Flashback, tracks from the past – ERICADE.RADIO

So Tina Turner may not need another hero, but we need more villains! A proper villain has to have a reason to be who he or she is or we don't want them. So meet the villains of this episode:Andrew “I'm right – damn the consequences” Ryan - Bioshock 1.Donkey “But Mario is the evil one” Kong – The Donkey Kong series.Sarah “I will bathe in your blood, but I'm the victim here” Kerrigan – Starcraft 1 and 2.Robo “He's just like Hitler” Hitler – Castle Wolfestein.Wallace “Long, intellectual rant on why all is perfect and you suck” Breen – Halflife 1 and 2.Shodan “I'm god, now you curl up and die” – System Shock 1 and 2.(Ghost/Zombie/Whatever) Pirate “The incel of piracy” LeChuck – The Monkey Island series.

Ok, we covered the pirates. Now let's talk DRM or Digital Rights Management. It's the manual lookups, the code wheels, the servers that cannot validate your game and the bloody dongles…

Tonight, we go to the big Jazz club in the sky … Or maybe it’s the cloud where all the great Amiga, Atari and PC jazz-tracks can be found. DJ Daemon remembers one of Swedish radio’s best: Leif “Smokerings” Andersson and pays tribute to him. Are our parents that played records on vinyl and listened to the radio in the 50s any different than us, who played games and listened to computer music in the 80s?

The show

00:00 Flashback – track from the past – show intro

00:08 DJ Daemon speaks: Hello there, music lovers. Tonight we got something special for you. Jazz, swing, sweet and Dixie land signed the true greats like Woolters, Cyberg Jeff, Jakim and JossS. In this hour’s jazz session, the tracked music artists takes on your grandpa’s music.

00:32 Argh! and Ballistique – Smoke Rings

02:15 DJ Daemon introduces the show and talk s about how this hour’s tracked music only is an approximation of jazz.

02:50 Woolters – Alice in Dixieland

05:41 DJ Daemons speaks about Leif “Smokerings” Andersson and his legendary radio show by the same name that played lots of Jazz music.

06:37 Vocal of Rebels – Sweet Lorraine

08:08 DJ Daemon talks about Smoke Ring’s disdain for “modern jazz”, that he called “Migraine music”.

08:54 Akuma Pan – Lynx Tails

12:38 DJ Daemon talks about his mother and her brother sitting in their room listening to radio and vinyl records the same way my generations sat in our rooms playing games on the C64 and the Amiga.

13:32 Brainbug – Downtown Groove

15:29 DJ Daemon talks about BasiCode and listening to the airwaves to download programs.

16:36 cRim of Lemonride – J4zz?

19:51 DJ Daemon speaks about the Swedish radio station that broadcast computer programs in the 80s.

20:50 Woolters – Dixieland, Dixieland

23:14 DJ Daemon speaks about about Smokering’s disappointment in New York 1989.

24:19 EAD – Camille in my heart

26:26 DJ Daemon speaks about the techno and rave music of the 90s.

27:18 Aymes – “Mood Swing”

30:21 DJ Daemon dedicates the next song to his father, Janis.

30:51 Bert – Beerbelly II – remix

33:24 DJ Daemon talks about the connection between Jazz-artists and Amiga/Tracker-artists.

34:05 Cybelius – Schwinging the swing

36:55 DJ Daemon: What’s up on the station?

37:35 Fifth note – sweet

39:22 DJ Daemon speaks.

39:40 Cyborg Jeff – YAM 2 : Funky Dream

42:25 DJ Daemon speaks.

43:07 Jakim – Galatea…

46:55 DJ Daemon talks about the upcoming one year anniversery of the station.

47:43 JosSs – BlackMissisipi

48:52 DJ Daemon speaks.

49:29 Junkie of Latex – Monkey Island v1

50:47 DJ Daemon speaks.

51:16 Lee Banyard – Ok!

54:08 DJ Daemon speaks.

54:40 Magnar Harestad – Humble Down The Road

58:01 DJ Daemon speaks.

58:24 Nuke of Anarchy – Acid Jazz (part1)

Tonight, we go to the big Jazz club in the sky … Or maybe it's the cloud where all the great Amiga, Atari and PC jazz-tracks can be found. DJ Daemon remembers one of Swedish radio's best: Leif “Smokerings” Andersson and pays tribute to him. Are our parents that played records on vinyl and listened to the radio in the 50s any different than us, who played games and listened to computer music in the 80s?

On wednesday, a major part of the station failed mid-broadcast. The station was back an hour later, but left the recording desk inoperable. DJ Daemon has fixed up enough of it to allow the podcast to be made. But no time for cool stories. It's about the music and some upcoming features.

Forndata 2021 Summer is over and brought a lot of joy to the demoworld from Visby in Sweden. It was off course online only, but presented demo-, C64- and tracked music compos as you'd expect from a true demo party. The start was on time and there were few problems until the OctaMed-tune from heck just would play and was disqualified. The line up was good and the tunes were all up to the standard you'd expect from them. The interviews were quite unique with Swedish minister of digitilization, Anders Ygeman and legendary Commodore techs Bil Herd and Dave Haynie. We also got a really nice live interview with Chris Huelsbeck, the tracked music god of sorts.

Today we talk about the pirates! Not the Errol Flynn type, but rather the community of Warez Doodz and crackers are under scrutiny here. DJ Daemon delves into this from a Swedish perspective.I know I may seem negative to the warez community, but that's mostly the warez BBSes which used to have a mentality of superiority that struck me as rather unappealing. I'm kinda amazed by the tecnhological prowess of the cracker groups. But personally I walked away from downloading piracy copied games when I got my modem, as I didn't like the community. For me the demo scene and the normal BBS:es was the thing I loved and respected. When I got a steady salary, buying software was the way I eventually went. Sure, I used Napster as well. But that for a later show, I guess.

From France comes the Shadow party 2021 and between 2021-05-21 and 2021-05-23 the virtual doors opened for a brand new demo party. We jumped at the chance to broadcast the tunes the same day they competed, so we did not know who had won. But we know now:

The winners:

1) TDTTDHAD – The Demo Track That Didn’t Have A Demo – CS-Jay / Desire ^ Persuasive Music & Slide / Polka Brothers

2) Evolution / Ma2e and Aceman

3) Brightstar – Mystra / Brainstorm & Nectarine (Amiga 4-channels)

So all the entries will be played and the artists presented to you. DJ Daemon also reviews the demo party and is generally very happy about it.

The broadcast:

00:00 Amiga Flashback – show intro

00:10 DJ Daemon speaks: Try as it might, Covid19 has been unable to break the demo scene. Coming to a screen near you, the online Shadow party 2021 sends its signal from France in Europe. Today, on the 22nd of May 2021, seven contestants battled it out in the old school tracker competition. As we don’t have the results yet, I will play them i my own order. First out is e!ghtbm from Poland and “All my circuits”. Yes, it’s a Futurama reference.

00:09 Speech duration: 00:42

00:47 e!ghtbm – All my circuits

04:14 DJ Daemon speaks: Time to take a deep breath, because the next entry is called TDTTDHAD – The Demo Track That Didn’t Have A Demo – CS-Jay of Desire and Persuasive Music and Slide of Polka Brothers. CS-Jay used to be known as Jazz and has a long career making music for the game industry and also got a record deal in 2000. Slide is a Danish artist with many tunes to his name.

04:14 Speech duration: 00:40

04:48 CS-Jay of Desire and Persuasive Music and Slide of Polka Brothers – The Demo Track That Didn’t Have A Demo (tdttdhad)

08:41 DJ Daemon speaks: Making music on an Amstrad CPC? Sure, it’s not a problem for Glafouk who really knows how to push three tracks to the max. The tune is called SontagBeat and Glafouk hails from France.

08:41 Speech duration: 00:23

08:56 Glafouk – SontagBeat

12:13 DJ Daemon speaks: Picture yourself on a boat in a river and for some reason Einstein sits by your side. That’s what Bird may have been thinking when he created Row with Einstein. Bird comes from Corsica which is part of France.

12:13 Speech duration: 00:22

12:30 Bird of Syntex – Row with Einstein

14:50 DJ Daemon speaks: Polish artist AceMan often stands for the weird of the tracker scene with crazy but great tunes like “Wonka Honk” and “Vintage groove”. Now he’s back together with mAZE and the tune Evolution. mAZE is Norwegian by the way.

14:51 Speech duration: 00:25

15:10 Ma2e and Aceman – Evolution

19:15 DJ Daemon speaks: Amiga four channels deliver the goods again, as provided by Mystra from Brainstorm and Nectarine. Mystras real name is Kjell Pedersen and he’s from Norway. Should we even plug the competition? Sure, why not, the group Nectarine was started by the retro tracker music radio station with the same name.

19:15 Speech duration: 00:13

19:22 Speech duration: 00:33

19:49 Mystra of Brainstorm and Nectarine – Brightstar

22:30 DJ Daemon speaks: Last in the line up of the Shadow party contestants is Synesthesia with “Voices in the wall”. Is it about madness or does it refer to noisy neighbours. It’s unknown at this time, but we know Synestesia comes from Great Britain.

22:31 Speech duration: 00:27

22:52 Synesthesia – Voices in the walls

26:09 DJ Daemon speaks: And that’s all of the seven contestants. We will get to know who wins tommorrow and I will update the podcast notes with the proper results later. So what about the Shadow party – really happy I went or maybe I should say connected ...

From France comes the Shadow party 2021 and between 2021-05-21 and 2021-05-23 the virtual doors opened for a brand new demo party. We jumped at the chance to broadcast the tunes the same day they competed, so we did not know who had won. But we know now:The winners:1) TDTTDHAD – The Demo Track That Didn't Have A Demo – CS-Jay / Desire Persuasive Music Slide / Polka Brothers2) Evolution / Ma2e and Aceman3) Brightstar – Mystra / Brainstorm Nectarine (Amiga 4-channels)

The ERICADE Radio Network is now officially a true tracker music broadcaster and not limited to just Amiga modules. With this change, it’s time to look back at what tracker music is and delve into its rich history. From Karsten Obarsky and the Ultimate Soundtracker on the Amiga and to todays Fast Tracker multi channel magic – it’s been quite a ride. Like Emmet Brown in back to the future, we ask ourselves “My god, has it been this long?”. Yes! Yes it has.

… and we’ve got a really nice set of songs from Swedish artist Slaze as well, so that’s the latter half of the show. It’s also up on the station now. Both some of his old stuff and a number of much newer tunes. Enjoy!

The show:

00:00 Amiga Flashback – show intro

00:13 DJ Daemon speaks: The tracks of the Amiga goes a long way back in time. It all started in 1987 and as we’re expanding our repertoire, it’s really the right moment to talk about the tracker revolution. From Sound tracker to Fasttracker and all in between.

00:34 Amigaartist – Retrospective an*s

05:59 DJ Daemon speaks: It’s almost 34 years since the tracker music revolution started. It was when Amiga musician Karsten Obarski created his commercial music creator or tracker called “the ultimate Soundtracker”, the whole thing took off. It was not a big success, but great enough to get the geeks of the day to start building their own versions of the software. And soon enough, the music market was open for everyone with an Amiga. This station stands on the shoulder of mr Obarski and celebrates the trackerworlds rich heritage.

06:57 Karsten Obarsky – Obarski mega-mix

10:55 DJ Daemon speaks: Obarskis the Ultimate Soundtracker introduced the world to the four channel mod-format that was then slowly improved. Every Amiga user must remember Noise tracker and ProTracker. The modules played samples that were the instruments. The pitch, the volume and also where in the sample the playback should occur could be set. One sample could thus be made into a number of different styles and even instruments. I remember a documentary about the Beatles, where the producer, George Martin showed us how to play cymbals backwards. That was revolutionary back then, but in the late 80s, the Amiga made it simple. But… You only had 4 channels.

11:55 DigiDz – Amethyst Cities

17:12 DJ Daemon speaks: Tracker music was featured in demos, games and presentations and meshed well with the Amigas reputation of being a graphics and multimedia creation device. But the four channels. It was the music chip “Paula” that put that limitation. OctaMed for the Amiga made it possible to play sound in eight channels, but it also cut the output level of the channels, causing a poor signal to noise ratio. This kind of hampered its popularity.

17:56 Slaze – Back to the roots

21:21 DJ Daemon speaks: I remember trying to connect an Amiga tracker-player to my fathers synth and I was shocked when it actually worked. This made the modules possible to use the same way Atari-users already did with the machines. This if you had a midi-interface for the Amiga. My sampler, called AMAS, did. So I was totally in heaven over this.

22:10 Slaze – Groovy beat

25:05 DJ Daemon speaks: All the games and the demos kept flowing, but it was curtains for the Amiga in 1994. The tracker culture did not die. The MIDI-connection kept the Amiga scene going a while on the more professional side. But the aging 8-bit sound and as I mentioned earlier, having only for channels was a bigger problem than ever by this time.

25:45 Slaze – Chase

28:33 DJ Daemon speaks: ScreamTracker 3, FastTracker and Impulse Tracker were built as the artist left the Amiga mostly for PC DOS and later Windows. They removed the limitation of the 4,