Infinity of Space blog 2 – Levels of inspiration

Growing up as part of the Commodore Amiga gaming generation of the 1990s, the electronic in-game soundtracks were just as exciting and important as the games themselves as were of course, the graphics. And there was some fantastic game music, as I have previously blogged about – this is perhaps one of the more unlikely influences of my own work. Or is it?

The Amiga heralded a new dawn for computer arts and music, and over twenty-five years later, those game soundtracks still inspire my music, just as the Amiga’s pixel art and the designs of the games themselves have influenced my artwork.

I always loved how each level of arcade games had it's own soundtrack to suit the surroundings, whether you're controlling a warrior clambering through a rocky alien terrain or a fast spacecraft hurtling through strange worlds. The music would be a great match for the different worlds, and I would often find myself looking forward to particular levels just to hear the music!

There were so many great games – hundreds – with titles such as the Turrican series, The Chaos Engine, The Settlers, Disposable Hero, Apidya, R-Type, Menace, Blood Money, the Eye of the Beholder series and the Shadow of the Beast series being among my long list of personal favourites. Every game offered the chance to escape in a different time or universe, with each looking and sounding unique.

When I wasn't playing the games, I would put a cassette recorder in front of the speaker and record all the various game music that I loved. Who needed the radio, when you had an Amiga? So much skill and creativity went into every aspect those games, and I still find it incredible that they managed to fit so much on to just one or two floppy disks!

While I loved many different games, I always had a soft spot for sideways scrolling shoot-em-up games, which usually took you on a fantastic voyage through space and alien worlds. With so many interstellar themed games, you could fly off into space without even leaving your bedroom!

So that whole era had a huge impact on my teenage self and ultimately shaped my career path. It has also been a real nostalgic thrill over the past few years, as many magazines and books celebrating the Amiga and the games scene of the time have been published – and many of the games themselves have been emulated for iOS and Mac, so I've been able to re-live the enjoyment without the hassle of digging out my A1200 from the loft and trying to find all the other bits to make it work.

It really is no surprise that today, in making what you might call computer music, that influence has come full circle. Game music is actually an area I would love to work in.

When I'm working on an album – especially one about space travel – this rich influence is something I always keep in mind. Each track is a different adventure, and it is easy to imagine each being a different level in a game, carrying you through different places.

So, when putting an album together, imagining it as the soundtrack to a computer game or even a movie, helps me to determine the structure and atmosphere, scene by scene. I loved the sense of travel and adventure in so many of those games. One moment you might be exploring a city, and the next deep in a jungle, so I'll often think about what kind of landscape would suit the music I'm making, even if it has no bearing on either the end result or the listener – for my creative process it helps with that feeling of journey, especially on a concept album.

With Infinity of Space being about space travel, some of the ideas going through my mind included super fast flight, cautious, slow travel and encounters – which could be other starships or undiscovered planets. Just trying to imagine what kind of sights would await you on such a mission really is a feast for the imagination, and I really wanted to get some of this into the music, and make each track represent different stages in the ongoing journey, and pose different questions.

Below is a brief preview of the track Cruise Velocity.

Infinity of Space is out now via Bandcamp:
https://thelightdreams.bandcamp.com/album/infinity-of-space

Digital Deluxe

Following on from the previous post about the joys of the Amiga home computer and the musical inspiration I gleamed from the games scene, it's now time to shift the focus on to art.

My journey into digital art began way back in 1990 at the formative age of 12. Up until that point, I had got by just fine with pencils and paper, without the addiction or distraction of a home computer. Of course, all that was about to change.

One day at school, our art teacher, Mr Cronin, took us to a dark and dusty corner of the art room, and introduced us to The Computer. Its was an Acorn Archimedes, and it had this thing called a Mouse – which looked like a house brick on a cable with a funky ball mounted in the underside. Mr Cronin then went on to demonstrate the power of a paint program, and the mouse swung into action.

This was the moment.

First he created a gradient from red to yellow, and before long we had a sunset! A few clicks of the mouse later and we had a house with windows. Wow. Up until that point, my only experience of computers were friends’ C64s or Spectrums that played pixely games with chirpy music. The notion of making artwork on the computer hadn’t even crossed my mind.

Mr Cronin then took the excitement up to 11 – by clipping out a section of the image and creating a brush… which he then zoomed around the screen and painted with, creating an impossibly crazy pattern.

I was sold. I’d seen the future.

I got home. “Dad – Can I have an Archimedes?” 

My pestering for one of these mysterious Archimedes machines went seemingly ignored, until one day when my Dad went out one morning and came back with this exciting new computer – a Commodore Amiga A500.

I still remember the squeak of the polystyrene packing as I extracted the Amiga from its box. Of course, the computer coming with the 10-Star Games Pack, would lead to a whole other distraction, but also in the bundle was this exciting looking software package entitled Deluxe Paint II…

Deluxe Paint – or Dpaint as it was usually referred to – was made by Electronic Arts and for a long time the main art/paint program on the Amiga. And it was the answer to all my artistic needs. The Amiga being smarter and more advanced that the Archimedes, Dpaint offered so many functions and hundreds of colours.  I’d soon be drawing cartoon illustrations, Daleks, space ships landscapes, you name it. All with the mouse, I should add! And as I progressed through later versions of the program, I’d explore the joys of even more colours and animation features too.

DPaint opened my eyes to digital artwork. I’d go on to design my own games on the Amiga, make comics, write stories and even do my school work at any given opportunity. 

Fast forward to the mid 1990s and my arrival on a college course in computer graphics and design. I was delighted to find a room full of Amigas. Of course, I already knew Dpaint inside out. The following year, it would all change and we’d be working on Macs and PCs running this new thing called Photoshop. But Dpaint’s user interface proved to be the perfect training ground for the more advanced Adobe software.

Some of the last work I ever did in Dpaint on the Amiga was some college coursework from that time – a journey inside a giant computer, giant engine and giant machine – and here it is! What fond memories.

Machine music

Today I came across a new publication from the makers of Retro Gamer magazine, The Amiga Book. I saw it on the shelf and snapped it right up. This magazine instantly brought a wave of nostalgia over me and took me back to my formative years and the start of my obsession with computer art and music.

Some of my most treasured memories of growing up are my early teenage years when I was pretty much inseparable from my Amiga computer.

The Amiga A500 first entered our house one grey day in 1990. And that day was a turning point – it set me on the course to go on to have a career in graphic design, create digital artwork and make computer-based music.

The Amiga opened up the avenues of music and digital art – I'll come back to art in a future blog post. Compared to earlier computers, where in-game music sounded as pixelated as the graphics, the Amiga heralded a new dawn for the computer game soundtrack, and no doubt in tandem with the music industry as analogue shifted to digital.

Not only did the Amiga boast the very best quality games and graphics on the market in the early 90s, but the in-game music was outstanding (well, most of the time!).

Electronic music pioneer John Foxx, (of whom I would later become a fan and run a website devoted to his work) emerged in the form of Nation 12 with Tim Simenon of Bomb the Bass to produce the music for the Bitmap Brother's Gods. The Bitmap Brothers had previously sampled Bomb the Bass' Megablast for the music to their classic game Xenon II – and in both instances, the music was fantastic; breaking new ground in game music quality.

However the benchmark for me was Chris Hüelsbeck, composer for German games developer, Rainbow Arts. I've previously blogged about Chris' soundtrack for the platform shooter, Turrican, but that remains my favourite game soundtrack from the Amiga days, and that music lives on today – so much in demand that in 2013, Chris launched a successful Kickstarter project to fund a brand new recording of the music.

When I wasn't playing the games, I would put a cassette recorder in front of the TV speaker and record all the various game music that I loved. Who needed the radio, when you had an Amiga?!

There were so many amazing composers working on the scene back then, such as Allister Brimble, David Whittaker and Bjørn Lynne, who are still producing great music today. I could go on listing games and composers – the point being that there was such a vibrant music scene within the Amiga circles back then, whether it was the game soundtracks or demo scene.

My first ever musical experiments would be on my Amiga 1200 in the mid-90s, when I got 8-track music programme, OctaMED. Although it would be some years until I turned my hand more seriously to music – all of that influence from several years of gaming obsession was ready to be regurgitated!

I might be AppleMac based today, but that influence from the Amiga days is still very much present and alive – and I think it is evident on my latest release, Sentient City.

The games I loved took you into another world, where you could explore and discover – all set to a brilliant soundtrack. And I'd like to hope I've achieved a similar thing with my own music.

Sentient City is out now on Bandcamp.