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NULL mag Issue 06 06 MBR Interview
Üßß ßßÜ MBR is a musician, with a unique style.
Û ÛßÛ Û from what i have heard, from his work, he
ßß ßß ß ß ßßß really likes metal music, but he also
° ±°°± ÛßßßßßÛ ÜßÛßßßÛ ±°°± °° likes retro stuff. you should definately
ß Ü ß ß Ü ß Üßß here all the tracks of game themes rmxs,
°± °± ß Û Û Ü ß Û Û °°± °°± at his soundcloud page. more of his work
Ü ßß ß ß ßßß ß Ü is, at his youtube page, both links below.
ßßß ßßß ßß ßßßß
= https://soundcloud.com/masterbootrecordmusic
= https://www.youtube.com/masterbootrecord
...for the rest, you have to read the interview... :)
how and when you entered the bbs scene?
I've been aware of BBS since I was a kid because my father had a
computer shop and managed one back in the day but at the times I
didn't really use it, I was more into hardware or configuring stuff
as well as playing video games of course. Few years ago my friend
Elder0010 who is from demoscene group Onslaught on Commodore 64 got me
back into it because he set up a BBS on a Raspberry called Vengeance
BBS. He's also the coder for our videogame VirtuaVerse. He told me
that the BBS scene was still alive and doing great but at the times
I didn't had a chance to explore it. When I launched my new album
which is a tribute to early internet protocols I made a CTF based on
those protocols, including telnet of course, so I decided to include
a BBS and started to learn how to configure a basic Mystic setup with
the essential functions I needed. It was when I launched it that I
got in touch with a lot of people from the BBS scene. At a point
Terminal Dragon told me to check out the Absynthe BBS and Araknet
and that was actually the time when I started to explore the new
scene and wrote for the first time in the message board of Araknet.
Everything happened really fast and in a short time I had visited met
sysops of the best BBS around, met the guys at Impure ASCII and Fuel.
It was really great and everyone was very cool with me, especially
Anachronist at first who show me the way to other BBS where I met
Hawk, Smooth, Stackfault and m00p. Chatting with them on BBS and IRC
I've learned a lot of stuff about new BBS scene and also everyone
seemed to enjoy my music. It was really like some massive information
overload for me but I loved it.
why mbr? is there a story behind it?
It's one of those things that just happen. When starting this project
I had in mind to do something that had an aesthetic and concept close
to my life experience and having had to deal with computers all my
life it was sort of natural for me to pick this banner. The first
album track titles represent the classic structure of the MBR and
the cover art state over it "Are you sure you want to write a new
MBR?" this is basically what I did. To restart all over again as a
musician. At the times I was in a dark place and I was almost giving
up doing music. I felt the need to cast a sort of spell to get out of
the storm, which is why theres a Vevìsir in both my logo and first
album cover art. A magical stave of icelanding witchcraft that is
helping sailors to get out of the storm. Then everything after that
was just sailing at sight pushed by a wind that made me explore more
this mix of magic and hardware which i call Spellware. A concept that
was already present in the cyberpunk backstory of my solo project
before MBR and which was also the starting point of the story behind
our game VirtuaVerse. Someway all those elements kind of converged and
contributed to create the vision and the imaginary around MBR.
except from a musician are you also an ansi artist?
Nope I'm not really an ANSI artist. The only attempt I did about it
was the cover art and logo of my side project KeyGen Church but that's
a really simple one. I'm not a skilled designer but I still do all the
cover arts of my albums as MBR. They are really simple but they also
have a continuity and are effective to express what I want. I prefer
to do everything about the project on my own without relaying on other
people for anything, from the production till the design.
how and when you started making music?
That was quite a long time ago. The first time I was actually writing
my music was sometime around the mid 90s. I played guitar in few bands
and we were at first playing mostly cover songs of thrash and death
metal then eventually we started to write some stuff and produce few
demos in some local studios. Eventually I started to get interested in
learning how to produce music on my own and using computers to do it
sometime in the late 90s.
are you only into specific kinds of music? you surely like metal from
what i have heard from your work and also retro stuff. do you also
write music of other genres?
I've been listening and producing several types of music and had
several projects before MBR. Mostly industrial or electronic but
always mixed with a bit of rock and metal. I've always had this goal
to merge rock and electronic music someway and MBR is probably the
project where I approached it in the most straight forward way. Been
also working in local studios and produced, recorded and mixed albums
for other bands of different genres. Then at a point I decided to
focus only on my music. These days I listen pretty much to classical
music and heavy metal, mostly thrash, death and black metal. But I
also listen to alot of underground dark techno and electronic music,
darkwave or post-punk as well and of course the classics of the 80s
and 90s.
do you have connections with the demo scene?
I have never been technically a scener cause I'm not a programmer and
I never wrote music for trackers but I've been following it since
it's birth out of the warez scene. The music of those crack intros
and keygens have played a very important role into influencing me
as a musician and so did the demoscene music as well as the video
game music. My current closest connection to demoscene is due to the
fact I've been releasing with Data Airlines which has roots in Razor
1911. Speaking of which, just few days ago Dubmood released the music
from their 64K intros "We Have Accidentally Borrowed Your Votedisk" [
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CBQI7cktMk ] and "The Scene Is Dead"
and I did remixes for both tracks which have been released on digital
and on a 7" vinyl.
for chip/retro music what tools do you use?
As said I'm not a purist chiptune musician but I'm still pretty
minimal in my setup for making music. All I'm using to produce is
essentailly Cubase 8 and a VST synthesizer called Massive.
in your bio you write that you are doing music on a 486? is this true?
Of course not, that's more a conceptual thing. Unfortunately a 486
won't be able to produce such kind of music anyway. The idea behind is
that of a computer that has been enchanted by icelanding witchcraft
and started to produce music using floppy drives and printers to make
the sound which is pretty much as the core elements of my music sound.
you also wrote the music for a new retro style / point & click
cyberpunk adventure... tell us about it. how you got the idea to do
it? what is your goal, will you do it again?
Yes, and more specifically this music project also started in function
of writing the music for our game. The idea of the game started
because I asked Valenberg, the pixel artist, to do a looped animation
for a music project I had before MBR and the cyberpunk background
story of it. The result really looked like a scene of a point & click
adventure game. So I just thought, why not doing it for real? Shortly
after I met also Elder0010 who's a great programmer and also a scener
and proposed him the idea. That is how the three of us founded a small
indie dev team called Theta Division. I've been writing the story
and music for it, Valenberg does all the graphics and animations and
Elder0010 does the code and we discuss puzzle all togehter. Turns out,
after almost 3 years now, the game is extremly long and complex and
we are really satisfied of how it's going. We are currently working
on the final part of it and then we'll start polishing everything. We
hope to be ready to release it this fall.
its obvious that the market on retro stuff is getting bigger. do
you think there are chances for artists / composers / bloggers /
youtubers, that can exploit it economically?
I think there's already quite an enormous amount of people that is
trying to exploit it economically but in my honest opinion there's too
many people that just jump on the train without really being aware of
it and they won't last more than few seasons. The so called synthwave
and retrowave scene is already rapidly fading as doesn't seem to be
able to deliver anything new and interesting since quite a long time
now. I think one of the main reasons why my project is still growing
solid it's also because what I do, the aesthetic associated to it
and the concept and story behind it is strictly connected to my life
experience.
can someone ask you music by payment?
I don't work on commission, not only cause I don't like it but also
because I am not really much in control of my creative output. If
somebody tells me to do something specific there's a good change the
result won't be what they expect.
it's obvious that you have roots since the bbs era, could be possible
for a new artist to be involved in chip/retro music? or is it
something that only "the ancients" (those who experienced it, in its
early stages) can do? :)
Music, per se, can be done in any style and genre at any age with
successful or mediocre results. What can result a bit goofy is when
you are trying to associate an aesthetic or a concept to your music
without having a genuine connection to it. And also in this case
this isn't a matter of age. The thing is that by doing so you may be
lucky to get it right by luck once but then you won't be able to push
forward and keep it solid and coesive. My suggestion for any artist
is always to be yourself instead of trying to be something else you
are not just to follow a trend. When I started this project I never
thought people would be having such a big interest in DOS commands
or obsolete Internet Protocol neither that a mix of classical,
chiptune and synth metal would actually work. I just transferred those
experiences I had in my life into my cretive output.
i enjoyed listening your versions on many well known retro games, like
doom, golden axe, dune etc. tell us about this work? how it happened?
Again there's not a specific reason why this happened. It's just
that my father had a computer shop since the late 80s and I have
been playing with ltierally every game that existed on most of
the computers and consoles. Those music of video games have been
influencing me a lot as a musician and I've just started to apply my
sounds to them and re-work those chiptunes in my style as a tribute
to all those great games and soundtracks I loved. Then I've realized
people seemed to enjoy them and so I just continued producing them
on a regular basis and sending them for free to anyone who was
supporting me on Bandcamp. Also they are a good gym to experiment and
get positively influenced and inspired for what I do with my original
works.
although i am not a metal fun, i really liked that music and
especially songs that were from games i really liked in the past like
'shadow of the beast', 'syndicate', 'metroid' etc. is it nostalgia
that makes us to be involved with all this retro stuff (music, ansi
art, bbses etc.)? are we "prisoners" of our youth? :)
Sometime people ask me to do some cover song of this or that game
that I never played but I often turn those requests down because I
only like to cover those music of games I've actually been strongly
connected with. I don't know if it's just nostalgia or there's
something more but I guess the energy that inspires me to do those
cover songs of those games I loved is also what inspires people to
listen to them but it is also powerful enough to involve younger
people that never listened to them before as well.
as an artist/creator, what is your opinion on copyright laws? do they
protect you, from others to exploit your work?
I think that nowadays those copyright laws are quite outdated and
also they bring more issues than advantages for the artist. The whole
copyright system and the collection companies around it are just
pretty much a scam to take money out of the artist for essentially
doing nothing at all.
do you think that todays copyright laws are restrictive even for
creators? we have seen many examples in youtube that creators can't
use music/video clips from other sources... is it the same in your
area?
Well this is a complex thing because it depends on the context. The
only time copyright laws are useful is when somebody is using your
music withtout your consent in controversial contexts or making money
with it. I don't think this has much to do with actual copyright.
To use music of somebody else without asking or even crediting and
making money over it is more a matter of lack of respect and a plain
fraud toward the artist to be honest. There's this idea in content
creators mind that they can just download anything from the internet
and use it without even asking consent because it's considered by
them as public domain and they don't seem to understand what fair use
really mean. That's not just about music but also about visuals. I
can't even count the times that Valenberg, our pixel artist, had his
stuff used for music videos of some generic synthwave artist without
being asked and even when asking to take it down he was forced to use
the copyright complaint cause the dude would not want to do it by
himself even after scoring millions of views for his new single on
sale on bandcamp. Sometimes they used even graphic previews of our
game into music videos or even embedded parts of it into some crappy
mobile game. This behaviour is really toxic and annoying and it's
what determine increasingly extreme and stupid copyright laws in my
opinion. If people would just respect other artists there won't be
any need of all this. This is sad because on the other hand there's
people who just use your music while gaming, streaming on twitch or to
produce non-commercial videos but then they risk to have problems with
copyrights because of all said above.
when you made these new version of the game themes, did you had any
problems with copyright laws? you are sharing your work in soundcloud
https://soundcloud.com/masterbootrecordmusic and youtube. is it free?
I never had a problem because those are non-commercial. I am not
selling those cover songs and they are free streaming and free
download for those following me. If I wanted to have an official
release and sell them I'd need to get licenses or ask consent to the
artists which is quite complicated given that most of those artists
aren't so easy to get in touch with. But apart from that I'd not feel
comfortable about making money essentially on someone's else music
even tho my cover songs are extremly derivative.
as i know, you also have a bbs and follow the scene. do you think that
the bbs/ansi/demo scene is doing a "come back"? but this time, more on
quality, than on quantity? or it's just the ansi scene and perhaps the
retro/chip music?
Well my BBS is actually a really basic Mystic BBS setup that I created
essentially for the CTF of my new album. But it's exciting to see
the BBS scene is alive and rocking and feel it's growing not only
thanks to the mainstream interest in retro stuff but also for all the
commitment and work of the sysops and people like you contributing to
making it better and more interesting everyday. Also the ANSI/ASCII
art scene is amazing and they have been incredibly cool with me
considering all the great logos they did for me recently. In fact
I'd really like to thank Anachronist, Smooth & Iks at Impure!ASCII
and H7 and eNZO of Blocktronics for the incredible work they did for
me. I really have good hopes for the scene to grow also because I
noticed there's alot of interest not only by those nostalgic of it
but also from the young generations. Just to give you an example, the
first one who solved my CTF was a young guy from Lituania that had
no idea about what a BBS was yet he loved to explore this world and
got really hooked. Also I often get messages in my BBS about people
discovering about it for the first time. So that's just to say I feel
there's an increasing interest also because current modern internet,
namely social media, has become so boring and pathetic that people is
really starting to look elsewhere and find out new, more interesting
cyberspaces.
