EtherReal - Background

I have always been a musical person. I took piano lessons when I was a child, and sung in the school choir for many years. Even in those days I would create songs. Well, not songs really, but immature little dittys. I'd play them on my electric organ. But it wasn't until much later than I began recording them.

Initially, 'recording' meant scoring them. I got some staff paper from the high school music room and started scribbling down the chord progressions and base melodies of some of my more memorable compositions, which were all untitled. But without any money or a way actually record them, I was rapidly growing impatient and frustrated. I discovered I had to find other ways to sate myself, and in some cases this meant recording chords onto a tape deck (no cables, just a built in mic) and playing back melodies over top of them live. I was also at this time doing megamixes and beat matching using my records and tapes which was practice for my later DJing.

It wasn't until 1991 that I finally recorded by first songs onto proper medium, and even this was crude by the standards then. The first one I recorded was Nightgames. The songs written during this period had no names, and only a couple survived the test of time.

After having a taste of what proper music sequencing sounded like, I was desperate for more. I remember having a frantic conversation with a couple of friends of mine over my desire to buy some expensive synthesizer I saw in a recording magazine, and there was no way on earth I was going to be able to afford it. They took it upon themselves to find a cheaper solution, which turned out to be a genre of PC-based sample sequencers called trackers. They were originally invented by the Commodore Amiga people, but had been bettered by others, and this was the result of their search.

They sat me down in front of their computer and this DOS app called ScreamTracker that I couldn't make heads or tails of at first. It took forever for me to get the gist of it, but before too long, I was creating my own samples from CDs, downloading samples from the Internet, and creating music in the form of MOD files.



The only drawback was that the music sounded like shit. The samples had to be all 8-bit-mono, and there were very few bells and whistles as far as effects went. And if you wanted to use effects, you had to learn how to count in base-16. All in all, creating a song in this manner was a lot more involved than just playing it, not to mention that I didn't have my own PC, so this meant that I was at my friends' house almost all the time. I'm not sure they knew what they were getting themselves into.

I took the name EtherReal for myself to compose under (a play on 'ethereal'), as I had discovered there was a 'scene' of trackers out there. Most of these early songs got released into said scene.

Now that it's 14 years since I did these tracks, they have a nostalgia value for me. At the time, I thought they were 'killer sweet', but they are clearly dated now; simplistic and not very good from an audiophile's point of view. Also, they were lost for the longest time until I discovered a pile of 3.5" floppies that had the original MODs on them. They have only been in mp3 format for about three years. I tried to clean most of them up as best I could, but obviously, they are only going to be as good as the tool they were created with. At any rate, I bundled all the 8-bit mod files together and posthumously entitled the collection Pieces Of 8. Clever.

. . .

Comes, 1995, and I was rapidly becoming very bored and constrained with ScreamTracker and its limitations, and if it had not been once again for the two superfriends, I would have given it up. They found a better program for me, which allowed the use of 16-bit stereo samples of any length, and a whole host of new effects. Yes, it was the venerable FastTracker, the hero of all modders everywhere. I used this program until the the early 2Ks.



Also during this time, a PC finally appeared in my home. Mind you it was my mother's, but it was still in my home. So I was able to make music without having to trek to friends houses and annoy them. Some of the tracks on my second collection, Headspace, however, were done at other locations, prior to the home PC.

Headspace was a learning experience for me, because I wasn't just making a cache of tunes for this. I was actually writing with the intent to sell. I didn't follow through on that part of it, but that's beside the point. I wanted to, and I was writing things that I thought people wanted to hear. I was ordering the tracks so that they flowed. I was designing cover art. Nothing ever came of it, but I thought I was cool anyway.

There really wasn't any break in time between when I put Headspace to bed in 1996, and I started on the next one. Some of the tracks I didn't use for Headspace which were little more than chip tunes, became fleshed out for my next collection, which became Bite Me. I went kind of crazy with the sampling on this project, even going so far as to build tracks based around my favourite drum loops of all time. Sometimes, the loop was all I had to begin with, and I arranged the music around the timing and syncopation of the loops. Also, I was determined to create a track listing that was complete and flowed from beginning to end, unlike Headspace which I felt was choppy and awkward. I'm not sure I was successful in this, but overall I liked it more than the last album.

1997 to 1998 was intensely musical for me, as there was a lot of great dance music out there, and I was fully entrenched in the studio environment at Vlev's Naked Steel, where I was learning the ropes of real recording, and helping out on all manner of projects: learning the ins and outs of recording engineering. But at the same time, in my own domain, I was still strictly limited to my lo-fi methods of composition. It was intensely frustrating, but I learned somehow to balance it all.

. . .

I don't think I have to say, for those that know me, that I've had a few problems in my life. I've always been a little keyed up when it comes to things that affect me, and I worry a lot. Sometimes it gets really bad, and in the past I have suffered a lot from anxiety attacks. I've tried a lot of different things, including prescriptions, alcohol, support groups and so forth, but the thing I find the most useful in overcoming is creating.

This was the case for pretty much all of the time leading up to the completion of The Flower Of Humanity in 1999. Due to financial and family problems, I suddenly found myself living at friends' places, on their couches, and it was becoming difficult, especially since in late 1999, I was stricken with a serious case of agoraphobia and found it damn near impossible to leave the house. I dare say the limits of frienship were reached on a couple of different fronts, until I was asked to house sit a friend's apartment for two months while he took a trip to California.

So it was during these two months that wrote and compiled Flower. Unable to sleep most of the time, I simply poured myself into composing for 18 hours a day, leaving only to get to my DJ gig every week, and try not to freak out while I was there. Several of the tracks were actually written while I was in the grip of a panic attack, and all of the tracks represent something that was going on in my head at the time. More so than the previous two albums, this record was actually successful in becoming a complete piece, in that the songs flow musically, and in context with their hidden meanings.

. . .

So the new millennium had begun, despite everyone's paranoia to the contrary, and things were starting to calm down for me. I returned home, and got myself back on track emotionally and mentally. I met a new girl, and we dated, and soon moved in together. It was the start of the next phase of my life and, sadly, the beginning of the end of EtherReal.

Rather than get into specifics, suffice it to say that the relationship was difficult. It was hard to write music because she was very needy and I was losing creativity because of it. Having said that, she was a very good singer, and did support me in my efforts to do another collection of tracks. But it was like pulling teeth to get the songs out of my head and into the computer, and after a year I only had enough material for an EP. Originally, I had this concept of calling it CTRL and having each track title a line of code in BASIC programming language, that when typed into a BASIC emulator, would actually do something. In keeping with that idea, the music would be very digital sounding, and less layered than my previous stuff... but I sort of forgot about all that along the way. In the end it became a collection of finished songs that had little or no relevance to each other.

While I was struggling with CTRL, I was also making contacts and doing music for other purposes. I contributed three tracks to a fan based tribute to The Art Of Noise, and entered a remix contest for independant musician Andrew Rothman. I was also still involved with Naked Steel Studio, I had been since 1996, but things were falling off, productivity wise. Several projects were started there, and then abandoned.

It became apparent that CTRL would be EtherReal's swan song, and I recall consciously deciding to throw in the towel as far as writing music was concerned. I had become bored of the tracker software, and could not afford more useful gear or software to compose, and the rigors of my relationship were making everything prohibitive. I think most of the music on CTRL reflects all of this.

. . .

So, ultimately, EtherReal, the Moniker, ended in late 2001, and began a long hiatus of anti-creativity. EtherReal represented to me an outlet for many things, and I was sad to see it go... but I didn't realize how sad until I reinvented myself as Perpetual Emotion Machine, and wondered what I had been thinking for the past 4 years.