Who would’ve thought one little piece of electronics could be so awesome. The SID chip found in the Commodore 64 still sounds absolutely glorious to my ears. Hell, I used to endure a 5+ minute loading time for Golden Axe specifically to hear the introduction music, then I’d switch the machine off once I’d gotten my fill. And I’m not even going dare start talking about Last Ninja 2..

listening to sid music

You’re going to need a SID player first up, fortunately there are no small number of them. If it’s a specific game you’re after, you might be better off just searching for it on Lemon64 and playing the music back with their web-based plugin (if you’re brave enough to still keep your Java plugins enabled).

For just a measly 70-odd megabytes, however, you can go and download the High Voltage SID Collection, a periodically-updated collection of just about every SID tune ever made. There’s more music in that collection than most of us probably have the ability to consume in what’s left of our lives. I think the HVSC was one of the first things I ever downloaded when I first got access to the Internet.

investigating sid files themselves

The first thing I wanted to figure out was exactly what a SID file comprises. The HVSC site has a pretty comprehensive documentation about that. This document describing the file format is probably the best “bible” on the topic, but I found the docs in the Ripping for Dummies guide quite good when it came to gluing all the concepts together, going  through the steps you need to follow when hunting for telltale clues of SID music in raw data and how to pluck it free from its confines.

Having read the above ‘how-to’ on how to rip music, it really is awesome that so many dedicated people have already done the hard work of ripping music for every C64 game imaginable! Thanks, collective Internet people. You’re awesome.

getting down and dirty with the chip

I found the SID Primer to be a great read at describing the fundamental capabilities of the chip and how to actually make some sound with it. Having read that, going into a tutorial on writing Happy Birthday in BASIC on the chip may make more sense. Or at least, it did for me. Oh, and if you’re going to copy-and-paste the code into an emulator like VICE? Make sure you convert everything to lower-case first, otherwise you’ll do what I did and paste in utter gibberish, then be very confused.

Now, the SID Primer makes reference to a program that the author has written to simplify sending instructions to the chip, but it’s absent in that link. I ended up hunting down the original article as it appeared in disC=overy, where you’ll see there’s a block of uuencoded data. Just paste it into your uudecoder of choice and you’ll get back a binary file which you should be able to load up in VICE or any other C64 emulator.

Toying with the above program helped me understand a little more about the impact of programming the registers in different ways, and how to get some familiar-sounding sounds crafted. Not so good for actually composing music though. Another program I noticed recently, but haven’t played with yet, is Iseq. It looks great! Totally psyched to give that a go one of these days.

Another great resource is SIDin Magazine. This is one that I’ve added to my reading backlog as it has a tonne of information on how the SID chip works, how to rip, how to compose, interviews with some of the best SID musicians, and more.  Somehow this site escaped all my initial googling research on the SID chip, which is a shame because it’s absolutely fantastic. I just wish I had enough spare time to indulge this sort of curiosity further and read all the issues.

a final note

Okay, I said at the start that I wouldn’t talk about Last Ninja 2, but that game really is the gold standard of C64 music for me. I can (and do!) listen to that soundtrack today and be just as thrilled by it as I was when  I was a ten year old kid hearing the Central Park theme for the first time. The whole thing is, pardon my crudeness, just fucking spectacular. Here’s the whole lot in a youtube playlist. I wish I hadn’t brought it up because now I’m going to listen to the whole thing before bed. Fuck. Sorry neighbours.

Matthew,

By the time you read this, we will be living in Gracemere. Our new house is really cool. Did you hear about Luke’s fight. He creamed Mark Crawford. It was cool to watch. Luke just bought Pitfighter on PC and I have a copy of it. It is completely and utterly brilliant. Arcade Perfect.

I finished Viking Child from start to finish in a week. If you don’t believe me I’ll tell you what happens at the end. After you kill the fella that grows big and disappears and reappears all the time, it shows Brian running to this man and woman. It has a fancy border with ‘the end’ written down the bottom and plays this deadly music.

Did you know Lemmings is out on the LYNX? After reading the review on Dirty Larry and after I got Pitfighter on the PC, I think I will get Dirty Larry instead of Pitfighter for my birthday.

I do not recommend Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and I will be swapping it for either Awesome Golf, Scrapyard Dog, Gauntlet or Electrocop. Can you please send up a copy of the codes for Electrocop? STUN Runner is brilliant and I can finish it but I won’t tell you what happens at the end because its a secret.

You know how my LYNX was playing up, it was a faulty connection in the LYNX, the bad connection mucked up my AC adaptor. The dude at Tandy blew up my AC adaptor and had to replace it. The next day, I went into Tandy and told the fella that he was a useless pile of horse cack! It was so funny. One of my friends at MSS High School owns Hot Shot Jeans! Is acid back from Hawaii? Gotta go now and finish packing.

Tony.

Whether you like, dislike or are otherwise indifferent towards Beck, one thing is for certain, you have to respect the man’s willingness to try different things. His musical output for much of the last 20 years is testament to that, showing him to be a pretty adept musical chameleon tackling all sorts of different genres and styles.

I happen to fall very strongly in the “like” category when it comes to his music - his 1998 album Mutations is either my #1 or #2 favourite album of all time (strongly dependent upon how depressed I’m feeling in the moment), and I think he’s an absolute genius.

But when he announced that his new “album” would only exist as a book of sheet music, I jumped unreasonably quickly onto the “wtf gimmick” bandwagon, although I’m not entirely sure of what my reasons were for the distaste. It just seemed a little bit self-indulgent, a little bit too artsy, and heck - it’s been five years since a last real album, toss us a bone here or somethin’!

My care level in the project was fairly low until I saw it sitting on the shelves of a record store whilst in Sydney last week, which caused the old impulse-buy nerve to kick in. Unwrapping it and taking it home, I was immediately struck by just how well it’s made.. the art accompanying the sheet music is simply gorgeous. And in addition to the twenty full songs that feature, there’s also little one-pager mini songs and snippets ascribed to imaginary musicians and companies (it’s all ghostwritten by Beck). It really is stunningly well put-together.

I thumbed through the songs on offer and picked out what looked like the simplest to pick up and play, a little piece called “Please Leave a Light On When You Go”, and then sat down at the Yamaha for an hour or so learning the first couple of pages until I started to get fluid at it.

And it’s kind of a weird feeling, you know? Because I’m now hearing new Beck material for the first time, but it’s actually me playing it. And I have no idea if I’m doing it “right” (the real answer is, of course, there is no “right”), and I’m singing everything off key, but I didn’t give a damn. It was fun.

Afterwards I went prowling on youtube and looked up other peoples’ interpretations on the piece. There’s a tonne, and they’re all so varied, and wonderful, and fucking amazing. And I think at that point I finally “got” whatever Beck was trying to achieve with Song Reader. The key thing was not having one original piece with which to base one’s interpretation off. There is only the sheet music, and you do with it what you will. I’m honestly quite glad that I didn’t go looking up performances before learning the song, because it was quite glorious to go into it with my own understanding of how the piece worked and then compare that against how others with vastly more talent and ability chose to approach it.

So even though there’s a bunch of songs in Song Reader that I won’t have a hope in hell of being able to play any time soon, I’m going to resist the temptation to look up the ways in which other people have played them for as long as possible. I’m trying to learn “The Last Polka” right now and honestly it sounds like a bit of an incomprehensible mess in my clumsy hands, but if or when I ever feel like I’ve got it “right”, I’ll be excited to jump back on youtube and see what the rest of the world did.

Sorry for doubting you Beck! You continue to be goddamn amazing. But I’d still like a new album all the same.

Assuming I’ve managed to poke and prod the right buttons in tumblr to make this happen, this blog should go live at roughly the same time that I’ll be sitting in The Basement with drink in tow, waiting for something very special to happen over the course of the next couple of hours.  You see, I’m off to watch The Necks play live tonight. This’ll be somewhere between the tenth and fifteenth time that I’ve watched them play - I’ve honestly lost count, it could be even more than that. You’d think that watching any band play live would lose its lustre after attending that many shows, but to me, The Necks aren’t just any band. And I’m as excited to see them today as I was the very first time.

Necks are an Australian jazz trio that have been playing together for over two decades now. Their members - Tony Buck on drums, Lloyd Swanton on bass, and Chris Abrahams on piano - are among the finest in their craft. A simple glance of their rather exhaustive individual resumes is enough to prove that. I first heard them back in 2005 when JJJ were doing an “A-Z of Australian music” feature. Hearing “The Sleep of Champions” (from their album The Boys) playing on a fuzzy car radio was enough to convince me that this was a band worth checking out, so I took a trip out to the record store later that week and picked up the first album I could find. That happened to be Hanging Gardens (a brief ten minutes of the full hour-long, single-track piece can be listened to here).

The next day I took a long lunch break and spent about $200+ grabbing every other album of theirs I could find.

So yeah, they had a bit of an effect on me.

But albums aside, it’s the live show that’s really what makes me love them. The typical Necks show is split into two sets of 45-60 minutes each. There’s that initial moment of anticipation as you wander in to the empty theater, seeing the instruments minus their performers, all lying dormant.  And then in time the lights will lights darken, the audience will give a smattering of applause, and the trio will make their way on-stage.  They’ll take their instruments, and ready themselves to play.

And then, silence.  Absolute silence.

You can hear a pin drop in the theater during that initial moment before the band play. Because, you see, The Necks are an improvisational band, and very often it would seem that the band don’t even know amongst themselves as to who’s going to start playing first, or even what they’re going to play. The audience, too, are waiting with bated breath, knowing that what they’re about to hear is something new, something born purely out of the moment, and never to be repeated. It happens in every show of theirs I’ve been to, in every different city.

And the silence continues. The band stand ever-so-still, their eyes closed, as if waiting for someone to tell them to ‘go’.

And then, that moment comes. One of the members will begin to play something. A soft chord, a gentle tap of a cymbal, a thrumming bass - exactly who starts first each time is anyone’s guess - but eventually the remaining members will join in as well. Over the next 50 minutes the piece will grow and evolve, to the point where you can be sitting there in stunned wonder, trying to figure out how exactly it got to this point.

Eventually the piece will draw to its conclusion - whether abruptly or gradually is up to the whim of the band members themselves. But typically their pieces will gradually fade and the band members will stop playing one-by-one until there’s just one left to carry the music to its end. He, too, will eventually stop.

And silence returns to the theater..

..if only for a few seconds. And then, there’s a sizable and rather lengthy amount of applause from a very appreciative and very blown-away audience.

Then it’s time to grab a quick drink before the band come back on-stage in twenty minutes to do it all again a second time.

Seeing this band live is something I recommend to anyone. There are Perth, Melbourne and Canberra dates left in what might be their only Aus tour for this year.

Like most people, when I’m sick, I want some comfort food to make me feel better. Unlike most normal people, my comfort “food” seems to be watching b-grade horror movies.  My usual favorite to watch is Exorcist 2 - a film so spectacularly bad, yet so indelibly watchable, that it defies logic. However, I couldn’t find the DVD in my increasingly-cramped closet, so yesterday I resorted to my back-up choice, Jaws 2. Following on from that, I decided to revisit a few little thoughts on the Jaws franchise that I’ve written in the past, and chuck them up here.

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Despite a decade’s worth of hindsight, it still seems too early to get a good feeling for how the 1990s will be remembered in the annals music history - or if we will care to remember them at all.  Many will view it as a time when grunge and alternative rock stole the limelight from their 80s soft rock cousins, only to find their very selves usurped by a “post” and “indie” rock scene as the decade drew to a close.  Others will reminisce upon how electronic music blossomed from house and techno into an explosion of oft-confusing genres, sub-genres and sub-sub-genres.  Musical styles twisted and melded together; jazz fused with funk, hip-hop fused with dance, metal fused with industrial, the list goes on and on.

Amidst this period of experimentation existed a microcosm of musicians spread around the globe, writing and sharing their music for free using floppy disks, Bulletin Boards and eventually some odd, uncommon thing called ‘the Internet’.  Loosely coupled to an artful subculture of hacking known as the demoscene, these musicians - or “trackers”, as they were colloquially known - created thousands of hours of music using the same humble home computer that sat in many family homes.  Most of these trackers were teenagers, and for some of them it would be a starting point that would evolve into successful ‘mainstream’ careers later in life.  Decades on, the music created by this collective of artists is still shared and revered.  But to understand tracking, it’s best to first understand two related concepts - MOD files, and the demoscene.

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The Reward.  A funny and quite imaginative animated short about two fellows on a quest for treasure.

Voice Over.  About an astronaut crash-landed on Mars who has only ten minutes of air.  No, no, wait, that’s not right..

Paperman.  The short that preceded Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph in theatres, now on-line.

They’re all under ten minutes.  Good stuff.

(this longform piece was originally written some time ago for a friend’s since-vanished site. I’m relocating it and other writings here so that they’re all eventually in one place until I shuffle off to the next flavour-of-the-month blog site.)

Hi.  My name’s mrbarge, and I suck.  No really, I do.  At first, I wasn’t sure whether I should write this article, because I’ll probably suck at it too.  But, I figure I may as well write about what I’m good at, so this entry’s going to be dedicated to how my inherent suckfullness got me to this sorry point in my life.

My passion for programming started at a young age, probably around ten or eleven years old. I remember that one of the first things I wrote was a text adventure game in BASIC (using the free GWBASIC that came with MS-DOS 3). It was loosely based around a freeware Commodore 64 game called Grod The Demented Pixie.

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