Don’t Take Drugs, Take Camomille!

Vince: I remember downloading my first mp3, an Eric Clapton track, and it took me 4 hours to download it with its impressive 4.5 mo, while a chiptune most of the time only weighs about 64 kilobyte. I fell in love with this filetype and started looking around for it on local BBSs. I remember groups like Martyr, N.o.i.s.e., Five Musicians and more. Then I got Impulse Tracker, a newer generation of tracker in which you could pull more tricks and have a wider reach musically and technically, and I started to do some modules.

All this was called “the demoscene” back then, for a simple reason. These artgroups used to create (and still do) what we call Demos, which is basically a music video, all done in hard coding and using module music as its soundtrack. You can still find some great Demos on www.scene.org.

There is another whole history of demos and demogroups, but from what I gather is they started with Cracktros, which is a little video the early crackers of programs used to put in there cracked software .zips. Then the internet came and the module world took the step to the internet. And that’s when the netlabel scene was born. But they weren’t aware yet, what they created.

The first center that was created for the BBS-turn internet module groups was scene.org, that hosted a selected number of modules. At that time filesize was still very important, so all you could download from the sites were next-generation module files like .it and .xm. I remember going everyday to sites like n.o.i.s.e. music, KFMF, monotonik, tokyo dawn records, total eclipse, five musicians, and in time, hellven, fromage, rebound, mephtik, tpolm. As the years went by, trackers weren’t doing chip anymore, but using complex time signatures, higher quality samples and exploring different styles, which in my mind, I have the arrogance to say created IDM. But that’s a different story *smile*.

The community grew larger everyday, thanks to scene.org, nectarine radio (a radio that played modules live), mirc and traxinspace.com. For a long a ring of tracker groups that released free modules. I can’t say who exactly started posting .mp3 music, but if I recall, it would be between miasmah, mono and nashmeja. As we all got better connections, the module started to die out and hence, when the group owners stop calling their organisations music groups or tracker groups, the name netlabel surfaced.

There are many reasons why .mp3 took over, but to put it simply: the musicians wanted to record real synthesizers, vocals, live guitars, etc. and the module started to weigh more in module format than mp3 and new programs and sequencers showed up, namely Buzztracker, cubase, reason and logic.

I started Camomille in 2001, at the end of the module buzz and decided to go full swing on .mp3 probably around release number 13.