there goes the neighbourhood

musicdisk by smash for theralite

(info notes about the interface futher down, added by whizzter)


.disclaimer:
nothing is my fault. 
don't blame me, i didn't do it.


.random thoughts

i suspect this disk may appear somewhat odd.
its not all aimed at the mainstream, some of the tracks are not
very popish exactly are they? and it isn't scene mainstream either,
no d&b or trance or whatever it is the random lamers of the music scene
are stuck on today.
but at the same time it's not all aimed straight at the jazz fan, the purist,
because some of the songs are pretty un-jazz-like. so it sits in the middle. 
i wrote this disk for myself. 
it is at the same time cheesy-ass happy little funk, the 
traditional jazz sound and just playing around with some shit. 
if you have got this disk, email me now and send me some comments or thoughts
(or just tell me you got it, whatever, i want to know people actually downloaded it)
i hope you can find at least something you like in here.

you are looking at over a year's work, so spending half an hour to listen to it
through isn't so much to ask, is it?

for information on each song, see tracks.txt.

oh. use the interface, it looks great. but if you really don't want to, the tracks
are separate from the exe so you can play them in whatever player you like. but
make sure that player is either FT2.08 (preferably) or xmplay. definately no modplug.





.by the way

if you are a jazz or acidjazz or funk or something like that 
maker, get in contact and let me hear your music. 
if you want me to make music for a demo or something, contact me.
if you want to give me money to make music for your game or production,
tell me now. 
and if you want to give me a record deal, haha, talk to me now.


.notes on the interface _[added by whizzter]

the interface is devloped on a ppro166 with 64 mb of ram, but i have
tested it on my 'ol p75 with 16mb of ram and it "ran" :) (with midas)

the main soundsystem is bass but you can select midas if bass fucks up
by some reason.

command line switches:
 -d : run in fullscreen(directX) mode [default]
 -w : run in windowed(gdi) mode
 -m : this enables midas instead of bass, should work better
       on machines with not-that-much-ram :)

the keys 1 to 8 changes "parts".
the keys a,b and c selects the bonus tunes.
and esc throws you into the end scroller(press esc again to quit)

.how the disk was put together


the short story

this disk was put together over a year, from december 1997 
to january 1999. it has a lot of songs in it. most of them
are jazz, acidjazz or funk based, although you will notice that
they tend to go off in their own direction most of the time.
happy listening.
oh, the interface is pretty, don't you think?



the (very) long story

in 1997 i decided to do a musicdisk. so i did. it was called tempest,
it took me about 5 months to make all the songs, and i was quite 
satisfied with it. then i tried to get an interface done, a group
agreed to do it. unfortunately after a few months of "development", it
appeared that they had done sod all with it, so i gave up on the idea.
by this time i had moved on to other stuff and had decided that the
musicdisk sounded a bit old and not worth releasing (listening to it
today i think it's ok, but whatever). so it was never released.

in 1998, i tracked quite a few songs but released hardly any, mainly
due to the fact that i could not be arsed to do so. around summer 1998,
i decided to package them all up into a musicdisk and release it. of 
course, before i would do so, i would have to finish a few songs that
i was working on and include them. i think that there were many occasions
where i nearly decided to just go ahead and release the damn disk, but
every time i said "just do one more tune". then, as i was in the demogroup
tesko at the time, i asked some guys in the group to do an interface for
the disk. they got the plans together and started development, although
not a lot got done quickly (on both my end and theirs). in the end, i 
went to university and quit tesko (and nearly the whole demoscene). 
nothing was done on the disk for some months, and it was in danger of 
becoming another unreleased collection on my hard disk.

when i got home for christmas, i got back into the scene again, and managed
to get back into tracking after not doing it at all for months. i decided
to finish and release the disk in the (month-long) holiday, because
i knew it wouldn't ever be released otherwise. so, i took the 2 songs
that needed finishing and did so (massively changing them in the process), 
and also tracked one more song to finish it off. i also collected a load
of other smaller songs which i had done over the year and added them in
as "bonus songs", songs which otherwise probably wouldn't be released.

and then the story moves to irc. i quit noise in january 1999, and so
was left only being in beam. unfortunately beam were not looking too
healthy - the last release was october 98 (and they have pretty much died).
i was going to release it for them, but after talking with hybris we worked
out that if it was going to get a big release and good distribution, beam
was perhaps not the best group to do it (as most people thought it was dead).
so i was talking about this on #trax and a few people appeared to be interested
in hearing the disk. one of them was argus/theralite (organiser of the group).
i sent the disk to him and he said he wanted to release it for theralite.

theralite are a wicked group, they have had my respect for a long time. 
they have members like optic and willbe, who are two of my favourite musicians
around today. so i agreed to let him release it. i also managed to worm my
way into joining the group, heh heh.

and then we came once again to the subject of an interface. plan a was the idea
of a web interface with flash, which argus and some of the other guys in theralite
(like willbe) would make. this sounded cool. however, then gainx persuaded argus
to let him do a normal exe interface instead. even better. the first "draft" version
was not quite what argus was looking for, and he sent them back to the drawing board.
so gainx came up with an interface using graphics from lots of top scene artists,
i.e. a pic for each song, and have it released in a month or so. that was in january.

deadlines came and went, delays mounted, some pics were done, some weren't. 
this continued until around may/june, when argus decided enough is enough and that 
the disk would be released as theralite's big 100th release, interface or not.
and well, here we are. 

eventually, after much delay, the gfx started to get finished. and so, we looked 
around for code. i asked whizzter/razor1911 to do it, and he agreed. now, by this
time the disk was very delayed, and it was holding up theralite's other releases -
because the disk was to be release 100, all the other songs waiting to be released
had to wait until the disk was out. it got to mid august and the last theralite 
release was in the beginning of july - so it had to be finished as quickly as 
possible. finally the day came when all the graphics were done and it was down
to whizzter to finish the code (at short notice). 

all that amounted to the disk you have now. it is a collection of the stuff
i did in 1998 (and a bit before and after that) which i liked and decided
went together well enough to be called a disk. there were a few songs i
decided not to put on here because they weren't good enough etc.. so i
did do a little bit of quality control. also, one of the songs that
was going to be on here was dropped and i entered it in mc6 instead,
where it got 9th in veteran.

i hope you enjoy at least a little bit of the disk. it covers a fair
bit of ground, some of it is catchy, some of it isn't, some is mellow and
some is funking.

i think the interface is beautiful. 

listening to this disk you'd have to say it has hardly any commercial
potential at all. but well, that isn't the most important thing.
maybe i could track d&b or techno or some such other style, and
get a record deal one day, but i like doing this style, you know?
it's fun, it's a bit more challenging for me.
let me know how you think i did.










.the geek trip

kit list:
all tracks done on a p120 pc with 40mb ram and 1.2gb hd, and an 
sb16 soundcard
later moved on to an amd k6/2 400 with 10gb hd, but i still use my sb16.
kawai sx-210 (analogue synth keyboard from 1980, i love it)
zoom 1201 fx 
microphone
yamaha p50m piano module (only got it around the end of the disk)
midiman multimixer 6:2 mixer 
roland pc-180 midi controller keyboard (controlling p50m.. 
                                     i don't have it midied with the pc yet)
 

software:
ft2
soundforge 4.5 
a small army of directx plugins 
analogic 


cds:
a lot of sample cds, mainly from magazines like the mix and future music
the future loops collection
the mix studio series sample cd
studio series vol 15: horns
studio series vol 7: bass
studio series vol 14: orchestral

"here come da law" contains a sample from a santana cd. please don't sue me.









.contact information

email:
smaash@yahoo.com  
mjs598@ecs.soton.ac.uk  (if you want another one. send any large attachments here)

http://??
no, i don't have a webpage. anyone want to make me a nice one? =)
i have server space but no inclination or skill to make the page. =)

currently i am a member of theralite, jecoute and razor 1911. 

ftp://ftp.scene.org/pub/music/artists/smash
has some stuff. everything i do should get there eventually.





.thanks 

to gainx for organising the interface, and for doing art for it, and
also inferno, tmk, flood, xhale, markus, argus, fliter and orome for doing art for
the interface

to whizzter for coding the disk's interface

to argus for liking the disk and releasing it for theralite, and
for letting theralite's other releases be held up for two months because
the disk was so late and we wanted out as release #100 =) thanks for
keeping faith with it.

to astradyne and stote for much sample support in the past that i 
still use to this day

to ravian, hotwire and sulphur for starting to make an interface for me,
but somehow i quit tesko and it was never anywhere near finished =)

to everybody who said "yes, i want to hear this disk when it's done", 
it was a useful incentive to finishing it

to the people who have previewed some of the songs, the feedback 
helped a great deal

to everybody who still makes and likes musicdisks and musicdisk interfaces.
it seems they are dying out. few people bother to make musicdisks and even
fewer bother to make musicdisk interfaces. why? ok, it's pointless if you
just have some shit menu to play tracks from, but it can be better than that

nearly every sample on here was created or sampled by me, but a very 
small number were made by other people.. some gave voluntarily, some didn't =)
thanks to willbe, mercure, subliminal and trinity for 
creating usable samples




.hello/respect (the slightly pointless but here it is anyway greets list)

going out to everybody who helped, generally cool people, random people
around the world, and jazz trackers past and present (whos ideas i 
borrow), including, in no order:

argus, toejam, trinity, beek, astradyne, screamager, stote, willbe, stereoman,
hybris, shawnm, lonewolf, lemm, vegard (sorry i never finished the co-op), 
radix, basehead (i think you've probably forgotten more about jazz than i know :D), 
loonie, argh, dr zachary smith, ballistique, mystical, aquafresh, h0l, lemm,
andromeda, wayfinder, jimmy redfern, scaldor, hunz, hotwire, yannis, 
adok, cremax, dd, caramel, bassq, dharma, pirat, farmer, nogsf, iv,
tom, ior, ravian, majicm, sunday, sulphur, discus, barog, frenzy, jrook,
oes, manwe, catspaw, jeremy rice (we should get in contact again, 
haven't heard from you in ages), gd, garlick, knos, mick rippon, phoenix,
dilvish, maelcum, akabu, findus, delta x, cybelius, soundgod, boo, optic,
dvs, spangly, graffik, whizzter, fireblade, case, nrg, barog, dejavu organisers,
semtex, hyper, grim, sneeka, nik, carlos, vovse.. 

all members of razor 1911, theralite, noise, beam, the uk scene, 
#trax 

+ my respect to mono, tdr, fm, analogue music, mon, hugi,
kosmic, digisonix, process 5



my love to clare.







.smash will return!

in future releases for theralite, jecoute, and the productions of razor 1911.

in fact i am also planning 2 more disks in the near future. 
firstly, a uk scene musicdisk starring an all-uk cast of musicians, due autumn 99.
secondly, a razor 1911 musicdisk by myself and andromeda, due someday.

and not to give too much away but yes i am planning a follow-up to this disk.
this was a learning experience. the next one will get right what was wrong this time.
now, i know what i'm doing. =)

to be released summer 2000? maybe. i hope it will be a really good production. 
watch out for it.








