Interviews
Interview with SIDwave of Ancients
Published in Vandalism News #57
Performed by ZZAP69 in July 2011
Jan Harries. Also known to you as Rambones, or more recently SIDwave, is a tremendously productive musician and a well known profile in the C64 scene. I have met Jan several times, I have slept on the couch in his apartment, seen his cartoon drawings from 1982, and been laughing and dancing with on C64 parties. But some questions still remain. Does he have any health issues? What lies behind his motivation? Has he been a hooligan? What is it like to have a brother being active in the C64 scene? Please join us to find out!
ZZAP69: Hello Jan! Please tell us a little about yourself, both your private life and your scene career.
SIDwave: My birth name is Jan Diabelez Arent Harries, born 120169. One hour after I was born I was alive and as result I have a different brain. I got a schizophrenic diagnosis, and it was apparent at the age of 32, when acute schizo arrived, caused by enormous stress at my then 2nd IT education, data technician/engineer. Most people would either be dead, totally a vegetable, or severely handicapped, but... not all is what it seems. I have it mildly, I have seen much worse in the hospital, but for a time, I was reduced to nothing, for a long time in fact. In 2004 I started to get better, but it had changed, to a depression. This I have suffered until last year. I'm just being honest. The rest is a longer story.
Scene... we made a group named The Supply Team, in 1985. We were one of the first 2-3 demo groups in Denmark. At this time, they were all crackers; the only guys making demos were SODAN and Wizax. SODAN is still our godfather. He gave us all, we wanted to be him. :)
There will be a book, all will be in there.
ZZAP69: Is this the first official statement to the scene about your condition?
SIDwave: Yes, I think so... And it's because I am so much better now and I have finished a hellish chapter of my life that took 12 years. It all began to reach a climax, when I spoke to a clairvoyant and later I experienced Reiki Healing, and then I fell in love on a woman... From there, I was reset, because I had to. It was either reset, or fall deeper into the pit. And if I look at it... Arman has played an enormous role in my healing. Because he told me everything. What he did, what he said, what it leads to, what he had tried to do. I have a lot to thank Arman for. And some people at X2010 talked with me about these things and they helped me to prepare for the reset. Booker, Linus, Jeroen - they are some of the smartest and compassionate people I know, well also other people, but they know who they are... 7 years ago it was Jackasser that did something. The thank you list is very long, so let's leave it here. I am a result of the environment I live in and what I choose to listen to, advice. Choices.
ZZAP69: How did it all start?
SIDwave: It began in 1983 when I left the 7th grade. My best friend Per Florczak and I were doing Disney cartoons every day. We had done this the whole 7th grade and in the summer after we left school, we were drawing Donald Duck etc. every day, all day long. Then 8th grade and a new school happened and I had a hard time to find friends, so I was at Per's place very regularly. Somewhere in 1984, Per got a C64, and I was hooked instantly. Playing all those games... Bruce Lee, Boulderdash, Choplifter, and so on. In the summer 1984 we worked at a farm, cutting cauliflower, and I earned some money and I could nearly buy a C64, but still didn't have enough... so I was almost crying to my grandmother: "pleeeeease!", it was just a small amount needed, but we had no money at home, mum or dad. So my grandmother gave me the rest of it and we drove to the superstore in the city and I got my C64.
This is the one I still use today, and it has the original SID chip and is of a pretty good balance so I feel fortunate with that. In its long life it had a CIA changed a few years ago and the PLA. Other than that, it's holding up. It's a smoker's machine, so I'm pretty surprised, that it lives so well still... All my DVD drives in the PC have to be regularly renewed every 2 years, because of the nicotine. The C64? it just goes to work... cool!
(stop smoking is one of my next plans...)
Well, the short version of the TST legacy: Per had all those games, but he didn't wanna say how he got them, so I was his slave... I did everything, to get games from him. :) So one day, I said "now, take me to your leader"! or, to his supplier. He agreed, and we went to Torben's place (TSN/TST). After copying a whole tape of new games, Per wanted to go home and game immediately, but TSN was programming some BASIC stuff, with a SUPER-EXPANDER cartridge and I just had to stay.
We became friends that night, just like that, because he liked to have a kid that was some years younger than him (TSN is a 1963 version), that he could teach something. In the next few visits, he taught me BASIC.
(Today, TSN is the boss' left arm at the IT school where I learned data-mechanics, he handles people and trains trainees, and he's always been a very good pedagog/teacher)
One day I was there, a guy came and showed his latest demo in the works, WOW! this guy was coding assembler (he used the Commodore Macro Assembler, 1982), I instantly saw that this is much better. BUT! he didn't want to show how, it was a secret! he had the secret book, Commodore Reference Guide, and NOBODY could look in it, except himself. :D That was Kaze and before the KAZE DEMO #1, which is a mix of a ripped SODAN sideborder scroller, some basic and animated chars that Kaze made himself - before that, he made a crack intro that was very cool, but sadly it's lost. I think it's the ONLY TST product that is lost forever... it was never spread... the disk was destroyed by coffee I think... sad it was (sniff).
((On a similar note: the very first TST intro that Wizz coded on the Amiga in 1987, only a few days after he got an A500 - this intro, was made, right there in TSN's living room and about when it was finished, he spilled some coffee on the disk, and it was all dead, gone! - then he coded another) :-) You can find all TST Amiga demos on the Exotica FTP, I made sure to save it all.)
On with the story:
Kaze went to business school, with Wizz '86, and that's how he got into the picture. After various stuff, basic demos, ripped code and 1 year of learning, Wizz and Kaze became WIZE. What we and they created is history. I know, today, being first, means nothing anymore. It did back then. If you're a coder and if you know the sequence of events, TMC's Game Music 1-9 demos etc, then you also know that TST invented several things and was first in several things. Like 1001, FCS, TMC. You have to remember, it was very small in 1986-1987, the scene was divided into crackers and demo coders. Enough of this, I was very proud to know these guys and we are still friends and I am very proud that we set a mark on the story of the demo scene. If you've never seen those demos, take the complete tour. The TST Demo Chronology I made, is your guide. This is how it went down.
All Danish scene stuff has landed in the Danish National Library two years ago and it's partly MdZ's doing. He did a bachelor in IT and saving old stuff is what he did.
Today, these demos and games, Danish games, are recognized as digital art. I can tell you, some wannabees in the IT school, who are 19-22 years old, they KNOW TST or TSN, Kaze or me. They know what we did. They had maybe a C64, or a friend had one and they have seen our demos, when they were kids. I bought a C64 in 1998 from my fathers girlfriend's kid, with three boxes of games, and what did I find? My own Summer and Winter Games, World Games - my own records on those games, that was made in 1986-1988, and he hadn't broken them all! haha - things have got spread, way more than people think.
I never had foreseen this. Even some things are beyond my imagination... (IT students, half my age, who know us)
ZZAP69: Do you have any musical background? Before the C64?
SIDwave: In 1973 when I was 4 years old, I played on the church organ in the church, and I found out that intervals sound good (two finger chords). When we moved to our new house, my neighbour had a piano and I used much time there. Just playing what I could. In school we could get to go to music school and I wanted the piano lessons, but we had no piano at home and I couldn't get one and I couldn't stay at the neighbour always, so I was offered a free violin from my grandfather and so I played that for 4 years. I learned it on the "Suzuki" method, and was pretty good, but truth is: I hate that instrument! It can sound so great, and it can sound so AWFUL. In 1981 my brother Dennis, Pernille, Henrik and I had a rock band in school and we just played the same 4-5 Shubidua tunes (a Danish band), over and over, at some "concerts in school". That was great, to be a rockstar! When I got the C64, I saw that my electronic piano, was a reality, and I wanted to learn it.
ZZAP69: Please tell me a little about every member (of those you can remember) in TST! (TSN and Hagar for instance).
SIDwave: Okay, well TSN was the "father", the organiser, the leader. He is 6-7 years older than the rest of us and a natural leader. Most of all the old TST demos are coded in his room, with 3-6 people being involved, or watching while they were made. Kaze's TV got fried, so he came to us and coded demos. My disk drive broke, so for 1 year I went to Hagar every day, to copy disks, I was a megaswapper like TSN, and we had 200+ contacts each. Kaze was the first to understand hex and binary and so on, he learned it from that PRG book and kept his knowledge to himself and only shared it with Wizz. I never got that book until 1993 when I found a cheap one in the USA, brand new, never opened, wrapped in plastic, for 5 dollars! haha - Kaze created most of his code, using macros that he made in the CBM assembler. To edit code, we used KWIK-WRITE, it's a word processor. A very good editor with many many functions. Wizz was the wannabe Kaze, he wanted to beat him at coding, so he did some great stuff. Do you know that "Cool as Wize" was the first megademo? They invented it. But it was never released, in complete form (but I have upped it on CSDb, I spread it in 1996 when I found it on Kaze's disks). They had too many ideas and the Amiga took over, so "Cool as Wize" was released as single parts, both as Wizax or Zetrex demos. Wizz is an ubercoder, he has beaten Kaze, long ago. :D He read one IT book in a few hours and the next day he has a running demo, on anything. I never saw anybody learn so fast. He does this for a living, but today he is all swamped in developing the CMS, SiteCore. Hagar, he is a talented drawer and he had all these drawings on paper, like me. So, he started in the Koala Painter to get some of them made for demos. It took him around 1 year from ugly style, to what is in "The Fourth" and those other demos. TSN was my "big brother" and I played the role as big brother to Hagar. I introduced him to ripping tunes and doing assembler and today he is one of the main guys behind www.autocom.dk, (car auction site) and has been so for nearly 12+ years. He's a JAVA expert... and other stuff, but JAVA is his trade... and databases... we both learned that from Kaze. Kaze catalogued all his Amiga stuff, in a complete CRM system he made in SuperBase 4. Hagar did the complete 8 years of computer technology at the University. He knows enough to build the next gen computer, but he is almost completely stiff because he has arthritis, very bad, he has to take it all easy, slow, else he can't work at all.
I have 1 unreleased koala pic from Hagar, which we never used... I'm waiting for an idea to appear, how to use it... :-)
ZZAP69: Who was "The Surfer Team"?
SIDwave: I don't know, Google?
ZZAP69: You have attended quite a few parties through the decades. Please tell us something about it!
SIDwave: I was, with whole TST, attending the first Danish copy party, EVER! It was the "The Danish Circle Copy Party", http://www.csdb.dk/event/?id=541 - TSN was a factor to make it happen, he was talking to Tiger/Dexion (they were not yet Dexion at this time), but Tiger was a super swapper. At the party, the 3 small groups, that were not a real demo group like TST, they went together and 2000 A.D. was formed, or it was right after. They met at this party and wanted to compete with Wizz and Kaze, so they needed to group up. And that they did.
To get this story 100% - you should interview Blitz/2000 A.D.
Well, the other parties... in the 80s... read the old reports, it's better. If I start now, then I have to paste many pages from my book that is in the making.
It's all written in the scrolls of the demos and some party reports, and demos made on the parties. Watch the demos, it's why they were made.
Okay, I will tell one little story, it's from my awakening in 1995 (that my grandfather helped to initiate after his death), after having not been to any parties since 1989: I convinced my father, to drive Devia (my brother) and I, up to AARS to be at The Party 1995. As I saw first, the "Dansa Med Achmed" demo (it wasn't new, but they showed it and I didn't know it), I never had seen anything like it and I wanted to copy it, do something like that (never did, yet)... in the middle of one of the WiLD demos, that was to compare with modern demos, how they are today, I started to cry. I felt I was home, I had come back to my roots, I couldn't believe it. I was happy, happier than ever before. After all the hard projects in school, the constant pressure to deliver something and only 2 days later, deliver something else, I felt that I should create something and never "deliver" anything. Delivering is slave work, creation is life. So I was awakened and I knew that I should make films.
So, after TP 1995, I went back home to my C64, and tried to find a more modern music program to use for making SIDs and JCH gave me the address of Geir Tjelta, so I called Geir on the phone and he taught me enough to get started using his own editor, SID Duzz It. Before that I made a few tunes in the JCH editor, but I couldn't do what I wanted because there was no description, which bytes are what. I was randomly trying to understand it and it was too hard, so SDI was easier to learn for me.
ZZAP69: Uhm. You make music. I didn't know you made films? Will we see something called Dansa med Jan?
SIDwave: Its a long road... things take more time than I thought. Well for starters I'm editing lots of video, and shoot some. And I practice on that. To get a grant, to be independent, instead of selling out, I have to demonstrate that I can do something. It's the best. The more I have when I go to the big guys with the money, to start production, the more I can have control in the making. If you have only an idea and nothing to show for it, they give you peanuts, take the credits for your work and you never get the chance to make it as it really should be made. IMO the best person who is suitable to direct a movie, is the one that wrote it. That's why Star Wars is eternal. It's made by a guy who does that.
I am/was working on a scene related music video and I posted on CSDB to all to send me a few pics for it. If you have some pics and want to star in a video that is about SID and our demo culture, then write to me.
If nothing comes, then I have to start contacting people, one by one, to get pics and permission. Maybe I should just have done that from the start, but I believed that posting on CSDb will get read and make a difference. Sadly, it's not so. Idling is killing the scene?
Don't want to sound negative... that's why Mr. R was killed! :)
ZZAP69: I heard you were a hooligan during that time, at least more than I expected. Spoiling someone's logo or something? Would you say the parties are different now from then and if yes, how?
SIDwave: You heard wrong! :) The Hooligan was Blitz/2000 A.D. On one party, he poured 1 litre of cola into a C64, because "you're a lamer!", and on another party he asked the gfx guy from Bones or Thanatos: "are you finished? is it saved?", the answer was "eh.. not yet", and then Blitz turned off the C64!
That was evil, just coz Blitz thought he was the best gfxian. (He was then)... hehe
Blitz/2000 A.D. is a good friend.
Another hooligan that really fucked up the sleeping at the Dexion party was Warp/2000 A.D., before we wanted to go to bed, he went and sprayed all the sleeping bags in the sleeping room, with some fart gas that you could buy (for fun stuff). Well, it was NOT funny! This was before we drank beers at the party and before we went to bed at 7 in the morning. It was when we were 17 and we NEED to sleep and feel good, else we couldn't survive a party. And then, he destroyed our sleep with this shit! :)
Parties are different yes, I just wrote how... sleep and booze - it was the opposite back then. :)
ZZAP69: I know you and Kaze are really close friends. But I have also heard you two had some argument about source code he made when he was in TST. What was that about and what made you become friends again?
SIDwave: well, Kaze, TSN, Wizz and me, put all our routines on disks and many demos were made very fast, by loading any source, adapting it and compiling it, viola! a new demo. :) When Kaze and Wizz left TST to go into Wizax, they forbid us to use the routines on the TST disk. But we did, coz we were learning to code, so we had to. :) Later Wizz and Kaze came back, coz Ecan Wizax stole Kaze's 3x high sideborder scroller and uploaded it to Compunet, full of a scrolltext about how he had made all this himself. Bwahaha! so it was in the old days. Code rippers everywhere. Nobody was better than anybody. I ripped too, or "assembled", I just pasted together what I had, and regardless of who made it, to get my dream alive: my own music demos. Mistake me not, I am a very able programmer, but I never spent all my time to learn to milk the VIC chip, so I can't do such cool things. I always just wanted to make music demos, my own. The music is important, not the carrier. Well a nice music disk with great gfx and ubercode is cool yes... but music is for listening, create inner worlds, visions from it, experience it, become it. For me, anyway...
One example is BOGG's Music Album 1 and 2. There is literally just BOGG on the screen and you could sit there for hours and listen to the music. LISTEN MUSIC! not show it, not dance it and hype it and drink tons of booze to enjoy it. No, LISTEN!
Who does that anymore? Just lay on the couch, close your eyes and just be inside the music and be nothing else. Young people in the nightclub could learn something!
The first tunes I did weren't so good, I did a lot of 2nd voices, harmony and recycling of sequences, but I couldn't get the bass to do anything. It's all just C-2 C-3 C-2 C-3, hehe... You have to reach "Zound Muzak 3" one of my last ones in 1988, before I had learned it. Yes and once I also stole a tune from Kaze, "The Force" and made a fake Zetrex 2005 demo with it, saying it was made by Sony/Zetrex (I am he :), we was not friends for I think 3 weeks, then it all fell into sync again. You know, teenagers, fighting over EGO and WOMEN... "who has the biggest one?", LOL. It was like that all the time, the scrollers in the demos is mostly that. Cock size. :)
I don't regret a word I wrote. It was all true, then. And it's so much fun to read, now.
ZZAP69: You were involved in something called PlaySID?
SIDwave: PlaySID, it's a whole chapter for itself. It's what we have today: HVSC, SIDPLAY 2.5 etc. No, I haven't coded any SIDplayer (for PC/Amiga), but I started to rip music in 1986 from games and demos and in 1987 I made a music collection called "Ripped Off!", it's something like 180? tunes ripped in two years. It's the first "intentionally" ripped music collection there was. In 1991 it became basis for the first "ADDITION" pack of sids for PlaySID/Amiga by PHS/CCS. Because I was using nearly all of my time to rip sids, when I got a PC in 1996, then I met Michael Schwendt, the creator of SIDPLAY for PC and through him I met The Shark/INC, the first HVSC admin. Before HVSC came to be, Agust (not August, no), from Iceland, Nemesis1, he took all packs in existence and merged them, into NEMESIDS. Basically he took my 1900+ ripped tunes and changed the dir structure of it all and a real internet ready SID collection was born. In 1996, The Shark, Michael Schwendt, Bod/Talent, LaLa and I, did the same. Packed it all up, started to clean up the credits, find composers, ask about who had REALLY made some tunes. That's how all of it began. Then Hubbard and Chris Abbot appeared and Back in Time, LIVE, were born. Chris wanted to bring the sids, to the outside audience. I wanted that too, that's why I spent 26 years to rip them all, as many as possible!
I don't do that anymore, I quit last year after X, I had decided that X is a level jump and I jumped.
Still I would rip a very hard/rare/great tune, if I want to, because the music is great, but I wont ever again sit for 3 months and rip 1000 sids, on a 20 hour schedule like I used to.
It's what caused my brain to fail. Info overload.
FYI, the rip count is 5672. Also I ripped 5000+ Amiga tunes. Mods, "exotic" and assembler.
As said, its the reason my brain reset in 2001. The problem is, I AM music, all those tunes I heard, they are ALL in there, in my head. They can NOT be deleted, never. But they can be "ignored". :) by Vulcan Mindmeld techniques... NLP.
I lost two Amiga MODs forever that I made. I still have them in my head. If I can find the right samples, I pretty much can reconstruct them.
In 1987, when I made "Apolloguys", I had to reconstruct the whole tune. First I made the tune one late night. Back then I didn't save. Just make the stuff, and save when finished. When the tune was at 80% finished, I accidentally pushed my C64 and the HEXMON cart in the back was bent a bit and caused the C64 to freeze. There was nothing to do. After a reset, the whole memory was random FF 00, so fuck no! nooooooooooo! my tune!!!! so I immediately started to make the tune again, because I know how it should be. The second version (the only one that exists now) became better. But I never want this to happen again, so when I make music I save for every small part I do, a new copy. "machine.1", "machine.2"..... "machine.61" - I save it all and I keep 3 copies of all. The worst I know is to lose something that I just spent 20 hours to create.
Actually the real name of "Apolloguys.sid", is "Squeezed Steps". I named it so, after remaking it the second time, because some parts of the original were transformed/squeezed.
Ian Coog rips sids like a machine, like I did and he rips intros also. Maybe he can do that a long time, but age will make his brain into mushroom, so a word to Ian Coog: "take it easy, you are not 17 anymore!" :)
ZZAP69: I heard you got an Amiga in the late 80's and stopped composing on the C64. What made you come back to the C64 in the 00's?
SIDwave: TST went to Amiga, we thought that Amiga was the new C64, the next gen computer. But it was hard to learn to code and we stopped in 1991. The cause was that we were all going to computer school. Learning REAL programming, databases, all that stuff. DOS. :)
Come back to C64? I never left, I never will. I am... but making music on only 1 instrument. I wanted more, so I bought the Amiga, for the purpose to make music on it. Since then I bought a PC, to get 32 channels (Fasttracker). The computers became my instrument from the day in 1986 when I was listening to "One Man and His Droid", that's when I knew.
I felt there are still things to be done with it and I still feel that there is, and probably, there always will be (like using it on commercial albums and in concerts).
Also, what I mentioned earlier, on The Party 1995, in Aars, I saw a "modern" demo and I knew that I had returned, to my lost self. That this is my life.
But life is more than C64! :)
ZZAP69: What has it been like to have a brother sharing your passion?
SIDwave: all I ever hoped for, because he's pretty good playing on a piano, especially jazz, now he has taken up guitar... let's see one day, if he can play anything. :) He can do what he wants, he knows. But time is limited with kids and work. I wish we could all be kids again... no I don't really, but you know what I mean. :) Ulf created some very bloodthirsty techno tunes on the Amiga, that's where he started to make music. Only a few are actually completely finished, rounded off, but doing 100 worktunes that are never finished, you learn from that, so it's not all wasted. I send all my worktunes to him and he comments on them. If something is outright crap, he says it directly like: "it's a 1 sample drum Jan, it's the same attack every time, it sounds like bad midi from 1989, change it!!!" - and whatever he says, he's right. Or he say "the bass is annoying the hell out of me!" - then I change it, maybe... but sometimes I do.
My father and Ulf, share the bi-yearly ski trips to the Alps. Ulf and I share the C64. My mum and I share golf. My father plays his Hammond organ every night for 20 mins before he goes to bed, but he never learnt to play properly and he doesn't want to. I tried to get him to take lessons, but he prefers it his own way... hehe a waste of potential talent... My father paints pictures or he used to anyway and he's really good. Perhaps he has just made a choice.
ZZAP69: Do you have any comment to the interview we made with your brother Devia in the last issue?
SIDwave: I should speak with him about it. It's personal. :) No... it was nice to read and I just wish we could spend more time together, but he knows that, but he has a family and those kids need what they need...
ZZAP69: Is Devia a better Charset designer than you are? :-)
SIDwave: No. :) He hasn't made any. But he has the visual ability like me, he just don't have the time to sit down and do it. He can I know. He did some good gfx on the Amiga.
I will upload my Amiga pics... some day... And his, if he allow it.
Fact: Devia hasn't made any C64 charsets, he only has converted one for the Datastorm 2010 Ancients demo, the one with 279? greetings in it. Demo: Snowstorm / Ancients.
In all fairness and I want people to know this: if anybody think that I made the SIDwave logo myself, they are wrong! It is the font made by B/Dual Crew, which was used in the demo "White" - it was just perfect for me, so I took this and made the logo out of that charset. All credit to B!
And, I have only made 2 charsets, I use the same 2 over and over, to have my own style. Something recognizable, like the TRIAD crack intro.
ZZAP69: What are achievement are you most proud of in the scene?
SIDwave: Building HVSC which took 26 years of my life. It's why I am now SIDwave.
And making music that nobody else does. Proud of not being "mainstream".
I want to quote somebody, I'll do it at the end. It's very important to me.
ZZAP69: What achievement are you least proud of in the scene?
SIDwave: trying to educate people on IRC, failing and then keep trying. It's over. I'm not coming to IRC ever again, not on #c-64. The scene there is dead. Idlers... idle sceners are dead sceners, an idle scene is a dead scene. Wasted too much time there. Drank too many beers, said too much crap.
Don't wanna sound too negative, I do have friends there, but they are less and less, they have had enough of it, like some others.
I'm not the first to "waste" time on IRC, but all who has left before me, learnt what I learnt. And that is: in the end, XmikeX can sit there and talk to himself, for the rest of his life. While Groepaz is clapping his hands, enjoying it.
I have used this tool in the wrong way and I'm not proud of it! And I apologise to anyone I have offended there!
ZZAP69: How many tunes per year do you make and how many do you release?
SIDwave: The SID Chronology tell all, about the sids... how often... 1 per month? Up to 5? It won't be like that anymore... maybe 6 per year? I don't know... As you see, since 2008, it was A LOT, just as many as in 1987-1988. It's funny, 64 tunes, exactly were made in the 80s, when I didn't know that, I would return in 1998... :)
ZZAP69: And now you said you returned in 1998? :-)
SIDwave: There are some tunes made in 1995, but they are unfinished, and I just spread them afterwards... in 1998 was the first "released" tune "Rabies", that was made in JCH editor and was added to that big music collection that Onslaught did called "Album of the Year". They asked everybody for 1 tune, and made a big music demo.
The tunes I made:
182 sids
87 Amiga mods
8 exotic Amiga format musics
227+ XM pc tunes
40+ midi tunes
200+ mp3 tunes, synthesizer, vst (renoise, presonus)
100+ worktunes on all formats
If all is added to a playlist in XMplay, it says that its 24? hours of music.
ZZAP69: Yeah you were snoring in class. I heard you had a nickname because of that?
SIDwave: Oh yes and that only worsened my stay in high school. It all started out very good and when it ended, I was glad it was over. I got my papers, so I could join the computer school, that's all that mattered. Yes, my nickname there was GAB (Yawn)... I hated it! It's what we today call "adult harassment". It ruined high school for me. The grades went only downward in the last 1.5 years. I was only happy at home, with my C64, Amiga and TST friends.
ZZAP69: Why do you change handle so often?
SIDwave: In fact I didn't... I was called RAMBONES for 25 years. In the last 3 years, I have changed, a lot, and I wanted to reflect this out, that something is happening with me and I was confused. Calling myself Jan Harries? Calling myself Rambones? There is several Spanish guitarists/band, called Rambones, so I can't use that... and it's not who I am anymore. Rambones thinks that whole life is one big war and it is, inside of him. He will not come full circle. I was him. I came full circle, so I wanted to have another name. So I made rash decisions, because I was completely confused. As the project, to make a C64 music group, SIDWAVE, failed, because some members were inactive and one wanted to leave and do his own thing, I realized, that I had become it. So this is my name and it stays that way. Artist name.
I know that those jerks on IRC who have given me a bad time, think that I am a complete maniac and that schizophrenia is multiple personality disorder. Well, my dear readers. I am not and it is not. Read the medical books on what it is. The world has been largely ignorant since always on what it really is about. The doctors are not even sure. Who knows what schizophrenia is? Some guy that has read 10 medical books on his 10 year study to become a brain scanner/surgeon/med producer, OR those, who have it? Who know what it is really? The answer is logical. Do I need to say it?
Some doctors read a few books, take the exam, and treat people for 40 years, without ever updating their knowledge... I met some of them. This is completely useless if we should ever hope to cure it or understand it.
Anyhow, I am not that anymore. I am cured. I am cured because I wanted to be cured and somebody helped me and has changed my life.
So, that is why all this confusion in the last 3 years. I'm sorry, but life don't go as we expect, not even for me, who is working always from my plan. :)
ZZAP69: You seem very structured when it comes to your music. Are you as structured with everything else?
SIDwave: Yes. I inherited this from my mother. ordnung muss sein! My mother has worked in banks and as a secretary to Doctors and she is a bookkeeper (finance). No doubt I have it from her. She turned 60 on the 13th of July 2011. It was a nice party, but it was raining... :)
ZZAP69: Please tell us what you think of today's active musicians compared to those who were active 1985-1989... and to those who were active in 1990-1995!
SIDwave: Well, it's all became more complex. Today they make styles and sounds that would have been called "year 2000" music in 1985. :) In 1985, "Lightforce" was the future of music.
How can we describe it? It's like it's being upgraded all the time. I know that we can make more out of the SID, with intelligent players. Today, a good music routine is still coded in the old way, but it's done that way to use as less time and memory as possible.
Jeff has done some interesting stuff with software oscillators, but he is nowhere near finishing it, because his priority has shifted, to be a house owner, and to get a life. :)
There is more to do here. Have you heard Booker's X2010 tune?
WOW!!!!!
Fact is: We wanted to be Hubbard. That's why we all stole his player and made tunes in it. Then we based our "own" player on his. It was a dream. To BE Hubbard.
Now, people found out, to be themself, coz they can't be Hubbard. :)
Others have other role models, but mine is Rob. There are others, there is many SID composers that I love, but my #1 tune is Lightforce. I know every sound and every note in it, I can play the whole tune, in my head, or on the piano. For 7 years, I made a ritual out of hearing it at least once per day. It was, when new, the ultimate tune that I had ever heard!
I could mention Delta in-game too.. but, just to name one: Lightforce.
Rob has no idea what he did. He is so modest and result oriented, "pay me, and I make a tune", he doesn't think that he is an artist. He has nooooooo idea whatsoever what he has done. When he talks about it, he sounds like a mechanic, who is fixing a car.
ZZAP69: If you had a time machine and were able to remake one day of your life, what day would it be?
SIDwave: Nothing at all. Because if I go back to 1973 and stay on the piano all day long (at the neighbours) and take the classes and got to be what I could be, then I wouldn't be here today. Then I wouldn't be electronic.
And I so love being electronic! :)
A detour in life, isn't a detour anymore, when the two roads meet again. It was just another path, to the same goal.
ZZAP69: Why did you quit Ancients?
SIDwave: I've not quit Ancients. :) Simply the CSDb interface is not able to let a person take a new name. If he take a new name, then he has to EXIT a group, and join it with his new handle.
Someone can add me, I'm not going to make any more mess on CSDb.
Last words:
"When you put water into a bottle, it BECOMES the bottle" (Bruce Lee)
Published in Vandalism News #57
Performed by ZZAP69 in July 2011
Jan Harries. Also known to you as Rambones, or more recently SIDwave, is a tremendously productive musician and a well known profile in the C64 scene. I have met Jan several times, I have slept on the couch in his apartment, seen his cartoon drawings from 1982, and been laughing and dancing with on C64 parties. But some questions still remain. Does he have any health issues? What lies behind his motivation? Has he been a hooligan? What is it like to have a brother being active in the C64 scene? Please join us to find out!
ZZAP69: Hello Jan! Please tell us a little about yourself, both your private life and your scene career.
SIDwave: My birth name is Jan Diabelez Arent Harries, born 120169. One hour after I was born I was alive and as result I have a different brain. I got a schizophrenic diagnosis, and it was apparent at the age of 32, when acute schizo arrived, caused by enormous stress at my then 2nd IT education, data technician/engineer. Most people would either be dead, totally a vegetable, or severely handicapped, but... not all is what it seems. I have it mildly, I have seen much worse in the hospital, but for a time, I was reduced to nothing, for a long time in fact. In 2004 I started to get better, but it had changed, to a depression. This I have suffered until last year. I'm just being honest. The rest is a longer story.
Scene... we made a group named The Supply Team, in 1985. We were one of the first 2-3 demo groups in Denmark. At this time, they were all crackers; the only guys making demos were SODAN and Wizax. SODAN is still our godfather. He gave us all, we wanted to be him. :)
There will be a book, all will be in there.
ZZAP69: Is this the first official statement to the scene about your condition?
SIDwave: Yes, I think so... And it's because I am so much better now and I have finished a hellish chapter of my life that took 12 years. It all began to reach a climax, when I spoke to a clairvoyant and later I experienced Reiki Healing, and then I fell in love on a woman... From there, I was reset, because I had to. It was either reset, or fall deeper into the pit. And if I look at it... Arman has played an enormous role in my healing. Because he told me everything. What he did, what he said, what it leads to, what he had tried to do. I have a lot to thank Arman for. And some people at X2010 talked with me about these things and they helped me to prepare for the reset. Booker, Linus, Jeroen - they are some of the smartest and compassionate people I know, well also other people, but they know who they are... 7 years ago it was Jackasser that did something. The thank you list is very long, so let's leave it here. I am a result of the environment I live in and what I choose to listen to, advice. Choices.
ZZAP69: How did it all start?
SIDwave: It began in 1983 when I left the 7th grade. My best friend Per Florczak and I were doing Disney cartoons every day. We had done this the whole 7th grade and in the summer after we left school, we were drawing Donald Duck etc. every day, all day long. Then 8th grade and a new school happened and I had a hard time to find friends, so I was at Per's place very regularly. Somewhere in 1984, Per got a C64, and I was hooked instantly. Playing all those games... Bruce Lee, Boulderdash, Choplifter, and so on. In the summer 1984 we worked at a farm, cutting cauliflower, and I earned some money and I could nearly buy a C64, but still didn't have enough... so I was almost crying to my grandmother: "pleeeeease!", it was just a small amount needed, but we had no money at home, mum or dad. So my grandmother gave me the rest of it and we drove to the superstore in the city and I got my C64.
This is the one I still use today, and it has the original SID chip and is of a pretty good balance so I feel fortunate with that. In its long life it had a CIA changed a few years ago and the PLA. Other than that, it's holding up. It's a smoker's machine, so I'm pretty surprised, that it lives so well still... All my DVD drives in the PC have to be regularly renewed every 2 years, because of the nicotine. The C64? it just goes to work... cool!
(stop smoking is one of my next plans...)
Well, the short version of the TST legacy: Per had all those games, but he didn't wanna say how he got them, so I was his slave... I did everything, to get games from him. :) So one day, I said "now, take me to your leader"! or, to his supplier. He agreed, and we went to Torben's place (TSN/TST). After copying a whole tape of new games, Per wanted to go home and game immediately, but TSN was programming some BASIC stuff, with a SUPER-EXPANDER cartridge and I just had to stay.
We became friends that night, just like that, because he liked to have a kid that was some years younger than him (TSN is a 1963 version), that he could teach something. In the next few visits, he taught me BASIC.
(Today, TSN is the boss' left arm at the IT school where I learned data-mechanics, he handles people and trains trainees, and he's always been a very good pedagog/teacher)
One day I was there, a guy came and showed his latest demo in the works, WOW! this guy was coding assembler (he used the Commodore Macro Assembler, 1982), I instantly saw that this is much better. BUT! he didn't want to show how, it was a secret! he had the secret book, Commodore Reference Guide, and NOBODY could look in it, except himself. :D That was Kaze and before the KAZE DEMO #1, which is a mix of a ripped SODAN sideborder scroller, some basic and animated chars that Kaze made himself - before that, he made a crack intro that was very cool, but sadly it's lost. I think it's the ONLY TST product that is lost forever... it was never spread... the disk was destroyed by coffee I think... sad it was (sniff).
((On a similar note: the very first TST intro that Wizz coded on the Amiga in 1987, only a few days after he got an A500 - this intro, was made, right there in TSN's living room and about when it was finished, he spilled some coffee on the disk, and it was all dead, gone! - then he coded another) :-) You can find all TST Amiga demos on the Exotica FTP, I made sure to save it all.)
On with the story:
Kaze went to business school, with Wizz '86, and that's how he got into the picture. After various stuff, basic demos, ripped code and 1 year of learning, Wizz and Kaze became WIZE. What we and they created is history. I know, today, being first, means nothing anymore. It did back then. If you're a coder and if you know the sequence of events, TMC's Game Music 1-9 demos etc, then you also know that TST invented several things and was first in several things. Like 1001, FCS, TMC. You have to remember, it was very small in 1986-1987, the scene was divided into crackers and demo coders. Enough of this, I was very proud to know these guys and we are still friends and I am very proud that we set a mark on the story of the demo scene. If you've never seen those demos, take the complete tour. The TST Demo Chronology I made, is your guide. This is how it went down.
All Danish scene stuff has landed in the Danish National Library two years ago and it's partly MdZ's doing. He did a bachelor in IT and saving old stuff is what he did.
Today, these demos and games, Danish games, are recognized as digital art. I can tell you, some wannabees in the IT school, who are 19-22 years old, they KNOW TST or TSN, Kaze or me. They know what we did. They had maybe a C64, or a friend had one and they have seen our demos, when they were kids. I bought a C64 in 1998 from my fathers girlfriend's kid, with three boxes of games, and what did I find? My own Summer and Winter Games, World Games - my own records on those games, that was made in 1986-1988, and he hadn't broken them all! haha - things have got spread, way more than people think.
I never had foreseen this. Even some things are beyond my imagination... (IT students, half my age, who know us)
ZZAP69: Do you have any musical background? Before the C64?
SIDwave: In 1973 when I was 4 years old, I played on the church organ in the church, and I found out that intervals sound good (two finger chords). When we moved to our new house, my neighbour had a piano and I used much time there. Just playing what I could. In school we could get to go to music school and I wanted the piano lessons, but we had no piano at home and I couldn't get one and I couldn't stay at the neighbour always, so I was offered a free violin from my grandfather and so I played that for 4 years. I learned it on the "Suzuki" method, and was pretty good, but truth is: I hate that instrument! It can sound so great, and it can sound so AWFUL. In 1981 my brother Dennis, Pernille, Henrik and I had a rock band in school and we just played the same 4-5 Shubidua tunes (a Danish band), over and over, at some "concerts in school". That was great, to be a rockstar! When I got the C64, I saw that my electronic piano, was a reality, and I wanted to learn it.
ZZAP69: Please tell me a little about every member (of those you can remember) in TST! (TSN and Hagar for instance).
SIDwave: Okay, well TSN was the "father", the organiser, the leader. He is 6-7 years older than the rest of us and a natural leader. Most of all the old TST demos are coded in his room, with 3-6 people being involved, or watching while they were made. Kaze's TV got fried, so he came to us and coded demos. My disk drive broke, so for 1 year I went to Hagar every day, to copy disks, I was a megaswapper like TSN, and we had 200+ contacts each. Kaze was the first to understand hex and binary and so on, he learned it from that PRG book and kept his knowledge to himself and only shared it with Wizz. I never got that book until 1993 when I found a cheap one in the USA, brand new, never opened, wrapped in plastic, for 5 dollars! haha - Kaze created most of his code, using macros that he made in the CBM assembler. To edit code, we used KWIK-WRITE, it's a word processor. A very good editor with many many functions. Wizz was the wannabe Kaze, he wanted to beat him at coding, so he did some great stuff. Do you know that "Cool as Wize" was the first megademo? They invented it. But it was never released, in complete form (but I have upped it on CSDb, I spread it in 1996 when I found it on Kaze's disks). They had too many ideas and the Amiga took over, so "Cool as Wize" was released as single parts, both as Wizax or Zetrex demos. Wizz is an ubercoder, he has beaten Kaze, long ago. :D He read one IT book in a few hours and the next day he has a running demo, on anything. I never saw anybody learn so fast. He does this for a living, but today he is all swamped in developing the CMS, SiteCore. Hagar, he is a talented drawer and he had all these drawings on paper, like me. So, he started in the Koala Painter to get some of them made for demos. It took him around 1 year from ugly style, to what is in "The Fourth" and those other demos. TSN was my "big brother" and I played the role as big brother to Hagar. I introduced him to ripping tunes and doing assembler and today he is one of the main guys behind www.autocom.dk, (car auction site) and has been so for nearly 12+ years. He's a JAVA expert... and other stuff, but JAVA is his trade... and databases... we both learned that from Kaze. Kaze catalogued all his Amiga stuff, in a complete CRM system he made in SuperBase 4. Hagar did the complete 8 years of computer technology at the University. He knows enough to build the next gen computer, but he is almost completely stiff because he has arthritis, very bad, he has to take it all easy, slow, else he can't work at all.
I have 1 unreleased koala pic from Hagar, which we never used... I'm waiting for an idea to appear, how to use it... :-)
ZZAP69: Who was "The Surfer Team"?
SIDwave: I don't know, Google?
ZZAP69: You have attended quite a few parties through the decades. Please tell us something about it!
SIDwave: I was, with whole TST, attending the first Danish copy party, EVER! It was the "The Danish Circle Copy Party", http://www.csdb.dk/event/?id=541 - TSN was a factor to make it happen, he was talking to Tiger/Dexion (they were not yet Dexion at this time), but Tiger was a super swapper. At the party, the 3 small groups, that were not a real demo group like TST, they went together and 2000 A.D. was formed, or it was right after. They met at this party and wanted to compete with Wizz and Kaze, so they needed to group up. And that they did.
To get this story 100% - you should interview Blitz/2000 A.D.
Well, the other parties... in the 80s... read the old reports, it's better. If I start now, then I have to paste many pages from my book that is in the making.
It's all written in the scrolls of the demos and some party reports, and demos made on the parties. Watch the demos, it's why they were made.
Okay, I will tell one little story, it's from my awakening in 1995 (that my grandfather helped to initiate after his death), after having not been to any parties since 1989: I convinced my father, to drive Devia (my brother) and I, up to AARS to be at The Party 1995. As I saw first, the "Dansa Med Achmed" demo (it wasn't new, but they showed it and I didn't know it), I never had seen anything like it and I wanted to copy it, do something like that (never did, yet)... in the middle of one of the WiLD demos, that was to compare with modern demos, how they are today, I started to cry. I felt I was home, I had come back to my roots, I couldn't believe it. I was happy, happier than ever before. After all the hard projects in school, the constant pressure to deliver something and only 2 days later, deliver something else, I felt that I should create something and never "deliver" anything. Delivering is slave work, creation is life. So I was awakened and I knew that I should make films.
So, after TP 1995, I went back home to my C64, and tried to find a more modern music program to use for making SIDs and JCH gave me the address of Geir Tjelta, so I called Geir on the phone and he taught me enough to get started using his own editor, SID Duzz It. Before that I made a few tunes in the JCH editor, but I couldn't do what I wanted because there was no description, which bytes are what. I was randomly trying to understand it and it was too hard, so SDI was easier to learn for me.
ZZAP69: Uhm. You make music. I didn't know you made films? Will we see something called Dansa med Jan?
SIDwave: Its a long road... things take more time than I thought. Well for starters I'm editing lots of video, and shoot some. And I practice on that. To get a grant, to be independent, instead of selling out, I have to demonstrate that I can do something. It's the best. The more I have when I go to the big guys with the money, to start production, the more I can have control in the making. If you have only an idea and nothing to show for it, they give you peanuts, take the credits for your work and you never get the chance to make it as it really should be made. IMO the best person who is suitable to direct a movie, is the one that wrote it. That's why Star Wars is eternal. It's made by a guy who does that.
I am/was working on a scene related music video and I posted on CSDB to all to send me a few pics for it. If you have some pics and want to star in a video that is about SID and our demo culture, then write to me.
If nothing comes, then I have to start contacting people, one by one, to get pics and permission. Maybe I should just have done that from the start, but I believed that posting on CSDb will get read and make a difference. Sadly, it's not so. Idling is killing the scene?
Don't want to sound negative... that's why Mr. R was killed! :)
ZZAP69: I heard you were a hooligan during that time, at least more than I expected. Spoiling someone's logo or something? Would you say the parties are different now from then and if yes, how?
SIDwave: You heard wrong! :) The Hooligan was Blitz/2000 A.D. On one party, he poured 1 litre of cola into a C64, because "you're a lamer!", and on another party he asked the gfx guy from Bones or Thanatos: "are you finished? is it saved?", the answer was "eh.. not yet", and then Blitz turned off the C64!
That was evil, just coz Blitz thought he was the best gfxian. (He was then)... hehe
Blitz/2000 A.D. is a good friend.
Another hooligan that really fucked up the sleeping at the Dexion party was Warp/2000 A.D., before we wanted to go to bed, he went and sprayed all the sleeping bags in the sleeping room, with some fart gas that you could buy (for fun stuff). Well, it was NOT funny! This was before we drank beers at the party and before we went to bed at 7 in the morning. It was when we were 17 and we NEED to sleep and feel good, else we couldn't survive a party. And then, he destroyed our sleep with this shit! :)
Parties are different yes, I just wrote how... sleep and booze - it was the opposite back then. :)
ZZAP69: I know you and Kaze are really close friends. But I have also heard you two had some argument about source code he made when he was in TST. What was that about and what made you become friends again?
SIDwave: well, Kaze, TSN, Wizz and me, put all our routines on disks and many demos were made very fast, by loading any source, adapting it and compiling it, viola! a new demo. :) When Kaze and Wizz left TST to go into Wizax, they forbid us to use the routines on the TST disk. But we did, coz we were learning to code, so we had to. :) Later Wizz and Kaze came back, coz Ecan Wizax stole Kaze's 3x high sideborder scroller and uploaded it to Compunet, full of a scrolltext about how he had made all this himself. Bwahaha! so it was in the old days. Code rippers everywhere. Nobody was better than anybody. I ripped too, or "assembled", I just pasted together what I had, and regardless of who made it, to get my dream alive: my own music demos. Mistake me not, I am a very able programmer, but I never spent all my time to learn to milk the VIC chip, so I can't do such cool things. I always just wanted to make music demos, my own. The music is important, not the carrier. Well a nice music disk with great gfx and ubercode is cool yes... but music is for listening, create inner worlds, visions from it, experience it, become it. For me, anyway...
One example is BOGG's Music Album 1 and 2. There is literally just BOGG on the screen and you could sit there for hours and listen to the music. LISTEN MUSIC! not show it, not dance it and hype it and drink tons of booze to enjoy it. No, LISTEN!
Who does that anymore? Just lay on the couch, close your eyes and just be inside the music and be nothing else. Young people in the nightclub could learn something!
The first tunes I did weren't so good, I did a lot of 2nd voices, harmony and recycling of sequences, but I couldn't get the bass to do anything. It's all just C-2 C-3 C-2 C-3, hehe... You have to reach "Zound Muzak 3" one of my last ones in 1988, before I had learned it. Yes and once I also stole a tune from Kaze, "The Force" and made a fake Zetrex 2005 demo with it, saying it was made by Sony/Zetrex (I am he :), we was not friends for I think 3 weeks, then it all fell into sync again. You know, teenagers, fighting over EGO and WOMEN... "who has the biggest one?", LOL. It was like that all the time, the scrollers in the demos is mostly that. Cock size. :)
I don't regret a word I wrote. It was all true, then. And it's so much fun to read, now.
ZZAP69: You were involved in something called PlaySID?
SIDwave: PlaySID, it's a whole chapter for itself. It's what we have today: HVSC, SIDPLAY 2.5 etc. No, I haven't coded any SIDplayer (for PC/Amiga), but I started to rip music in 1986 from games and demos and in 1987 I made a music collection called "Ripped Off!", it's something like 180? tunes ripped in two years. It's the first "intentionally" ripped music collection there was. In 1991 it became basis for the first "ADDITION" pack of sids for PlaySID/Amiga by PHS/CCS. Because I was using nearly all of my time to rip sids, when I got a PC in 1996, then I met Michael Schwendt, the creator of SIDPLAY for PC and through him I met The Shark/INC, the first HVSC admin. Before HVSC came to be, Agust (not August, no), from Iceland, Nemesis1, he took all packs in existence and merged them, into NEMESIDS. Basically he took my 1900+ ripped tunes and changed the dir structure of it all and a real internet ready SID collection was born. In 1996, The Shark, Michael Schwendt, Bod/Talent, LaLa and I, did the same. Packed it all up, started to clean up the credits, find composers, ask about who had REALLY made some tunes. That's how all of it began. Then Hubbard and Chris Abbot appeared and Back in Time, LIVE, were born. Chris wanted to bring the sids, to the outside audience. I wanted that too, that's why I spent 26 years to rip them all, as many as possible!
I don't do that anymore, I quit last year after X, I had decided that X is a level jump and I jumped.
Still I would rip a very hard/rare/great tune, if I want to, because the music is great, but I wont ever again sit for 3 months and rip 1000 sids, on a 20 hour schedule like I used to.
It's what caused my brain to fail. Info overload.
FYI, the rip count is 5672. Also I ripped 5000+ Amiga tunes. Mods, "exotic" and assembler.
As said, its the reason my brain reset in 2001. The problem is, I AM music, all those tunes I heard, they are ALL in there, in my head. They can NOT be deleted, never. But they can be "ignored". :) by Vulcan Mindmeld techniques... NLP.
I lost two Amiga MODs forever that I made. I still have them in my head. If I can find the right samples, I pretty much can reconstruct them.
In 1987, when I made "Apolloguys", I had to reconstruct the whole tune. First I made the tune one late night. Back then I didn't save. Just make the stuff, and save when finished. When the tune was at 80% finished, I accidentally pushed my C64 and the HEXMON cart in the back was bent a bit and caused the C64 to freeze. There was nothing to do. After a reset, the whole memory was random FF 00, so fuck no! nooooooooooo! my tune!!!! so I immediately started to make the tune again, because I know how it should be. The second version (the only one that exists now) became better. But I never want this to happen again, so when I make music I save for every small part I do, a new copy. "machine.1", "machine.2"..... "machine.61" - I save it all and I keep 3 copies of all. The worst I know is to lose something that I just spent 20 hours to create.
Actually the real name of "Apolloguys.sid", is "Squeezed Steps". I named it so, after remaking it the second time, because some parts of the original were transformed/squeezed.
Ian Coog rips sids like a machine, like I did and he rips intros also. Maybe he can do that a long time, but age will make his brain into mushroom, so a word to Ian Coog: "take it easy, you are not 17 anymore!" :)
ZZAP69: I heard you got an Amiga in the late 80's and stopped composing on the C64. What made you come back to the C64 in the 00's?
SIDwave: TST went to Amiga, we thought that Amiga was the new C64, the next gen computer. But it was hard to learn to code and we stopped in 1991. The cause was that we were all going to computer school. Learning REAL programming, databases, all that stuff. DOS. :)
Come back to C64? I never left, I never will. I am... but making music on only 1 instrument. I wanted more, so I bought the Amiga, for the purpose to make music on it. Since then I bought a PC, to get 32 channels (Fasttracker). The computers became my instrument from the day in 1986 when I was listening to "One Man and His Droid", that's when I knew.
I felt there are still things to be done with it and I still feel that there is, and probably, there always will be (like using it on commercial albums and in concerts).
Also, what I mentioned earlier, on The Party 1995, in Aars, I saw a "modern" demo and I knew that I had returned, to my lost self. That this is my life.
But life is more than C64! :)
ZZAP69: What has it been like to have a brother sharing your passion?
SIDwave: all I ever hoped for, because he's pretty good playing on a piano, especially jazz, now he has taken up guitar... let's see one day, if he can play anything. :) He can do what he wants, he knows. But time is limited with kids and work. I wish we could all be kids again... no I don't really, but you know what I mean. :) Ulf created some very bloodthirsty techno tunes on the Amiga, that's where he started to make music. Only a few are actually completely finished, rounded off, but doing 100 worktunes that are never finished, you learn from that, so it's not all wasted. I send all my worktunes to him and he comments on them. If something is outright crap, he says it directly like: "it's a 1 sample drum Jan, it's the same attack every time, it sounds like bad midi from 1989, change it!!!" - and whatever he says, he's right. Or he say "the bass is annoying the hell out of me!" - then I change it, maybe... but sometimes I do.
My father and Ulf, share the bi-yearly ski trips to the Alps. Ulf and I share the C64. My mum and I share golf. My father plays his Hammond organ every night for 20 mins before he goes to bed, but he never learnt to play properly and he doesn't want to. I tried to get him to take lessons, but he prefers it his own way... hehe a waste of potential talent... My father paints pictures or he used to anyway and he's really good. Perhaps he has just made a choice.
ZZAP69: Do you have any comment to the interview we made with your brother Devia in the last issue?
SIDwave: I should speak with him about it. It's personal. :) No... it was nice to read and I just wish we could spend more time together, but he knows that, but he has a family and those kids need what they need...
ZZAP69: Is Devia a better Charset designer than you are? :-)
SIDwave: No. :) He hasn't made any. But he has the visual ability like me, he just don't have the time to sit down and do it. He can I know. He did some good gfx on the Amiga.
I will upload my Amiga pics... some day... And his, if he allow it.
Fact: Devia hasn't made any C64 charsets, he only has converted one for the Datastorm 2010 Ancients demo, the one with 279? greetings in it. Demo: Snowstorm / Ancients.
In all fairness and I want people to know this: if anybody think that I made the SIDwave logo myself, they are wrong! It is the font made by B/Dual Crew, which was used in the demo "White" - it was just perfect for me, so I took this and made the logo out of that charset. All credit to B!
And, I have only made 2 charsets, I use the same 2 over and over, to have my own style. Something recognizable, like the TRIAD crack intro.
ZZAP69: What are achievement are you most proud of in the scene?
SIDwave: Building HVSC which took 26 years of my life. It's why I am now SIDwave.
And making music that nobody else does. Proud of not being "mainstream".
I want to quote somebody, I'll do it at the end. It's very important to me.
ZZAP69: What achievement are you least proud of in the scene?
SIDwave: trying to educate people on IRC, failing and then keep trying. It's over. I'm not coming to IRC ever again, not on #c-64. The scene there is dead. Idlers... idle sceners are dead sceners, an idle scene is a dead scene. Wasted too much time there. Drank too many beers, said too much crap.
Don't wanna sound too negative, I do have friends there, but they are less and less, they have had enough of it, like some others.
I'm not the first to "waste" time on IRC, but all who has left before me, learnt what I learnt. And that is: in the end, XmikeX can sit there and talk to himself, for the rest of his life. While Groepaz is clapping his hands, enjoying it.
I have used this tool in the wrong way and I'm not proud of it! And I apologise to anyone I have offended there!
ZZAP69: How many tunes per year do you make and how many do you release?
SIDwave: The SID Chronology tell all, about the sids... how often... 1 per month? Up to 5? It won't be like that anymore... maybe 6 per year? I don't know... As you see, since 2008, it was A LOT, just as many as in 1987-1988. It's funny, 64 tunes, exactly were made in the 80s, when I didn't know that, I would return in 1998... :)
ZZAP69: And now you said you returned in 1998? :-)
SIDwave: There are some tunes made in 1995, but they are unfinished, and I just spread them afterwards... in 1998 was the first "released" tune "Rabies", that was made in JCH editor and was added to that big music collection that Onslaught did called "Album of the Year". They asked everybody for 1 tune, and made a big music demo.
The tunes I made:
182 sids
87 Amiga mods
8 exotic Amiga format musics
227+ XM pc tunes
40+ midi tunes
200+ mp3 tunes, synthesizer, vst (renoise, presonus)
100+ worktunes on all formats
If all is added to a playlist in XMplay, it says that its 24? hours of music.
ZZAP69: Yeah you were snoring in class. I heard you had a nickname because of that?
SIDwave: Oh yes and that only worsened my stay in high school. It all started out very good and when it ended, I was glad it was over. I got my papers, so I could join the computer school, that's all that mattered. Yes, my nickname there was GAB (Yawn)... I hated it! It's what we today call "adult harassment". It ruined high school for me. The grades went only downward in the last 1.5 years. I was only happy at home, with my C64, Amiga and TST friends.
ZZAP69: Why do you change handle so often?
SIDwave: In fact I didn't... I was called RAMBONES for 25 years. In the last 3 years, I have changed, a lot, and I wanted to reflect this out, that something is happening with me and I was confused. Calling myself Jan Harries? Calling myself Rambones? There is several Spanish guitarists/band, called Rambones, so I can't use that... and it's not who I am anymore. Rambones thinks that whole life is one big war and it is, inside of him. He will not come full circle. I was him. I came full circle, so I wanted to have another name. So I made rash decisions, because I was completely confused. As the project, to make a C64 music group, SIDWAVE, failed, because some members were inactive and one wanted to leave and do his own thing, I realized, that I had become it. So this is my name and it stays that way. Artist name.
I know that those jerks on IRC who have given me a bad time, think that I am a complete maniac and that schizophrenia is multiple personality disorder. Well, my dear readers. I am not and it is not. Read the medical books on what it is. The world has been largely ignorant since always on what it really is about. The doctors are not even sure. Who knows what schizophrenia is? Some guy that has read 10 medical books on his 10 year study to become a brain scanner/surgeon/med producer, OR those, who have it? Who know what it is really? The answer is logical. Do I need to say it?
Some doctors read a few books, take the exam, and treat people for 40 years, without ever updating their knowledge... I met some of them. This is completely useless if we should ever hope to cure it or understand it.
Anyhow, I am not that anymore. I am cured. I am cured because I wanted to be cured and somebody helped me and has changed my life.
So, that is why all this confusion in the last 3 years. I'm sorry, but life don't go as we expect, not even for me, who is working always from my plan. :)
ZZAP69: You seem very structured when it comes to your music. Are you as structured with everything else?
SIDwave: Yes. I inherited this from my mother. ordnung muss sein! My mother has worked in banks and as a secretary to Doctors and she is a bookkeeper (finance). No doubt I have it from her. She turned 60 on the 13th of July 2011. It was a nice party, but it was raining... :)
ZZAP69: Please tell us what you think of today's active musicians compared to those who were active 1985-1989... and to those who were active in 1990-1995!
SIDwave: Well, it's all became more complex. Today they make styles and sounds that would have been called "year 2000" music in 1985. :) In 1985, "Lightforce" was the future of music.
How can we describe it? It's like it's being upgraded all the time. I know that we can make more out of the SID, with intelligent players. Today, a good music routine is still coded in the old way, but it's done that way to use as less time and memory as possible.
Jeff has done some interesting stuff with software oscillators, but he is nowhere near finishing it, because his priority has shifted, to be a house owner, and to get a life. :)
There is more to do here. Have you heard Booker's X2010 tune?
WOW!!!!!
Fact is: We wanted to be Hubbard. That's why we all stole his player and made tunes in it. Then we based our "own" player on his. It was a dream. To BE Hubbard.
Now, people found out, to be themself, coz they can't be Hubbard. :)
Others have other role models, but mine is Rob. There are others, there is many SID composers that I love, but my #1 tune is Lightforce. I know every sound and every note in it, I can play the whole tune, in my head, or on the piano. For 7 years, I made a ritual out of hearing it at least once per day. It was, when new, the ultimate tune that I had ever heard!
I could mention Delta in-game too.. but, just to name one: Lightforce.
Rob has no idea what he did. He is so modest and result oriented, "pay me, and I make a tune", he doesn't think that he is an artist. He has nooooooo idea whatsoever what he has done. When he talks about it, he sounds like a mechanic, who is fixing a car.
ZZAP69: If you had a time machine and were able to remake one day of your life, what day would it be?
SIDwave: Nothing at all. Because if I go back to 1973 and stay on the piano all day long (at the neighbours) and take the classes and got to be what I could be, then I wouldn't be here today. Then I wouldn't be electronic.
And I so love being electronic! :)
A detour in life, isn't a detour anymore, when the two roads meet again. It was just another path, to the same goal.
ZZAP69: Why did you quit Ancients?
SIDwave: I've not quit Ancients. :) Simply the CSDb interface is not able to let a person take a new name. If he take a new name, then he has to EXIT a group, and join it with his new handle.
Someone can add me, I'm not going to make any more mess on CSDb.
Last words:
"When you put water into a bottle, it BECOMES the bottle" (Bruce Lee)