #34 — Faces in the Crowd: Interview with Deus Ex (Master of Darkness) · TW #43 — Interview with Pariah (V.S.L)
created 2026-08-30 · updated 2026-08-30

Founder of V.S.L. ("Variety's the Spice of Life"), a 14-member Toronto dance-music group started around April 1995, and a member of Aim Higher; interviewed by Master of Darkness for traxweekly's Faces in the Crowd in October 1995. No real name is printed; the contact address is mike.kameka@realm.tor250.org. The single source for this page is that interview (source: s-tw031-interview-vicious); deus-ex was interviewed as "another VSL member" three weeks later (source: s-tw034-interview-deus-ex).

Facts#

  • Composing since about late 1994: dropped by Mazurka for "holding the group back", then the short-lived Toronto group DDT, then VSL, whose first thirty releases were almost all his. Veterans of VSL: pariah, E, d.j. XL. Inspired to start by Moby of Anasthasia.
  • Style: euro dance on the surface, "true underground house" underneath — "simple, repetitious"; an all-house disk in progress; wants a record deal but promises not to leave the PC scene (see commercial-tracking).
  • Argues that sample-ripping is the nature of dance music ("House music was born from stealing"; "take it as a compliment"); originality is in the use of a sample.
  • His GUS ACE cannot record, so he buys sample CDs and prefers 16-bit 44 kHz samples.
  • Releases prefixed V-, mostly XM, on ftp.cdrom.com — among them "Witch Doktor" (two mixes), "Tonight", "Breaking Free" (S3M), "Can You Feel My Love", "At The Break Of Dawn", "Day Dreaming", "Escape from Ya Brain", "Da Euro-Grooves" — and the vsl-dj disks; FITC's reviewers recommended "Tranquility Within" (XM, August 1995).
  • pariah joined V.S.L after DDT: the group "started off small, then we grew rapidly, and we learned a lot along the way"; its 1995 output included MTM releases and the five VSL DJ's Dream Disks (vsl-dj-1.zip … vsl-dj-5.zip); master-of-darkness remembers DDT with Vicious and "Imagix (now paganus)" (source: s-tw043-interview-pariah).

deus-ex · sample-ripping · gravis-ultrasound · commercial-tracking · traxweekly · tracker-scene-history · pariah · master-of-darkness

Sources#

s-tw031-interview-vicious · s-tw034-interview-deus-ex · s-tw043-interview-pariah

source file wiki/entities/vicious.md · graph