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)

Let's face it: modern demoscene sucks.

Too many hexagonal lens flares, too many trilinear filtered polygons.
Too many satori demos and too few TBL DOS intros.

But, you know, as the title says, there is still hope in the past: maybe there's something to discover again in that beautiful period of our lives called "the nineties", when we listened to 2Unlimited and Snap, lens flares were just circular and to run some DOS intro you had to cross your fingers and hope that you had free enough of those 640k that should be enough for everyone. Or maybe those demos I'll speak about just suck, so you can just stop reading here and leave an angry, sarcastic message in the comments.
I don't care.

Modern demoscene is too involute.
Back in the nineties, you could have shown a torus (or the inside of a torus) and just ruled by doing that.
Today, you have to show 9 raytraced meta-toruses merging into each other, and you barely suck.
Yeah, your 12-part 4k with music isn't that bad for a firstie.

So, let's go back to the 90s and see some jewelry hidden in there.

Jive 2/Sublogic (1998)

That jazzy music (a mythical lo-fi .xm by lone wolf called "the funky corner"). Some spinning clouds in blue and purple. Some raytraced spheres and cylinders. The effects change every 4 patterns, and it's never the same effect. And music follows the intro's flow perfectly.
And then, the music stops, and, what's that? An image. Not a crappy, B/W pixelated image, but a full colour image.

This is Jive 2, aka charlie chong.
This is "the second part in the famous 'Jive' intro series".
Oh, how much I love that nonsense feeling demoscene had in the 90s? Modern demoscene takes things too seriously. And it sucks.

Fyvush/Jamm (1994)

Who does remember Jamm? What are the Jamm members doing today? Maybe they are just old farted house-men, growing up children that just want to chat on Whatsapp and don't know what IRC is. I'm talking about an intro that squeezed each clock cycle out of your dusty 16Mhz 386sx. Come on, who does that today? Just Trixter, that, as everybody knows, is an old farted house-man of the 90s.

Ok, OK, Fyvush has some strange coder/psychedelic colours, makes more than one effect with palette cycling (THAT is so nineties), but, damn, which modern intro has upside down characters at the end? None. And NOT because no one makes DOS intros anymore.

Fyvush made a FAST rotozoomer years before all that cache shit by Pascal.

An please, PLEASE, watch that spinning hellraiser cube move smooth on a 386. Just buy a 386 to watch it, dude. It's cheap.

Overtone/Suburban (1999)

Fast forward to the end of the nineties.
I bet nobody remembers Suburban anymore. I do. They were the last defenders of Pmode/W, the wizards of bilinear filtering, the masters of DOS-era and 320x240 design. I have seen this intro live at The Trip 1999 and it rules. No that's not for nostalgic reasons. This post is not nostalgic. Shut up.
Overtone has everything you'd love in a DOS intro: 3d with overlayed wireframe lines, free directional tunnels and that lightray effect you'll drool on.

And music by pete e, one of the best (and forgotten) musicians of all time.

Now go hear all his modules. And then go watch all of Suburban productions.
Then return here and continue reading this.

Mother lode/fudge (1997)

Ready to have a bilinear filtered orgasm?
Yeah, probably someone still remembers fudge, but maybe for their "the clone" series. Nah, that's too mainstream.
Fudge invented the "super bon bon" effect (that's a trademark). The Fudge guys are soo cool that they decided to name a demo "planet groove" (what's more 90s than that?).

Mother lode features an aggressive music from croakr/TPOLM, and as said all effects are bilinear filtered (no, you don't need a Geforce GTX 690 for that). Mother lode has blue objects on a red background and red objects on a blue background. Mother lode is the prodrome to all the orange, TPOLM, TBL and everybody else's intros of the second half of the nineties.

Mother lode has that stylish, linear, fire-esque fudge logo you'll envy forever.

Pandemic/Byterapers (1997)

Pandemic: adj. 1. widespread; general. 2. Medicine: Epidemic over a wide geographic area and affecting a large portion of the population.

You want to watch this just for that chick's picture. Yeah, that chick with the alien skin.
You want to watch this just for that underwater scene.
You want to watch this just for the [B] logo in 256 colours, even if the demo is in truecolor.
If you watch Pandemic, you'll appreciate 1bit animations and two overlapped, alpha blended free directional tunnels.
You would have never said that.

Space/Euthanasia (1997)

Euthanasia is probably more a forgotten group than the maker of forgotten demos.
A little is known of this Hungarian demogroup, but one thing we remember is the absolute consistency of their productions, starting from the *names* of those production (always a one-letter word). Each production had also a powerful 3d-engine (640x400, not bad for 1997), capable of filling your screen with advanced software-rendered scenes. Each demo had also a little "story" in it.

"Space" is worth mentioning for the smoothness of its scenes and for the spacey killer-plant.

Only downside of this otherwise mythical group: re-releasing "Spirit" in the mobile demo compo at Assembly 2004.
But you know, no one is perfect and we can forgive Euthanasia for this. And love them.

Stream/mfx (1996)

Mfx, aka the most hermetic group in the demoscene.

"Stream" is full of symbols, strange writings (maybe because they are just upside down) and strange pictures.
And it has an astonishing lens flare (not hexagonal) running through an hyper-smooth tunnel.

Music is pounding, obsessive.

You don't have to try to understand mfx's demos. You just have to let them flow through you and be assimilated.

Blind/eufrosyne (1996)

With only six productions in the timespan of 2 years, eufrosyne is nothing less than a legend.
In 2 years, they managed to win Assembly, place in the higher slots of the most important parties, and write a masterpiece like "time zone + 13:00".

Blind *has* hexagonal lens flares. Yeah, almost 20 years before.

Blind has the usual circular distortions that are a watermark of Sucho (the same coder of Pandemic). And that "water" effect. You have to see it to belive and never forget it (again).

Public demand/purple (1999)

This intro has 4 metatoruses. Not 9, but 4 is good for old 1999.
And an impressive goa-ish module by rez, that compresses down to 21kb (size counts).
I don't know what's appealing in this one. Maybe the danish-style pointillized background or such. For sure, travelling through two concentric spheres filled with particles is trippy. We want purple and danish style back, that's for sure.



So?
Probably there is more of this. Write about your personal, forgotten pearl in the comments.
In the mean time, I'll go watch Stash for the 124th time, just to hear that synth bass resonating in my subwoofer again.

(Greetings to sublogic, purple, euthanasia, fudge, blasphemy, soopadoopa, inf, quad, acme, cryonics, excess, tpolm, dubius, cubic team, $een, complex, jamm, moottori, eufrosyne, orange, japotek, deathstar, coma, nooon, wildlight, valhalla, psychic link, realtech, astroidea, capacala, mfx, bug2fix, camorra, doomsday, trauma, TPOLM and everyone I forgot - you made the 90s rule, guys)

(pssst: as always, we've packed those 9 gems here for your pleasure and your laziness. Watch with dosbox)

posted by friol at 6/22/2014 09:40:00 AM - under: 64k, demo, demoscene, nineties - comments? here (4)

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