The first time I saw FBY, he was sleeping on the stands of the arena where The Italian Gathering 1997 was taking place. The party was almost finished, and they were announcing the winner of the 4 channel music compo (which was FBY himself). Someone started yelling at him, but he continued sleeping, until they threw him his prize and he awoke.

FBY is a great musician. The parties he won speak for themselves: 1st at The Party 1995, 1st at Saturne 1996, 1st at The Italian Gathering 1997 and 1998, 1st at Outline 2006, and so on. But more than looking at placements, you should experience his mods in first person. If you haven't heard of him, well, lucky you: you have a world to discover today. I suggest (but it's just my personal opinion) to start with Apache, Strange flower and Sambing to have a quick glance of his art, and then dig deeper if you like his style (you will).

So I reached FBY and asked him to talk about his musical origins, tracked music and music in general.


I've read that you started with a guitar and that your sisters carried you (or forced you to go) to music lessons. Is your family a family of musicians? Did you study classical music?

Yes. I began to sing when I was young, and then my sisters and I started to take private guitar lessons with maestro Carlo Mascilli. It was really fun: our teacher gave us pieces to study at home, and then we had to replay them during the lesson. At the end of each lesson, the teacher played for us... he was fantastic. Ivana [his sister, Ed.] quit first, while Sandra continued studying really hard. I was not studying that much, but still managed to keep up with the lessons, and after a while I started to bring to the lesson my own pieces (I was starting to show the traits of a composer, more than a performer). At our first recital, I played music from Leo Brouwer, Dionisio Aguado and three preludes written by me :)

So yes, I had a classical education that influenced my first compositions, like the "Piano Sound" I-V and "FBY Studio" I-IV series. By the way, the first music program I used wasn't a tracker, but a pentagram-based composing software, "Aegis Sonix".

In 1998 you said: "I like travelling a lot, so I don't think I will stay in Florence much more or in a stable way; I'd like to spend quite some time in America, maybe near a big lake with big trouts inside". How did it go then? Did you catch some big trout in America? :)

No, but my father went there :)
I've been in New York and for some time in the flat-ish Florida. I was at Delray Beach and often went to Miami and the beaches near there. I travelled a lot, across Europe in the 90s and then also in Asia. In the last few years, I really dug into Tiziano Terzani's books on the subject. 
Tell us something about the "acid" period of FBY's music, the one that brought pieces like "Acido Puro". Too many hours spent at the disco or just a consequence of the 90s?

Both things, I would say :)
At that time, with my friends Francesco and Demetrio we were listening to "a martello" music [an Italian expression to identify music similar to gabber or with a pumping bass drum, Ed.] every evening. If you like Acido Puro, you should also like Tetriade and Klassica.

Did you ever compose that kind of modules where notes make drawings in the patterns or the pattens go backwards?

No, never. But I appreciate Audiomonster and other musicians that did this kind of stuff. Really ingenious!

Apache. What's the title about? The public release of the .xm dates to 1998, but there are two other versions in different keys. Can you tell us something about the birth of this module?

The title comes from the American Indian tribe... not from the open source web server :) The first version was made in 1988 with Aegis Sonix (4 channels), the second version was made with 2 Amigas playing simultaneously in Soundtracker (8 channels), and the third and final version was made with Fast Tracker and rendered with Deliplayer (with additional stereo sound and reverb).

How did I track one module on 2 Amigas, you may ask... My friend Bernie [Bernardo Innocenti, Ed.] invented an interface that duplicated the mouse movements on the 2 Amigas, when needed, and created a home-made mixer for sound output. He also wrote an Amiga utility called "XModule", that was able to merge two 4ch modules into an 8ch one, and to convert Oktalyzer modules [Oktalyzer is a tracker often used by FBY, Ed.] into .mods.

Another piece I really like is the soundtrack for "Mille e non più mille", a 64k by Spyral that was presented at Mekka/Symposium 1997. Did you have problems staying within the 64k limit (the mod is 20k)?

Not really. I was used to write chip music. For example, I produced other small mods, like "Lucky day" (43k), "Amiga monkey shine" (63k), and the more well known "Superjazz" (aka "Oh yes, Jazz!", 86k compressed), that won the chiptune compo at DiHALT 2007 in Russia.


A question on "inspiration". Talking about non-commissioned music, how does inspiration come for you? You just stand in front of the tracker and start composing, or you imagine a melody when you're walking, or you play an instrument or all of the above?

The first option. I regularly opened the tracker, every afternoon, and started composing what came to my mind. As you can see in the page that collects all my mods (FBY ALL MUSIC), I really covered a lot of genres. I liked to experiment and I enjoyed composing music in every style and genre. For example Andalusia, that recalls Spanish/Andalusian music (I've also been there on vacation) and Paco de Lucia's one.

Is there a relationship between your mood when you are tracking and the quality of the music you produce, or this is really randomic? Where does quality, the thing that makes a piece stand as a masterpiece that is remembered, come from, in your opinion?

Yes, there is a relationship. But there is also a random, experimental factor. For me, the quality of a musical piece comes from its originality (that's why I love Pink Floyd, a band that experimented a lot) and then from its tracking and musical technique.

In another interview, you said: "In the future, more than affirming myself, I hope to create a series of skills, working practices, and a commercial system that would put in the spotlight artists, creators and not the usual merchants". Do you think that with Youtube, Soundcloud, and all the platforms to share music we are near to your idea of 20 years ago?

Yes, that's true: the "new" Internet gave to everybody the chance to put their music online, and for sure this is a good thing. At the time of that interview, anyway, I was starting the company "Nayma Software", in 1998, so in my mind there was the idea to establish a more open and free way of working to create software and electronic art. Nowadays, some companies, like Google, are near to that ideal, giving their employees that kind of freedom and flexibility.

Music in the demoscene has always been free, but very good, nonetheless.
Do you think that music should have a price? Or do you think that there can be a system that would give free music to the listener without letting the artist starve [maybe called Patreon or Spotify, Ed.]?

In my opinion, music should be free. In fact, my motto has always been "Fby's music is free music". Musicians have always been starving, little exceptions apart.

Last question: after all these years, you can tell us: F=Fabio, B=Barzagli... and Y=?

Sorry, it's a secret I will take to my grave :)


It has been a pleasure speaking with FBY and discovering his tracking secrets (but not the secret of his nickname, unfortunately). He's also involved in social themes (he mantains a portal on divorced fathers and paternity, www.paternita.info) and he writes thoughts and aphorisms (www.FabioBarzagli.net - in Italian).

We hope to hear more music from him soon!

posted by friol at 8/12/2020 04:53:00 PM - under: demoscene, history, interviews, intro, Italy, nineties, parties, tracking - comments? here (0)

Bulletin Board Systems: something everybody already forgot.

Something nobody will remember in 50 years, except for Wikipedia.

To your nephews you'll tell: 'Yes, we used those, like photographic film or books'. BBSes were the grannys of the Internets, most of the time used in a serial-way, accepting just one user at time.
And sometimes, the sysop (yeah, maybe Wikipedia will keep memory of him too) came out of nowhere, breaking your intimate and private feeling of leeching files or, badly, some early porn pics, and greeted you or talked to you when the last thing you wanted was to talk.

So next time you logged in, you were like a thief with your paranoid eyes spinning around, fearing the sysop would appear from nowhere, again.

But demoscene, which is everywhere there is shortage of space, bytes, screen resolution or bandwidth, soon started to sponsor BBSes, basically for the selfish need to advertise its productions, or just to spread, well, you know, good old 'stuff' (legal and illegal). Laws were really slow to realize what was happening, so there was a short timelapse where 'hackers' lived in an happy limbo of anarchy.

So, 'bbstros' were born. What are those? Well, take a demo. Make it 3 or 4 kilobytes long. Add music. Add some text talking about telephone numbers, forums and warez and one or two demoscenic effects. There you are. This kind of productions sneaked easily into the 'big' zipfiles containing warez legal software, just like a sort of benign virus.

Even well known groups of the demoscene made bbstros.

Maybe the most well known BBS ad is 'Starport 2' by the Future Crew. Yeah, that mythical group that made the original Second Reality (not the C64 remake).

I remember reading the (printed) source code of STARPORT.COM in my uncle's bathroom. You could find many coding tricks there, not only size related ones, and I couldn't agree more upon the quote by Psi 'Making a small intro is not hard. Making a small intro with a nice feel is very hard'. Because you know, Starport 2 was made in 1993, and was 1993 bytes long. Yeah, things like that counted in 1993.

bbstros showed off cryptic and mysterious acronyms like 'V32bis', 'DGI',' GSN' or talked about forgotten places like 'The Asylum', 'The Lounge', 'Blastersound', 'Digital Nightmare', 'The One', 'Virtual Light', 'Equalizer' and so on. And exotic international prefixes you would be afraid (or not so) to call. But at the end you would make that call, attracted by that '3 Gigabytes' of downloadable software or by the luxurious 'free email'.

There is another couple of mythical intros made for the (as much as mythical) french A.C.E. BBS. Both are productions of Karl/Nooon.

One (ACE2.COM) is 2.221 bytes and shows a 3d voxel rotating 'ACE' logo. The second falls in the 'things that ran fine on a 386sx' category (I should write a post just on that concept, someday). It's only 2.465 bytes long, and has a nice big scrolling font and a background rotozoomer with the then famous 'Intel Outside' motto.

If you wanted 'the latest warez' for (no less than) HP48, you had to call 'The One', back in 1994. 'The One' had a nice ad, made by Eclipse, that is very Amiga-ish in its colours, effects and in the font. Pointless to say, this ran fine on a 386 too.

Italy had BBSes as well.
Many were demo-related (it's 1995, remember). Something of them still exists, if you look closer. Somewhere on this page you can find old vestiges of that time appearing as modern-day .png files. If launching again those reliquiae makes your DosBox sound strange and metallic, you should be aware that many DOS BBS intros exploited the old 'Adlib' (or OPL2, integrated into the SoundBlasters) chip/soundcard, because an Adlib player routine is much more simple and small than a full digital replayer. Some BBS intros have ASCII graphics also, because that's tiny (and colorful).

Oh well, that was just the tip of the iceberg for bbstros.

There were sub-scenes of BBS intros on Amiga, C64 and Atari too. Still, someone in a moment of nostalgia makes a bbstro for Windows.

That makes no sense, you may say. But what is this if not an expression of something measured in kilobytes, reduced to 32 colours, four channels and with BBS telephone numbers that start with "+", called demoscene?


Edit: apparently, BBS-fever infected Pouet too:

posted by friol at 2/08/2015 08:07:00 PM - under: BBS, demoscene, intro, Italy - comments? here (0)

There was an era when demotools were not needed to create a mindblowing intro, an era when 2D effects outnumbered 3D effects, sounds were not realtime generated but sampled, scene poetry was scene poetry and progress bars were made of ASCII characters. In that era the PC scene broke its Amiga roots and assumed its own shape.

This is a trip through that period and its milestones we still remember now, 15 years from there.

Symbology - Admire (1993)

This intro turns pale if compared to modern productions, but at its time it was a breakthrough.
The 64k format wasn't perfectly consolidated (this intro weights 75kb, in fact), but intros up to 1993 had always shown quite static scenes and repeated the same cliches ad infinitum: multicolour plasmas, 3D starfields, shadebobs.
Symbology, instead, makes a technological step forward: it shows 3D scenes and a free camera, and an embrional but vivid "story".
The plasma-cube eaten by the landscape-wormhole is epical.

Drift - Wildlight (1995)

Everybody remembers Drift.

Drift shows some youth errors (full blue is a coder-colour, the 3D-julia is a nerdy and old effect), but the use of shadows and the (generated) music create an unpreceded episode. There are not toroids or ducks in this intro, but objects with a well-defined personality.

The end credits make you shiver still today.


Lasse Reinbøng - Cubic team (1995)

Lasse Reinbøng suffers from its "german" fingerprints (see the lack of coherence in some elements and the kitchy typography), but at its time the number of scenes enclosed in 64kb and the seamless transitions surely hit the scene.

The quantity of simultaneous rotozoomers in one of the first parts impressed everybody, running at full framerate on a 486.


Supermax - Complex (1996)

Supermax is the intro that helped the scene break the 256 colours barrier.

A bunch of shiny spotlights and an extremely realistic bump mapping are enough to create a sci-fi mood. This time Complex needs no 3D scenes, no strange effects, only the title, some four fingers melody and a breathtaking typograpy.



Paper - Psychic Link&Acme (1996)

It's the first intro with a central "theme" (paper, indeed) instead of the usual effects sticked together.

Some moments, like the 2D drawing that comes to life and gains the third dimension, or the paper planes that fly along some splines at the end, are unforgettable still today.

Legend says that sceners at Wired '96 continued to build and throw paper planes for hours after seeing this intro.

Famous cyber people - Pulse (1996)

Pulse show some Orange influence in this really peculiar intro.
Famous Cyber People doesn't impress for the variety of effects (at the end it's made of variations on the same one) or for the 3D models (during the whole 64k, only one is shown, and it's almost hidden), but for the beauty of music, pixeled images and chromatic choice.

The 2D bumped tunnel is something organic and threatening.

Deesbab - Orange (1996)

Orange, instead, cite themselves.
The constellations and alien sounds of Deesbab create in a few seconds an unique and inimitable atmosphere. We'll find echoes of this intro in masterpieces like Bjoer or Viagra, or in anything else, up to the SQNY productions. The makers of Bjoer (TPOLM) will negate the similarities with Deesbab, but it's like negating a portrait owes something to the Mona Lisa.

Drain - Vista (1997)

It's the official sanctification of scene poetry.
Despite its low resolution, Drain doesn't look out of place if compared to modern intros. The number of effects, each one different from the others, is elevated. The technical mastery of the medium is impressive (there are a few intros with sound for GUS and Soundblaster).
Scenes are clean and linear, but evocative.
The cut between the purple free directional planes and the lens flare at the end is flawless.

Spotlite - Funk (1997)

Funk makes the final ascent to the peak of software rendered 3D.
The scenes, if watched nowadays, have a really slow pace, but the spotlight of the title made people scream for a miracle. Even for modern intros, it's rare seeing a similar level of detail in object illumination.

It's strange that from a kitchen (where legend says that Digisnap, the coder, wrote this beauty) comes one of the most advanced intros of the last millennium.


And as a final gift, daTunnel has packed those 8 intros in a nice demozip. Watch it with Dosbox and imagine 1993 is here again.

posted by friol at 4/22/2010 10:33:00 PM - under: 64k, intro, past - comments? here (2)

"This post is bigger than 4Kbyte".

4k, in the qabbalah of demoscene, means a program with size smaller or equal to 4096 bytes.

Classic figures you get to explain how tight 4k is are, for example, comparisons with other programs (Microsoft Word spans several megabytes) or with the size of a movie (a 3 minute .avi can weight even 15 megabytes).
But those delights in 4096 bytes are more than that. You should imagine 4ks as the haiku of informatics; like an ecosystem in a matchbox; like a ship in a bottle. Like bonsai.

If this article was made of code, we would have already used 25% of the available 4096 bytes.

This is a trip through what the demoscene managed to put in 4 kilobyte intros across the last 10 years.

Ready?

1997 - Omniscent - (download link - watch with Dosbox)

To understand the beauty of "Omniscent" you don't have necessarily to know Descent, as you should have not necessarily seen Microsoft Word to understand how small 4096 bytes are.

"Omniscent" was a step towards the future. "Omniscent" brings an entire level of the game "Descent" in 4Kbytes, and, as a bonus, if you rise your speakers' volume, you'll hear the metallic chords of a videogame-music.

Sure, the technology is ten years old, but in those 4 kilobytes you'll find everything: earth, lava, warning signs, neons and even alien-painted walls. We see everything in first person, floating lightly as a spaceship pushed by anti-gravitational rockets.

And while we exit from the tunnel, maybe we can hear behind of us the sound of the exploding corridors.

1998 - Mesha - (download link - watch with Dosbox)

After "Omniscent", democoders wanted to demonstrate that more and more things could fit into 4k; they wanted to push the limit some polygons further.

So the intro's info-file tells us that those 4096 bytes of code processed 13.000 vertexes, 17.000 faces, 8 different textures; many 3d solids were created by "revolutionary" generative algorithms.

If there is an astonishing aspect of 4k intros, this is the size of each routine, like the size of a leaf or a root in a bonsai tree.
So "Mesha" contains a code depacker in only 95 bytes. Every texture is generated by an algorithm of a few bytes. Other 4ks have musical players in 100, 110 bytes or musical scores in a bunch of bits.

Now you could ask yourself: would nowadays' software span entire DVDs if it was made as 4k are?

1999 - Void3 - (download link - watch with Dosbox or see the video)

The echo of a metallic sound in the distance, a pink fog that clears in front of our eyes, and then, coup de coeur : speech synthesis in 4k.
The future is now.

Ok, even Commodore 64 could do speech synthesis, you may argue, decades before, but here is the difference: this is 4k. C64 had ten times that memory space, and, do you remember?, when that "destroy him, my robots" quote got out of the speakers, everything just freezed.

Here we have realtime 3d graphics, synth quality music, 16 millions of colors and high resolution video all running together with speech synthesis. That's just the difference.

2000 - Stoerfall ost - (download link - watch the video)

Who programmed a factory with orange automatic robotic arms and put it to sleep in just one sector of our hard drive?

4k intros are no more than a magic lamp: you just have to rub them to realize your dreams.

If we run "Stoerfall ost", we suddenly see two couples of orange robots hanging up some blue panels in an assembly line. Then the camera zooms out and we understand they are just weaving Penelope's shroud. They are condemned by the coder to repeat the same moves ad infinitum.


Perpetual motion in only 4096 bytes. Now, GOTO 10.

2001 - Juggler 2001 - (download link - watch with Dosbox)

A reference to the koine of computer-graphics, again.

This time, we should go back to November of 1986 to catch it, year when in an Amiga program the animation of a stylized humanoid made three reflecting balls spinning inside a surreal landscape. At that time, this made people scream for a miracle, and relegated green phosphors monitors of IBM PCs in a dusty corner, in favour of a machine that was light years ahead in technology.
The programmer himself described in detail the somersaults needed to inflate that animation in an Amiga diskette.

An Amiga disk is 880Kb big.

In 2001, the juggler comes back to life; this time the camera is not static, but moves through the scene; the spheres are not just three anymore, but become many; music is not even that metallic "bip" again, but is made of real armonic chords.

Pressing "escape", the Pandora's box closes inside itself its 4096 bytes.

2002 - Industrial light and magic - (download link - works in xp and vista)

Industrial light and magic is obviously the company that creates the most astounding special fx in the world, but here its name is borrowed by the two democoders of this intro to play on words with the "light" of the technique used to realize the graphics (raytracing) and the "magic" of enclosing everything in 4 kilobytes.

This time, all the cliches of raytracing (here, scene's peculiarity, in realtime) are respected: the reflecting checkerboard that mirrors the spheres made of different materials, the columns with the central light source, the tunnel with shadows. Everything is perfect, even the realtime generated soundtrack.

Raytracing is a computational technique that normally uses machine-hours to create just a simple image, but this time, with this masterpiece, space and even time limits are broken.

2003 - Mojo dreams - (download link - works in windows xp)

The tentative to recreate a landscape (maybe a martian one) in few bytes is common in the demoscene, with more or less good results.

Indeed, here we witness a leap forward: normally we would find mojo dream's graphics in several megabytes weighted ATI or Nvidia's tech demos. Instead, for the nth miracle of demoscene, here everything is concentrated in 4k.

But how is this step made, compared to "Mars"? With algorithms, first of all: the terrain is not generated with a "simple" perlin noise, anymore, but owes its natural look to "Doc Mojo"'s (from here the title) Musgrave researchs. Light is bend by the light scattering routines. The rest are demoscenical tricks, but looking at the mojo dream's mountains is like looking at the Matrix behind an operator's monitor: at the end, they're made of scrolling green characters.

2004 - Micropolis - (download link - works in windows xp)

If "Stoerfall ost" recreated an entire factory in 4k, Micropolis creates a whole futuristic city.

There are bridges, buildings, trains, and the sky is obfuscated by thousands of small stylized flying cars.
Music is obviously synthetic and sequenced. Frequencies are cut progressively by resonant filters, the ones you normally find in 10 thousand dollars recording studios' synths.

Suddenly, going backwards, the camera uncovers a mech's foot. It's the topic moment. Suspension of disbelief falls down, because in a fraction of second the mech starts to march and goes with its footsteps towards the heart of the 4 kilobytes city.

But if you thought that we reached the limit (what can you fit in 4k bigger than a city?), read ahead.

2005 - Parsec - (download link - watch the video)

Bigger than a city.
It's simple: a planet.
More planets.
A galaxy.

This is "Parsec": an entire galaxy in 4k.

We get an initial image of the whole galaxy, but then we see that it's composed of smaller planets. Probably some planets are populated. We get worlds with asteroid rings, we get nebulas, we get stars and space debris. Quality is not far from cinematographic effects.

The 4k intros with "natural" scenarios close a circle: men always knew that behind every natural shape there is mathematics; now mathematical algorithms are used to recreate natural worlds.

2006 - Polarfield - (download link - works in windows xp)

The reaction to "Parsec"'s delusion of grandeur could not be different from minimalism.

At the beginning of "Polarfield", the screen gets filled of garbage; a "loading" sign is in the lower right corner (actually the "garbage" is not really garbage, but a side effect of precalculus). In the background, a synthetic music repeats the same six notes, in a loop. We may think that something's really broken in the program, but at this point, the intro starts.

Polarfield uses only two colors, black and white, and the intermediate shades of gray, but turns that into unequaled elegance.

The abstract shapes (from white cubes, to romboids with black spikes, similar to the beak of a robotic parrot) are rendered with an algorithm called ambient occlusion (we find something really similar in 3d graphics professional programs, like 3dStudio or Maya). At the end, the music fades away while the 3d solids continue to dance in a milky background, and the electronic carrillon closes and stops moving.

2007 - Stiletto - (download link - watch the video)

What's left after robots, planets, Descent-levels and landscapes in a 4k intro? Well, just an human. A woman, or, to be exact, half a woman.

When the intro starts, we hear just footsteps; then the silhouette of two legs, unequivocally feminine, comes onto the screen, wearing a pair of red stilettos that, we are informed, cost only 99 dollars. The intro then gets a bit repetitive; the lower part of the body is taken by many different angles.

But what gives the wow-factor is the flexuous movement, the natural colour of the skin, that makes us believe the rest of the body is not less angelical. Indeed, knowing the space-hungry scene democoders, the upper polygons of the body are surely just cut in an abrupt section.

Digital walls within 4k worlds probably are just the wings of a theatre.

posted by friol at 8/22/2007 06:51:00 PM - under: 10 years, 4k, intro - comments? here (1)

Post più vecchi