One of the fun things about the old trackers was that you could load any file as a sample or song, with varying result. Here are two examples from 1995.
EGO – Bit By Bit
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Bit By Bit was made by loading a few images and data files as samples, and spreading them out over a few patterns, turning samples on and off for a while with drums on top. The drums are in fact proper samples though, made from an old kiddie Casio keyboard which had broken somewhere internally and sounded not like it was supposed to.
Knobster – Gok
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Gok (there’s a Gok 2 as well) was made by loading some random data file as a song, as thus creating random data all over the place. This practise would not seldom crash the program – or the entire computer – because of all the weird numbers that would appear where they shouldn’t and cause memory leaks or something. Loading the same file as a song at different times would create different results as well, because it would try to play samples placed in odd memory locations so it would change depending on what files you had loaded previously. Anyway, you’d load a file, press play, and if it worked you’d put a reverb on top of it and you had created a new experimental ambient masterpiece. Of course, you’d never tell that it’s all random noises and there’s no actual work involved.
A (long) note about the band names: We would constantly change band names for various reasons. In the early days of techno, people would use different names to separate different styles. Sometimes an artist would even be too productive, and to stop himself from overflowing the market he would use different names on different records. An examples is Moby who would release early records as Voodoo Child, UHF and Barracuda among other names. We started out with BPA as a catch-all band name, but later switched to EGO for a short period until we realized it was quite a common name. We even played at a festival where we were double booked with another Ego at the same time. EGO turned into 0.63 (EGO upside down) but was used mainly for the more un-genre-able electronica (remember that word?) while numerous names was used for more specific types of tunes. Knobster was mainly Jan’s own ambient-quirkiness, although the Gok “tunes” was a joint effort (hah).
