Archive for July 29th, 2010

The greatest tracker (demoscene) composers / Purple Motion, Necros, Skaven, Pro-XeX

Thursday, July 29th, 2010

For all of us who yet remember the Demoscene , Purple Motion, Necros and Skaven are absolutely legendary names.
Their music work contribution for tracked Electronic music, video games music and general development of the IT culture is truly invaluable.

Many younger computer users (I’m 26 now), and probably IT starters would probably never heard about neither Demoscene nor Purple Motion or the other three patriarchs of tracked Electronic music.

This musicians have a special value for people who has ever composed music with Impulse Tracker and the many other programs to compose music from samples.

Purple Motion has his own home page for quite some time now, however I just noticed that he has recently turned his home page to a PHPBB Forum where there is plenty of information about the composer as well as open discission and many questions and answers of people who are interested into the great electronic composer.

The “foster-father” of tracked electronic music is Necros.
Necros is the Artistic Pseudonim of Andrew Sega, probably his most notable piece of music work is called mech8Mechanism 8 .

The third by significance electronic musician who is probably known by the many old school computer users and musicians is Skaven .
Skaven is part of the Future Crew .

One of the most notable Skaven music works is actually the soundtrack song produced for the Second RealityDemo .
It’s worthy to say few words about Future Crew as well, Future Crew (link to wikipedia)
– “Future Crew is a now-defunct group of Finnish computer coders and artists who created PC demos and software, active mostly between 1992 and 1994.”
You might also consider checking Necros profile in modarchive
There you can find plenty if not all of his works for download and listening.
A descendant of the the 3 up-mentioned wonderful tracker musicians is Pro-XeX also known under the artistic pseudonim Necroleak
Though his works are much later first originating from the distant 1995 his works are comparable by quality and goodness to (PM, Necros and Skaven’s works).
If you really want to completely turn back some memories about the good old times when we used to use DOS environment and to listen the great old MOD, S3M, XM etc. songs with the good old Cubic player which is already available under the free port called Open Cubic Player

A port is even available for most UNIX platforms You can download and install the Linux / Unix port of Cubic player here plus on the below link you will find some brief instructions on how to make it work on Debian, Ubuntu, Redhat, Gentoo and FreeBSD.

Under Debian Lenny, Squeeze/Sid installing opencubicplayer is pretty easy and comes to simple installation via apt-get as follows:

debian-desktop:~# apt-get install opencubicplayer

First time I’ve noticed Cubic player I should admit it was a real joy to know there is already a Unix port since Linux and BSD are my OS choice for almost 10 years already.
Another possible way to play the old school songs on Linux is through the well known console player mikmod
I’ve prepared a downloadable song archive for each of the 3 great electronic composers (Purple Motion, Necros, Skaven) on my personal webserver.

Below I present you with links to their music.

Download all tracked music by Purple Motion

Download Necros composed music works

Download the songs composed by Skaven

Download a collection of all composed songs by Pro-XeX / Necroleak

I have few other composers who are very liked by me, their music works can be obtained through my tracked music tiny collection available here

Many of the demos created and works by Jonne Valtonen known under the artistic pseudonim Purple Motion are currently uploaded and available for watching via Youtube – (search) Purple Motion

I’ll close this post with a the Award Winning Demos (Second Reality and Panic) which are the most notable produced Computer Simulation Demos of all times created by the collossal Future Crew group.


Second Reality by Future Crew [ Winner Demo of Assembly ’93 competition ]


Panic by Future Crew


Toasted by Cubic Team & $een
Also don’t forget to check The ultimate source for MOD Music – modarchive.org