Welcome to the Interview
with Demosceners.
This time, we have kb from Farbrausch! Enjoy!
Because Farbrausch is
doubtlessly one of the most popular groups in the demoscene. They have been
releasing technically and artistically sexy demos and reigning on top of the game. And for aspiring sceners they are the benchmark to aim and the target to
beat.
Because kb, who has been
active demoscener since 90s, is doubtlessly one of the most iconic person in
the demoscene. He’s a coder, musician, party organizer, and has been successful
in each of these domains.
In this interview, I asked
him about some myth around Farbrausch, scene politics (!), his creative surroundings and favorite leaf (it's not what you think! :)
So yeah, welcome to the
interview with demosceners. This time, we have kb from Farbrausch.
Enjoy! :)
Update: You can read this in Russian now! Big thanks to gravisus!
Enjoy! :)
Update: You can read this in Russian now! Big thanks to gravisus!
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First of all, could
you please introduce yourself briefly?
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Photo by kb
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Hi.
My name is Tammo, and in the scene I’m known as “kb”. My scene career started
on the C64 (Commodore64) with The Obsessed Maniacs in 1993, continued with groups like Reflex and Smash Designs, and to
this day I’m a member of Farbrausch where I mostly code but was also
responsible for a few sound tracks. Apart from that I’ve been an organizer for
German Easter demo parties since 1997, and am the current head of the Beam Team
(the people responsible for showing all the stuff on the big screen) at the Revision party.
I’ve read somewhere
that you became interested in coding in very early age. When was the first time
you touched computer?
I
was always fond of things with buttons on them – my parents showed me how the
light switch worked when I was two years old, and from that moment on my
destiny was sealed :) - and at age six I found those weird typewriter-y things
that were connected to a TV in a shop. I can remember how I hammered the
“shift” key on some Commodore computer and how disappointed I was that nothing
happened… that probably led me to want to find out what these things were. And
oooh boy, when my father copied me the manual of a C64 and I read about that
you could program this device to do all kinds of stuff for you, I fell in love
for the first time in my life.
6 years old! Do you
still have that copied manual?
Hehe,
no :) If I remember correctly I threw it away a few years later when I got my
own C64 with a real manual :) And even that one doesn't exist anymore. I have
kept one of all the computers I used in the past tho, should the need for those
old systems arise.
Well, you figured
out what you like in quite early age :) What type of child you were?
Basically
I was always doing something. Building weird contraptions from Lego and
dismantled old electronics I snagged from my grandparents, experimenting with
electronics (not really successfully, though I realized that capacitors would
change sound quite early), sitting in front of my C64, or combining all of
those things, that was basically me. You could say “typical nerd boy” and
wouldn’t be too far from the truth.
Okay :) And when and
how did that curious boy discover demo and demoscene?
The
first contact was probably with early cracktros of C64 games, and then suddenly
I got this disk full of those intros but without the games that would normally
come after them, and got curious. There were people who were doing audiovisual
stuff just for fun, and they had those weird names and they greeted each other
and oh wait does that picture really go over where the border should be?
And
then in the early 90s there were commercial German disk mags on the C64 that
came out every month or so – and one of those actually had a small ongoing demo
competition where people would send in small demos and get like 50 German Marks
(€25 nowadays) if they won. That’s where a friend and I who were both into
demos but not really into the scene found some fellow sceners in The Obsessed
Maniacs, and decided to join.
How was it like to
create your first demo? Did it take much time?
Our
first big demo (“Who Cares (TM)”) then took almost a year to get finished. It was a classic “Megademo” with
single parts that are shown after each other with loading screens in between,
so there wasn’t that much of a process – we just assembled what we had done and
threw it together somehow. And then we just spread the disk to everyone else;
the whole demo party topic only became relevant a year later :)
And you’ve been
releasing your work since then :) I know you’ve been in several groups in 90s,
but you started brand new group called Farbrausch in 2000. Why the new group?
And how was this group formed?
Farbrausch
was actually born out of frustration: Back then Yoda, Ronny and I were all fed
up with the politics we had to endure in our former demo groups. People were
calling themselves “Leader” and trying to make decisions about productions they
didn’t even have a hand in, there were petty fights between group mates and a
lot of other stuff that essentially did nothing except keep us from doing the
one thing we were in those groups for – making demos. And on the other hand we
all had fresh experience from that one-off experiment called “Elitegroup”; caricaturing all
those demoscene tropes that certain other oldschool groups can’t shake off even
in 2014 not only was a lot of fun but in the end turned out to make us even
more creative than before.
"Kasparov" by Elitegroup (1999)
So
we three founded Farbrausch on simple premise: “Let’s make demos, and let’s
never feel bad about that”. Every FR member was allowed to do basically
anything he or she wanted to do, and there’s no leader or committee or whatever
to tell what comes out under the group name and what doesn’t. And this
attracted a lot of our other friends, such as Chaos, Fiver2 or the other
ex-Elitegroup people.
And
even after we suddenly got famous for reinventing the 64k genre, these basic
principles stay. To be honest there have been some productions of the other
guys that I’d rather not seen released under the FR label – but that’s not for
me to decide, so I just shut up about it and look forward to being able to
release the next 8-hour 4k intro as fr-0something whenever I feel like it. :)
Wait wait, you said politics
among group members? Are these politics are common in demogroups?
Not
really anymore. It's mostly a thing that came from a time when the internet
wasn't ubiquitous, and people still had to send disks throughout all of Europe
or even beyond. Some people emerged as being better at communication and
organizing and started acting as a hub to keep a group together. From there the
leap to "Manager" and "Dictator" isn't too far, so that
happened. Or it was simply a group's founders who had a clear vision about how
"their" demo group had to look like and what releases to expect, and
they didn't want to lose control over that.
Of
course nowadays people can just communicate in real time over a plethora of
channels, so you don't need a strict organizational structure anymore to get a
production done, and luckily a MediaWiki installation on some server isn't too
prone to delusions of grandeur. Yet. :). Which makes the kindergarden fights
certain oldschool groups are having publicly at e.g. Pouet even funnier. Here
you have some guys in their 40s acting like the rules they made up when they
were twelve ever applied to anyone, and wasting their time with typing page
after page of rage-induced rants just because in 2014 someone in the group
dared releasing something not completely in accordance with some arcane
commandments from the late 80s.
But
don't worry, basically everyone else in the scene couldn't care less if it's
TRSI or just T or just RSI or, seriously, people, get a grip already. Or just
write a nice letter to your family and put some glue over the stamps just to
feel relevant again, 'k?
Oh.. well I guess
where there’s people there’s drama… but honesty I’m very surprised to hear that
your group doesn’t have leaders or structures. I kind of imagined there must be
a strict hierarchy… then how do Farbrausch project start usually? Can you
explain its demo-making process?
As
I already said, the premise Farbrausch operate on is “let’s do stuff”. So we
don’t really have the _one_ process for making demos. Pick five of our demos and
I can tell you five different stories about how they came to be. But in the end
there is a common thread: It all starts with somebody having one idea, and then
others joining in because they think it’s cool. This could be Chaos wanting to
show off his multicore physics, or it could be Fiver2 who always wanted to do a
disco demo and thanks to that new “bloom” effect finally could, or it’s Ryg who
declared he wanted to make an “we can also do art” demo at one Evoke, and with
a little help of Ronny and me we suddenly had “Cargo cult”. But from then on the actual creation
stories diverge again.
Okay, then what is “Elitehaus”
that you guys visit to make demo? I’ve heard about this place before and rumor
says that this house has magical power to make killer demos. Sounds very
suspicious to outsiders…
Did
I just say the creation stories diverge? Well, that’s not 100% true. There is
always the Elitehaus.
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Photo by kb
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The Elitehaus is a thing that we came up when we did the whole Elitegroup thing and seriously needed to work on a few killer productions to show the scene who is the boss. So in December 1999 we rented a vacation home in Denmark, an hour from the German border and ten minutes from the next supermarket, and basically locked us up for two weeks with nothing than our computers and a swimming pool. And after those 14 days we almost had “Kasparov” done and were able to finish it at The Party (demoparty held in Denmark) a few weeks later – to great success, I must say.
From
that point on it became a tradition until today. We didn’t do it every year,
and 15 years later we aren’t working as frantically on productions anymore as
we did in the beginning, but all the “big” Farbrausch productions, such as “The Product” (video), “Poemtoahorse” (video), “The Popular Demo” (video), “Of Spirits Taken” (video), “Debris”, “Rove” (video), “Magellan” (video) and the
likes were made in a Danish vacation home to a significant part. As were
various other productions by friends of us that we invited over. E.g. last year
the Mercury guys joined us to work on the productions they now released at
Revision, and in 2005 Paniq was there – he showed us two poems on the first
day, we decided that we liked the second one better, and thus “Die Ewigkeit Schmerzt” (video) was
made.
"fr-041: debris." by Farbrausch
(2007)
I believe ‘locking
yourselves in the place with computers and swimming pool’ must sounds like a
heaven to some people :) Compare to other groups, I guess quite a many people
are involved in Farbrausch projects. Why is that?
That
whole Elitehaus atmosphere kind of leads to this. Even if you don’t work on the
same project as the others you constantly look at their screens and suddenly
you realize you’re starting to feel like a part of the team. Making helpful
suggestions or lending yourself to help with coding or graphics then just comes
naturally. For example I helped optimizing the code in “Rove” and “Magellan”
although I originally had brought my own projects with me. But there were a lot
of milliseconds of execution time to squash, and Chaos was busy enough writing
effects and finishing the demo itself.
Ok... you just mentioned before, but your
group uses product code for your demos. And sometimes you use “minus” on its
code to show that the work is not so serious. Is there certain criteria to be
released as positive product numbers?
As
said, the first rule in Farbrausch is “basically, do what you want”. But then
quite at the beginning we thought if we have that numbering scheme anyway (and
even that one isn’t mandatory – noticed that “Masagin” (video) doesn’t have an fr-number?), we could also
be nice and separate our “serious” from our “crap” releases, just to give a
hint to people. But that’s as much rule as it is. We released some fairly
crappy stuff with positive numbers, and some of our fr-minus productions do
have their special place in my heart, so the line is rather blurry there.
Ha. I thought you
have some thick written rulebooks :) By the way, when I watch the
live video of demoparty, people tend to get really excited just by seeing the
name “Farbrausch” on the screen. You know there’s this high expectation from
people. Does this expectation work as a burden or an encouragement to you?
Actually,
after “The Product” and perhaps also after “The Popular Demo” it wasn’t too
easy, and of course even nowadays people thumb us down on Pouet because some
two-weeks project of ours wasn’t a new “Debris”. But you learn to just live
with it and go on with whatever you were doing. Or you subvert it, like we did
by releasing “Farbomat” at
TP2001 one year after “The Product”.
Of
course sometimes I watch a demo and go like “how could they release that? Don’t
they have, like, EYES? I really suck at graphics but even I wouldn’t release
something like that”, and one minute later I remember that this attitude is
probably another of the reasons why I haven’t released anything worthwhile for
three years now. Except the current Partymeister beam system, also known as
“everything you see between the entries at most recent demo parties” :P
“Subverting it”
seems very brave attitude :) But you might have received some mixed comments… Do
you care about other people’s comments?
Of
course. Nobody is living in a vacuum, and if feedback wasn't important nobody
would release a demo at a demo party, cowering anxiously in their chair during
the compo and dreading the audience's reaction when their entry is over; or
even release at all. But in the end most of us in Farbrausch are so experienced
that we can easily tone out all the cheap praise and stupid flames, and only
listen to people either whose judgment we trust, or who bring up actual points,
positive or negative.
At
least that's the theory. :)
Ok, thank you :)
Now, let me ask you a bit about your personal creative process. Where do you
get your inspiration for demo and music?
At
all kind of places. It might manifest as a melody in my head, or it might be a
fluid process like in my 4K “sunr4y” (video) where I decided to try out a few rendering techniques and then just let the
demo take shape over time. Or it’s like the music in “Candytron” where I had no idea even about what
genre the soundtrack should be for weeks, and then suddenly I heard exactly the
right thing in a club, and went for that direction. But in general I must say
it’s easier for me to keep up coding than making music – In the end programming
is a very linear kind of work that I can always do while music is “either I
have a good idea in my head or I don’t”– and in the latter case I can’t do much
about it except wait.
- In case you’re wondering what “demo” or “demoscene” is, better check out the well-made documentary called Moleman2. (and the director, M. Szilárd Matusik's interview can be read in here.)
"fr-030: candytron" by Farbrausch (2003)
(note: It's a bit sexy stuff, so be careful when you watch it at school or office :)
(note: It's a bit sexy stuff, so be careful when you watch it at school or office :)
Regardless of what
group or what project you’re working on, is there anything you really care
about when you make demo/music?
I
think the only thing I care about is that I need to like what I produce. Songs
I made need to pass the “doesn’t get annoying after looping it for 5 hours”
test for me. Demos I participated in should be pleasing for my eye and such. Of
course the bar varies depending on how much time I spent on doing something,
but in the end I need to have a good feeling watching or listening to the end
result.
As
far as meaning is concerned – I don’t really see myself as an artist, just as
someone who enjoys making and consuming cool stuff. My past as a goth certainly
helps with writing that lyrically loaded scenepoetry though :)
You just remind me
that I’ve read about how you went into goth culture.. Since you’ve brought it up, do you see any
similarity between goth culture and this geek (no offence) culture?
Another
point where I have to say "in the 90s it was more prevalent". I think
the biggest common denominators are the certain feeling of "not
belonging" that probably most members of both groups had in their
childhoods, and consequently a certain kind of looking down on those so-called
"normal people". That's a feeling that unites goths and geeks, and
that's why these two groups normally go pretty well together.
That
whole thing sadly diminished a bit in the last years, when both geek and goth
culture got more mainstream attention and even got "hip" in a way.
It's still there though.
That’s very interesting
to know.. it might be a good theme for a thesis :)
Right, back to the
creative process.. do you do anything particular while making demos.. like
drinking beers, always after midnight…?
Darkness
and tea certainly help :) Unfortunately with a full time job and a private life
there’s not too much choice regarding the time I have for demoscene activities,
but yeah, I rarely see the sun when I’m coding or making music for fun. When we
are having Elitehaus it’s in the middle of the winter in Denmark so the days
are rather short and our sleep schedule overlaps with half of the daytime. So,
yes, darkness. And tea. Lots and lots of tea. You’ll be hard pressed to find me
without a glass or pot of tea next to me when I’m working on stuff.
Hmm… sounds like a
serious tea drinker. What leaves are you into? :)
My
first choice would be Darjeeling, first flush, and the more letters there are
in front of the TGFOP (note: grades of tealeaf), the better. Try the Jungpana
estate, I really like all these details in the flavor. :)
Apart
from that I do like some green (Sencha or Jasmine) and the occasional white
tea, too (try Bai Xue Long) - and when it comes to the evening hours there's a
nice selection of different fruit or herbal teas in my kitchen.
Wo…wow… your kitchen
must look like a tea shop :) How about music? Do you listen to music or pink
noise when you work on the project?
As
far as music is concerned: When I’m coding I’m mostly into pleasant electronic
stuff without too many lyrics to distract me. Just give me nice melodies and
harmonies to keep my right brain busy while the left is churning out those
algorithms. Songs in languages I don’t understand sometimes work too – If I
really need to finish something important in an hour, chances are that I crank
up the J-Pop :)
Haha, that’s quite
fun to imagine :)
Unfortunately I
won’t be able to understand, but here’s one for the readers who make demo… What
program do you use to make demo/music? Do you create your own tool?
Well
Farbrausch is known for their tool centric approach to demo making, so of
course I’m a part of it :). I think the point is that coders like Ryg, Chaos
and I are pretty bad at graphics and design, actually. So creating a tool where
we plug in the effects from one side and let actual artists make them look good
from the other side was just a natural fit for our skills. That’s basically how
Werkkzeug and all the
other iterations of our modular demo making tools were born. Same thing with
music – when it came to making tracks for 64k intros, I decided that the “coder
me” had to write a tool that the “musician me” was happy to use. So it became
an actual synthesizer
that anyone could use with any music software. I could have composed the music
for “The Product” in a source file or text editor but I just wanted it to sound
“real”, not like something hand-coded. So the best choice was to make the
workflow as “real” as possible.
"fr-08: .the.product" by Farbrausch (2000)
Apart
from that, here’s a short list of tools I deem essential: Coding wise I’m
almost exclusively using Visual Studio for everything, and my music software of
choice is Reaper nowadays, plus a lot of plug-ins. Add the usual text editors,
file managers and a zillion small command line tools to the mix, and you have
an environment I feel comfortable in.
Ok! time to shoot
this classic question… your favorite demo, memorable demo, demo that changed
your life… anything… tell us a demo which is special to you.
1993.
The living room of my parents. I just got a broken Amiga 500 from a friend, somehow
managed to fix it, connected it to the big TV and the stereo, took a random
disk out of a box that contained demos, and shoved this disk labeled “State of the Art” (video) into the
Amiga’s disk drive. Five minutes later I knew: I was newschool.
Funny
thing was that even with my very limited Amiga knowledge back then I kind of
knew that technically that demo wasn’t that big of a deal, but still. This was
something new and exciting, and this was the point where I kind of said goodbye
to scrollers and effects in front of black backgrounds and looked forward to
what the future would bring.
The
fact that I have picked a demo from over 20 years ago of course doesn’t mean
that everything from then on wasn’t as good :) … Future Crew and the Gravis
UltraSound sealed my fate as a PC scener, DirectX and the first GeForces lead
us into a new era, and the advent of pixel shaders pushed the demo scene into
unseen directions so far. There were slow years but in the end we all had so
many exciting moments.
I believe you’ve
seen the rise and fall of demoscene culture.. and not just being a demoscener,
you’ve been organizing German Easter demoparties for a long time that I heard
you haven’t had a “usual” Easter for more than a decade. What makes you keep
going?
One
tUM party (which takes place in Germany between Christmas and New Year) a few
years ago had a motto; it was called “Christmas with your REAL family”.
That’s
kind of fitting. I don’t even know anymore what a “usual” Easter is supposed to
look or feel like, and I’m not sure I want to. Fact is – I still love what the
scene is doing, I still love the job I’m doing at Revision, and just standing
there in the hall and seeing the compos and events, and knowing I did my part
in making this happen is worth all the stress.
You never thought
like “I’m done with demoscene” in the past?
Can
you ever? I haven’t been too productive in the last years to the point I have a
bad conscience whenever I attend yet another party without having a production
with me, but I still very much consider myself a part of the scene. Actually I
think when people are “quitting” the scene it’s because it wasn’t the right
place for them to begin with. Because on the other side there’s all those
“Ex”-sceners and veterans in the game industry and wherever else, and those
people still very much like watching new demos, and most of them would even
like to attend a demo party – especially after all those reports of people who
came back after tens of years of inactivity and it took them only one Revision
weekend to fully convert them back :)
That’s really nice :) Hopefully we'll see more demos with
middle-aged charm and guts :)
I
have no idea and I like it. :) But honestly, I would wish for the scene to at
least partially lose their fixation on the usual oldschool platforms and let
new ways of expression in. There’s a lot of fresh blood out there, people who
make things not too unlike demos, and yet there’s not too much common ground
with the demoscene. Sadly attempting to open up let’s say Revision to those
other people would possibly make a lot of sceners feel uncomfortable because
they’re not ‘among themselves’ anymore, and most mixed events except Assembly
weren’t a too good place for the scene.
But
that’s too big a discussion for this interview, I fear. Let’s see what the
future brings :)
Yes, let’s :)
Personally what type of demo/music do you want to make in the future?
There
are a lot of vague ideas in my head but nothing too concrete yet. There are a
few half-finished audio related projects waiting for the right occasion to
finish them, and as far as a demo is concerned, I really would love to play
around with current rendering techniques because they made such a jump forward
in the last few years with all the High Dynamic Range and the Physically Based
Rendering and whatnot, and it should be fun to do something with those tricks
that isn’t a dull grey and brown so-called AAA game. But then, as said, I’m not
too good at visuals and first of all a current-gen engine takes time to write,
even if it’s not an engine per se but loose pieces of code that render stuff.
But
perhaps the others in Farbrausch have something on their mind, and as always
I’m ready to contribute :)
Finally, your
message for demosceners and demo fans out there please.
Currently?
Yes! And maybe for the
prospect and dormant sceners too! :)
Make
a demo about it.
Really,
fire up the development environment of your choice and code something that
looks promising. Send a screenshot to your favorite digital artist and tell him
to do a paintover. Get that paintover back and try to replicate the look of it
in code. Then make variables of all the numbers in your code and GNU Rocket the hell out of
them. Now contact your favorite indie musician in the style you want to have,
send him a video and ask him to either give you one of his tracks or make a new
one. Assemble everything, pack it into a zip archive, copy it to a USB stick
and somewhere into the cloud, buy some booze, show up at a demo party near you,
show your production to a select few people and tweak it a little, submit it,
start drinking and sit down in front of the stage when the compo starts.
Bam.
Demo made, and with a bit of luck new demo group founded in the process. Now
was it that hard?
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Well, I bet I’m not the
only one to discover new side of kb and Farbrausch :) Thank you so much for
answering all the questions, kb!
On his website, you can
check his works and blog posts, and download his “V2 synthesizer system” (the
synth he mentioned in the interview). And on Farbrausch’s official website (looks
bit confusing!), you can check their prods, Elitehaus diary, and download their
demotool source code including "werkkzeug".
For further reading
including how kb got into the goth culture, I recommend this ZINE’s great article.
Thank you very much for
reading this till end! :)
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#1: Interview with Demoscener: q from nonoil/gorakubu is here.
#2: Interview with Demoscener: Gargaj from Conspiracy, Ümlaüt Design is here.
#3: Interview with Demoscener: Preacher from Brainstorm, Traction is here.
#4: Interview with Demoscener: Zavie from Ctrl-Alt-Test is here.
#5: Interview with Demoscener: Smash from Fairlight is here.
#5: Interview with Demoscener: Smash from Fairlight is here.
#6: Interview with Demoscener: Gloom from Excess, Dead Roman is here.
#7: Interview with Demoscener: kioku from System K is here.
- For some of my posts related to “demo and “demoscene” culture is here.
