music01bpm

alexei berteig > fashioner films > music > broken phetish music

Liner Notes: 1993 marked my conversion. I used to hate electronica: I was a drummer, and resented that artists in the 80's were relying heavily on canned rhythms and synthetic sounds to replace flesh-and-blood musicians like myself. The Grid changed all that for me; one song, recorded six times in a row on a cassette, and six more times on the b-side, became my sole listening for about a week: "Texas Cowboy," the song that converted me. Around the same time, I got my first computer - a 486 33 mhz desktop inherited from a friend with a whopping 16 megs of RAM and a Gravis Ultrasound. Those were the days when Windows still ran on DOS, and DOS shareware was a cult unto itself. Thus, with nothing more than a MOD tracker (first it was Scream Tracker, and later, Fast Tracker 2) I started pumping out rhythm-dominated music. At first, I couldn't use more than 16 samples at a time, but the equipment gave me the chance to experiment with dense layers of polyrhythms that only Animal from the muppets could have executed without an aneurism, but which were relatively easy to achieve with my hot computer. Eventually, the tracks started to mature and started to resemble songs. Most of the tracks on BPM are born from a simple musical idea and taken to computer-aided extremes. Trackers are not exactly user-friendly, however, and in hindsight, even as I started to close in on a personal musical style, I was probably trying to do something no 8-bit system was every intended for: put an organic sound into a synthetic environment.

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06'15
05'27
03'29
06'59
03'48
04'45
06'21
05'07
07'22
06'24

8.5 MB
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4.7 MB
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5.2 MB
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10.1 MB
8.7 MB

They Told Me To Dance.mp3
Hammer.mp3
1999.mp3
Bigmouth.mp3
War.mp3
ZoupSoup.mp3
Power Harmonica.mp3
Happy Casio Catastrophe.mp3
Broken Phetish Music.mp3
Rackmounted.mp3

dance
rave
rave
electronica
rave
trance
dance
rave
electronica/funk
electronica/funk

Liner Notes: 1993 marked my conversion. I used to hate electronica: I was a drummer, and resented that artists in the 80's were relying heavily on canned rhythms and synthetic sounds to replace flesh-and-blood musicians like myself. The Grid changed all that for me; one song, recorded six times in a row on a cassette, and six more times on the b-side, became my sole listening for about a week: "Texas Cowboy," the song that converted me. Around the same time, I got my first computer - a 486 33 mhz desktop inherited from a friend with a whopping 16 megs of RAM and a Gravis Ultrasound. Those were the days when Windows still ran on DOS, and DOS shareware was a cult unto itself. Thus, with nothing more than a MOD tracker (first it was Scream Tracker, and later, Fast Tracker 2) I started pumping out rhythm-dominated music. At first, I couldn't use more than 16 samples at a time, but the equipment gave me the chance to experiment with dense layers of polyrhythms that only Animal from the muppets could have executed without an aneurism, but which were relatively easy to achieve with my hot computer. Eventually, the tracks started to mature and started to resemble songs. Most of the tracks on BPM are born from a simple musical idea and taken to computer-aided extremes. Trackers are not exactly user-friendly, however, and in hindsight, even as I started to close in on a personal musical style, I was probably trying to do something no 8-bit system was every intended for: put an organic sound into a synthetic environment.