The skandinavians come: Group-Interview with Ephidrena, norwegian Amiga demoscene group
by Lars "Ghandy" Sobiraj in 2000
Ghandy: First of all - each member: Please introduce yourself. Real name, age, what are you doing in real life, hobbies (if the power is switched off!), what kind of future you`re dreaming of etc. Use as much space as you want!!!
Frequent: Most people I know on this planet know me as Åsmund T. Johansen.Currently im 22 years old, born 13/10 1977, and studying boring information technology. In Ephidrena, I am together with Zixaq responsible for the music in our productions. My dream is to still continue making music, and perhaps get a contract with a recordcompany. Who knows what the future tells?
Cheetah: My name is Sondre Kippenes, and I'm born the 22nd of february 1980, which means that I'm currently 20 years old. (Actually I'm the youngest member of eph.) At the moment, in my "real life", I'm working as a security guard at Oslo Airport, but this is only only temporary. I just finished some schooling and expect to study some more later, but I simply haven't got a clue what to become in my life. Therefore I need to take some time to figure my life out.My only future plans are to do my civil service (as I'm a pacifist I'll do this instead of a military service), and I have hopes for serving somewhere abroad as this has recently been allowed by the Norwegian authorities. But who knows what the future will bring??
Loaderror: My names Espen Aamodt, actually spelled with ancient norwegian characters, but Ill save you for interpreting those. Nowadays, Im studying computer science, learning everything thats boring about computers. Hobbies, well I try to do some sports once in a while, but thats become very rare. I like going to the cinema, and also the innards of a good can of beer :) As for the future, who knows? I just live on day at a time, but being ever so hungry for information on all sorts of computer subjects, especially computergraphics, my dream would be to make computergraphics for a living, in a demo kind of way.Take the artform one step further perhaps.
Cyberstarr: OK i'm Cyberstarr and in real life I'm a student at Computer Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). I've been quite inactive in Ephidrena for a couple of years now, and I don't really contribute with much at the moment. My dream for the future is to create the ultimate scene demo, but I think it'll take some revolutionary coding and design. I'm not in a hurry.
Zixaq: My realname is Øyvind P. Noste, born 27/8/76, and are currently studiying. I started with Amiga when I was 14 years old. I first wanted to be a graphichian, but I soon spent more time in Protracker than in Deluxepaint. Since I make music in many different styles, I came up with the nick sikksakk, but spelled it "zixaq". When it comes to music, I'm never 100% satisfied with my tunes, and I hate to release bad or not-so-good work. Anyway, I'm enjoy making oldschool and goatrance. Chiptunes can also be very fun to make, but I like weird ambient the most. I will hopefully get "not-so-lazy" in the future, so I can get real famous :) OK, don't forget to contact me if you need a tune for something.
Ghandy: I was crazy enough to download at ftp.amigascne.org ALL Eph-releases that ever came out. Didn`t know they are that many. Maybe you want to make a sort of Demo & Intro-Graphia with the names of the demos, which party they came out, some comments about them etc. (starting with the oldest production at first)
Ephidrena: Such a summary for 27 prods will take to much time and space for this Interview. But Zixaq will here present some short info of our four most important prods so far:
Ephidrena demo history:
Photons Dodraugen-Remix: I think this is the first demo we start to make really cool things. The demos before had often been without direction and real design. This is by the way the first demotune I'm pleased with. I made mostly of it in the beginning, then Frequent added some things in the end. This tune started with that Cheetah and Loaderror thought we should have some real hard music. We found some samples gathered by Frequent. I started to make drumloops, and added some other samples, riffs and effects. We had really fun making this demo. We spent a week at my house during the summer 1997. We took a swim in a local lake and spent the nights being creative. Loaderror got much better coding, and I think this was a little breakthrough for our next demos.
Substral: After the "hurry and rush"-work with Dridiriija, we wanted to make something great. Now we were full of inspiration to make a hard demo. I made bassline and drums with heavy and tough samples. Luckily the others liked it, and we worked on the demo at my house right before christmas. Loaderror coded the rest at TP, and Frequent finished the demosong. The new with this demo was Stoney's animations. Without his contribution the demo wouldn't have been the same. Big thanks to Accede for a helping hand at TP.
Flux: After the success with Substral Ephidrena had gained a name in the Amigascene.We were of course thrilled. It looked like the polish scene liked us a little bit more than the rest of the scene. :) After a hard and breaking demo we wanted to make something nice and cosy. Cheetah made textures with bright colours, and Stoney made more animations. Concerning the music we decided to make two songs. I was very happy about that, since people always thought that Frequent made all the music when we cooperated. I was sick and tired of never getting the credits for demomusic, especially on tunes I had done mostly on. Well, this time it wasn't going to be a problem. Frequent had made a soft, floating and fine tune which fitted good as an end-tune. I had the honour of making the main-tune. I wanted to use strings to get a massive sound, but also drums and tb303. I mixed acoustic drums with elctronic drums to get a groove out of it. I sampled the string-chords from my synth, and made the 303-sequences in 303-tracker. Mod2samp was a handy thing in this tune. This is probably the 4channel-tune I'm most pleased with. We started on the demo at Cheetah's place, and finished it at TG99. By the way, that party sucked, and we decided to go to MekkaSymposium next year.
Concrete: Loaderror and Cheetah wanted again something hard. We still wanted Stoney's animations. Loaderror was now a good coder, which allowed us to do cooler stuff, technically. Frequent and myself decided to cooperate on the tune. Cheetah had an idea for the beat, and we started right away. First we made the acoustic drum-beat. Then I made all the parts with drums and bassline in it. Frequent made the ambient-parts; the one in the middle and the end. This is our best cooperation, I guess. Well, what more can I say? We won The Party 1999.It was a great production.
Ghandy: What I was missing was a slideshow from Cheetah. I`m sure he has drawn enough great pics to make a good slideshow out of them, didn`t he?? Or did you never wanted to make productions like slideshows, diskmags or music- disks????
Frequent: We are simply to busy working with demos, so making something other kind if prods is not our highest priority, for saying it in a such way. And personally I really like to compose music for demos 'n intros, since it visualize your inner thougts about the music you make in many ways.cta: Hmm, actually I don't concider my production of graphics good enough for a slideshow I would be really satisfied with. I guess I should have done a whole new collection of images, but this is easier said than done (pixeling really takes a lot of time) When it comes to musicdisks, I remember discussing plans for a zixaq musicdisk, but I guess we never got that far. I guess we're not very structured that way. Besides, loaderror isn't very fond of doing interfaces :> Diskmags have never been concidered.
Loaderror: slideshows, musicdisks, DISKMAGS??? ARGH!! The very most boring code I've ever done, was a little piece of code, that wrote some text onto the screen. So if I`m not very pushed, I'll stick to coding demos. I think that`s the best way to show off both our individual skills, aswell as our cooperative skills.
Cyberstarr: We're hardcore industrial demo sceners. Or at least we like to think so.
Zixaq: Loaderror hate that kind of coding. We want to make musicdisks, but the demos always get in front.
Ghandy: At your homepage you wrote that you`re living away from each others quite a long distance. If the email should be the way of your communication, why didn`t you ever accept a foreign member?? Should not be easy to visit eachothers if one of yours is living in the south of Norway, the next f.e. in the west and some others in the north etc.! What is then the difference between your crew and other groups consisting of members in different european countries like Darkage, Scoopex etc. ????
Frequent: We are not living so very distant from each other... Some miles, yes. But still close enough. Since we're have developed a very good friendship between us, we have decided to keep the same memberlist that we had from the start. (wich perhaps are one of the biggest difference between us and other groups)
Cheetah: All members come from places in eastern Norway, and in fact half the group (zixaq, Stoney & Cheetah) come from the same place (Gjerdrum). So it's not that great a distance between us. The core of our cooperation has always been, and still is, physical meetings at each others homes where we have the opportunity to work closely, and not inet/email. As said, we have all become good friends over the years, and the joining of other members has never been seriously concidered. The feeling I have is that we - the 6 if us - aren't that much "members" of eph, we are more a bunch of friends keeping in touch through this scene thing. Eph is just what we call ourselves. The thought of other people "joining" our group just seems very wrong.
Loady: Kind of agree with cheetah. I think a new member would have felt very strange as we've been this bunch from the start off.
Cyberstarr: We've been six members for 5 years. We've focused on productions and have had enough people to feed the coders.
Zixaq: Some of the most important things with Ephidrena is that we can meat eachother once in a while. When we are home with our parents houses at vacations, we don't live too far from eachother. If we had members that never could join our meetings, it would have been a drawback. The most important thing with us is that we are buddies, with a social connection.
Ghandy: What are your reasons not to convert to the PC? Not that I want that, god beware, you`re really important for the Amiga Scene in my eyes, but observing the ongoings the past years with Escom, Viscorp, Phase5 etc. etc. one could really understand that step. Is it more the computer or more the Scene keeping you on track??
Frequent: Important to the Amiga scene? Never thought about us in that way. Although we got comments about our prods, they varies from "fucking good" to "nothing special", so.... For scening in general, Amiga is a excellent platform to develop demos, both for the sake of our scene, and for those nice features the amy got. The entusiasm among the scene today is still quite good. I really don't have much of an impression of the Amiga scene nowadays. I've seen few really good productions so far this year. (Gift was mighty by the way) Haven't been to any party for ages either, so I really can't tell.
Loaderror: As for the scene today, respect to the people making good productions which I love such as Potion, DCS, Loonies, Ozone, Tbl, and Zigs latest demo, and Napalm :). And perhaps those people complaining about the dead scene, should download some productions and watch them. Its normal to think it was all better before though. The human mind forgets all that was bad in the past (like the design of most demos, which sucked!).
Zixaq: I'm not so sure. I guess it's falling. I think it's far between the good productions. The #Amigascne are sometimes cool, sometimes few people.
Ghandy: What are the scenerelated sites you visit from time to time? Don`t tell me you don`t know http://Scenet.de hehe!
Frequent: Scenet.de, Amigascne.org, Dhs.nu, scene.org, div group pages.
Cheetah: scenet?? nah. I tend to visit gfxzone from time to time. Really nice gfx site. And 3daddict is a nice fellow that knows to appreciate some good design.
Loaderror: Scene.org, amigascne.org, div. groups' pages.
Cyberstarr: welcome.to/ephidrena, soon www.ephidrena.net
Zixaq: Ftp://amigascne.org and other Amigasites. Ftp://scene.org and other music/graphic-sites.
Ghandy: What can we expect from your crew in the future? Heard there`s a cooperation release planned together with the danish Loonie-s-heeps!
Load: well, we'll see about that. I said yes to do it of course, as that sounded like fun, but doing stuff with people that are hundreds of miles away, isnt that easy. So I think we've agreed to put that cooperation on ice for a while. As for eph productions, we will probably move more into typography styles, and we will not do a 3d engine demo, as I don`t think 3d engines can do anything exciting on Amiga really. I like better to mess about with single objects so that the effects are more a part of a whole composition together with the graphics and music.
Cheetah: So far there have been times when motivation has seemed years away, but it seems like we always manage to discover some of the magic again. So if this trend continues I guess you'll see more prods from us also in the future.
Frequent: Don`t really expect something, then you will get more surprised about us in the future :)
Zixaq: I imagine that we start making "demos" more like music-videos. I mean productions for a bigger public, not only the scene. Loaderror has allready made graphics/animations which was shown at a DrumAndBass-party. More things like that.
Ghandy: What is your honest opinion about the following productions:
a) Impossible by Loonies
Impressive code, but design, where`s design afterall? - Lacks when it comes to Concept.... It.... was..... BOOOORING!!!! Why can`t we discuss Potion`s "Gift" instead? It simply rules :)
b) We ride on our enemies by Skarla
Is there a trend into 3D demos like it is on the PC Scene?? - Yes. 3d is a trend. But 3d brings posibilities. Anyway, we liked Smokebomb better, why didnt that win?
c) Divine slideshow by Gods^Darkage
Ok enough
d) the less active diskmags which are still alive like Showtime, Eurochart, Oepir Risti, Devotion etc.
Oepir Rules... The rest is ok.
e) Grid 40kb intro by Nature
Nice codework and.......nice codework. Colours are a little bit too acid. Cool sound. The production lacks a complete design. Could have been a great goa-intro if they had used more goaobjects :D
f) or about the oldies like Odyssey (Alcatraz), Hardwired (The Silents), Voyage (Razor1911) etc. etc.??
Loaderror: Odyssey, it lasted for 45 minutes, so that`s what`s special, didn`t really like it that much.
Fqt: 45 minutes long, an actually entertaining, if you like that kind of demos.
Loaderror about Hardwired: The start rocks. But I didn`t join the scene before 1995, so I have no real affection for it the way older sceners have.
Frequent: One of the first demos I've ever seen on Amiga. Brings tears in my eyes when thinking about it. Liked it better than Odyssey, and one of my personal favorites of the old school demos.
Loaderror about Voyage: Never seen it.
Frequent: Quite ok, but it never catched my attention.
The whole group: Our all time favourites: - Desert Dream, 9fingers, state of the art, sequential, nexus7, closer, faktory, sumea, fullmoon, captured dreams, deusexmachina, gforce, fad, zif, smokebomb, klone, valhalla, gift, gush, freedom(4k), 1000%, muscles, wild, dance diverse #2, vision, deep psilocybin mix, killer, electroboy, 2cb, Budbrain 1,2.
Ghandy:Finally, want to greet anybody?
Ephidrena: We greet all our friends and especially to all we met at MEkka! Se you at mekka next year.
Thanks a lot for your attention!!
---
Author: Lars "Ghandy" Sobiraj Copyright: Diskmag (http://diskmag.de) Taken with permission. | 
Adam Malysz vs. Wienerwurst
Bier
Dridirijia
Flux
J
Omnicrom
Pluss
Showtime 16 Intro
Substral
Cheetah 01
Cheetah 02 |