Interview
On the 26th of february 1966, I was born Jens-Christian Huus in Copenhagen, Denmark. Soon to be notorious as JCH of Vibrants on the C64, I touched my first computer in 1981 - ofcourse it was the ZX-81 which I saw in action at a friends place. After having briefly seen and used Sinclair Spectrum and VIC-20's at other friends places during those years, I finally bought my own computer - a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. It was a marvellous computer at that time! It had 16 Kb of RAM (compared to VIC-20's 3.5 Kb) and using "Extended BASIC", I even managed to write a few games using the excellent commands of the time. In some ways, it was ahead of time; it had a 16-bit processor (albeit terribly slow due to other technical drawbacks) and a cartridge slot which didn't require me to turn off the computer. As soon as the computer received the cartridge, it added another item to its menu; cartridge title or BASIC. After a year or two fiddling with the TI-99/4A, it went out of the market - presumably because of its inability to perform machine code in BASIC - you had no POKE, PEEK or any other means of making really fast programs yourself. Whatever the reason, I finally bought my Commodore 64 in 1983 (or was it 1984) together with "Omega Race" on cartridge and "Revenge of the Mutant Camels" on tape.
During the first two or three years I messed around on the C64 doing not much else than playing games and typing in pathetic listings from mags like "Computer and Video Games". After having bought an american mag called "Compute!" I decided to type in their "Fast Assembler" using a foolproof interface program also coming from the same mag. You know, the checksum type of thing. So, in 1985 or 1986, I actually tried to fiddle with machine code for the very first time. Although I wasn't too good at it, I was learning. I even got a lot of experience out of programming a "Boot Hill" game, the old "Shoot Me!" cowboy shooting game with graphics not much better than "Ping Pong". At the same time, I was extremely impressed with Rob Hubbard's music, which arrived with groundbreaking effects such as vibrato, pulsating and slides. Prior to that, the best music was heard on "Interceptor Software's" games, but that was nothing compared to what Rob Hubbard and Martin Galway started to do with the SID chip. However, although I was impressed with the possibilities of the SID chip, I was not yet encouraged to try my own experiments.
The friend I have know for the longest time is Marc. He is exactly ONE day younger than me and we first met when we were 8 or 9 in school (I always think about that Beach Boys song whenever I say that!). We still know each other very well after 22 years. Although he is not a computer freak down to the programming bit, he is a computer USER. I mention him is because he in fact is the reason why I got into the C64 scene in the first place. Desperately in need of cracked games for my C64 (he didn't have his own computer), he found an advert in a newspaper under "computer games" and called the guy. At that time it wasn't illegal to advertise cracked games in this manner in danish newspapers. Soon after we visited the guy in Herlev, part of Copenhagen. I soon realized that he received loads of games and demos together with another contact. After a short while, the two guys, Lars and Claus, gathered a few other guys and created the group "New Men". Seeing that I had programming potential, he asked my if I could code an intro for the group, and I did.
In 1985 or 1986, I bought an Amiga 500 - it was one of first of its kind in Denmark. Shortly after I received "Aegis Sonix" for it, which I briefly tried - almost only as a joke while Marc was in the same room - but to my own surprise, I found that I was able to put together notes and form a reasonable song. Today, those songs really makes me wonder why I even bothered to continue, but there you go! ;) I made loads of songs in this composing tool, which was edited using notes on a real staff. Then it hit me, why not try and code my own music routine on the C64 and transfer the music. It took quite a while to program the first player - and since I had no knowledge on the subject, I made a lot of cumbersome, completely redundant subroutines which took up a lot of CPU time. Still, I managed in the end to construct a system which made it possible for me to transfer the "Aegis Sonix" notes to DATA sentences in BASIC. After running it, the data was appended to the player. Now I had to make all the instruments from scratch. Imagine that! Having all the notes in all three voices at the same time - the entire tune - and no instruments at all. They all have to be created from square one, and I had little experience in creating instruments. It took a long time and today, I shake my head when thinking of that terrible system I made. In the 1.3 Mb file I recently spread with all I did on the C64 you can find all that music in the "Old_Play" directory. The first tune ever is "Moonlight". One word of warning; it's BAD!
The second of the two persons I met in Herlev, Claus, soon got my attention with more games and demos than Lars, and I started to visit him instead. Here, I met Rooze and Excell for the first time, newcomers to the C64 scene which soon would create a whole tree of acquaintances for me in the scene. To make a long story short, Rooze let me to Channel 42 (with Niels who created Hugo for SilverRock/ITE) and Excell let me join "Jewels" a cracker- and demogroup which used my terrible tunes in their demos and intros. Rooze was into snailmail trading since this was way before the days of modemtrading - as he received more contacts than he could handle, he split his addressbook and gave me half of it. This way, I quicly got a lot of contacts in the scene. I now became a true part of the big C64 scene, in a time where most crackers and demo programmers was inevitably sharing the same groups.
In 1987/1988, Thomas Egeskov "Laxity" Petersen arrived with his own music routine using a refreshing new style that left me jealous to say the least. What even terryfied me more though was the fact the he created all his music using a mere machine code monitor, or sometimes the assembler itself! Having received "Turbo Assembler" for the C64 myself, I managed to obtain a hacked copy of Laxity's player for this assembler and I tried composing directly in the assembler listing. Amazingly, I COULD do it, and a member of the group I was in at the time, "Scorpio" of "2000 AD", even encouraged me by saying that it was excellent. Forgotten was the days of the awkward Amiga-to-C64 conversions! I made a few tunes in his player until he told me to leave his player alone at a computer party.
Not wanting to return to the old player, I wrote a new and MUCH better player in "Turbo Assembler" simply called "New Player" (quite innovative, wasn't it!). It soon became a pain to write all those hexnumbers instead of notes, so in 1988 I decided to create a complex editor system. Shortly after creating the editor I met Klaus "Link" Grøngaard at a computer meeting. I remembered having heard a few songs from him in "Future Composer", a public domain editor used with a hacked version of one of Charles Deenen's older players. I offered the editor to him and he agreed, becoming the first person to use it besides myself. Working as a team (although with a few 100 km's distance), we made a few gametunes for some PR-demos I was coding. I was just about to spend my holidays in London, England at the PCW-show, and I wanted to offer our tunes for certain software companies. However, Klaus called me up and said, "Now that CD and JT has Maniacs of Noise, we ought to have a name for ourselves too!". I instantly rejected the idea knowing that other musicgroups had arrived in Europe, all trying to imitate the success of the "Maniacs of Noise". I didn't want to be another imitation. Klaus insisted, and during the conversion he managed to convince me of the advantages of a name at the PCW show. So now we had to come up with a name! Klaus suggested "Dudes of Volume" which I didn't like because of the "of" word! ;) I thought of "Audio Ants" - then I substituted "Audio" with "Vibrato" (an effect in many players) and combined it with "Ants". And there was the name, "Vibrants".
As my music and players improved I began to pop up in the charts of certain demomags. Many demogroups was born all over Europe - one of them was "Noise". Really good musicians was still a rare thing to find in the demoscene itself, but in one of the demos from "Noise", I noticed a distinctive, funky style combined with completely redesigned instruments in "Future Composer". This indicated to me that the composer had a lot of talent. One of my contacts of the time, Martin "Maduplec" gave me his phonenumber and I called Thomas "Drax" Mogensen, with whom I talked for hours the first time. Shortly after meeting him at the computer party in Esbjerg I gave him the editor I made. Now "Drax" really showed the scene what a talented musician he really was. He instantly joined "Vibrants" - and is still a member today.
In 1989, the story becomes very complicated. Deek, the scottish member joins and leaves, Jesper Olsen joins and "Metal" joins on the PC in the nineties. But this is another story which I don't want to write now. The reason for this is that I feel the very birth of an notorious persons career is always the most interesting part. Besides, I just discovered how much text I have actually written! ;)
Today, we still have "Vibrants" and we are Thomas "Drax" Mogensen, Jesper "Jo" Olsen, Thomas "Laxity" Egeskov Petersen and me. "Laxity" is working for "Funcom" and is without doubt the greatest composer in the group. Both "Drax", "Laxity" and I have recently done a lot of FastTracker II music which has been spread on internet. My activities has never really stopped, they just keep on fading out. I'm still a mailman and I hate it! ;)
Looking back, I probably can't complain about the success in the demoscene. Still, it was a damn shame I didn't make it to the gamescene. I always wanted to appear in mags under reviews with speciel words for the composer because of an outstanding soundtrack. We all have our dreams. Or in this case had. Today, the reviewers rarely mention the music. If it is fantastic, fine. That's just what they EXPECT it to be! But if it's bad... :( The days of exploiting a soundchip in new ways is gone - today we have loads of studio samples which could have been created with any equipment. They even hire professional musicians nowadays. Sigh...
If there's anything left that I want to be remembered for, I´m not so sure it has to be the music anymore. At the time I made it I actually thought it was all right, but today I think it sounds horrible. I got the general idea that the editor I spread was well received and became famous for its unique design. I would like to be remembered for having produced one of the most outstanding music editors on the C64.
When suggesting which demogroup was the best on the C64 we always tend to choose the group which made the greatest number of sprites lately, or the prettiest design. Design is good, no doubt about that. Still, I'd like to measure the group by the amount of revolutionary ideas compared to the general standard in the demos of the current time. What fun is there to see a demo with 88 sprites only one week after a demo with 80 sprites? If the demo had 256 sprites on the other hand, it would have impressed me a lot more. "Upfront" had this ability to knock my socks off, coding stuff which no one considered possible at all. "1001 Crew" and "The Judges" also managed to invent and impress with both new techniques and design. During the later years, most demogroups realized that design was a lot more cool than raster bars with hundreds of sprites on top. Besides "Crest", "Blackmail's" long delayed demo also contained some pretty design.
The best composer was Rob Hubbard. He got an enormeous head start and kept it. With thousands of tunes on the C64 from so many good composers I will not even try to pick a favourite - I'd just end up placing 20 tunes on a shared #1.
The best computer party there ever was happened in Randers - I can't remember the year, 1988 or 1989 I think. Most famous people were there. For a composer like me, 20CC, Johannes Bjerregaard and many other interesting people was present and I got a chance to talk to them all.
I better leave some room on Zike's homepage for other computer celebrities! ;) In other words; The End.
If you for some reason want to write to me you can reach me on: jchuus@dk-online.dk - or you can visit my homepage at http://www2.dk-online.dk/users/jens_huus