More Of Ulysses Vibraphonic can be found on UV music

1) What inspired you to begin writting music?

Picture it: Sicily, 1921.

No.

In 1995 my friend Dave introduced me to a game called Star Control II. It was a marvelous mix of three gaming styles - fast-paced combat, exploration, and role-playing. I found it addictive, partially because of the all-digital soundtrack it contained. I was amazed at the quality of music my little Sound Blaster was pumping out, because at that time most of the games I had ever tried used the little OPL-3 4-voice faux-MIDI chip to create cheesy background ambience. The song associated with one alien race, the Ur-Quan, was particularly good, and when one day I was looking around the internet for Star Control II uh, modifications, I found a utility and some batch files which would rip all the songs out of the Star Control II resource files. I downloaded it and it didn't work. After using DOS 5 Shell to figure out and correct the hex offsets of the songs embedded in the resource files (they all had standard headers, though I didn't know what type they were) I fixed the batch file and ran the ripper again, and all of a sudden my Star Control II directory was filled with MOD files. I found this fascinating because I had never heard of a MOD file. I used Archie to find a MOD player at first, and though it was another year before I got the byte offsets right for the Ur-Quan theme, I got all the other songs, played them and decided I had to know how they were written. One more interminable 14.4 download later, I had a stupid little program called MODedit which had advanced support for absolutely nothing, but at least displayed the notes and provided an interface by which I could screw around with the songs I had. I wrote four little songs, the first of which was pretty cool but ripped off at least two songs I'd heard on the radio. The second and fourth are missing and presumed shitty, but the third was a neat little guitar ditty featuring a sample I ripped out of the demo tune that came with MODedit. In September 1995 I remembered a program I found kicking around in drafting class called Second Reality (I think it was by Future Crew) which was one of the winning entries at a demo competition in a previous year. I ran it again and noted that the music quality in that program was far better than what came out of MODedit, so I checked it out and found that Purple Motion was the alias of the person who had written the music in there, and I don't remember if it was another web search or a check of the .nfo file that brought Scream Tracker to my attention. I used Scream Tracker through 1996, writing terrible songs like Flameout II, Flameout III and Fall, fun stuff like Crush (whose melody I wrote in 45 seconds to demonstrate to a friend named Thor how ST worked), and one industrial song called Ignorinati that was pretty damned cool. Ignorinati perished as the result of a terrible misunderstanding concerning the nature of drivers for my new 5 GB drive in late '97, I think, and as a result I make CD backups of my stuff every couple of months. Playback was with Cubic Player and I used the spectral analysis features of that program to analyse the spectrum spread and detect things wrong with my music, which I would immediately not bother correcting. My parents noticed my new hobby and in December of '96 my stepdad gave me an AWE32 under the mistaken impression that I could make use of the sample RAM in Scream Tracker. I went off searching for a better tracker that had AWE32 support and found Impulse Tracker, which was already in its final few incarnations (by Jeff Lim -- huge respect to this man, and a golf cleat to the side of the head of all the w4r3z d00dz who pirated his stereo WAV driver and rubbed his face in it). Music was still just an amusement to me when I picked up Impulse Tracker, and then during one particularly beautiful week in July of 1997 when I was supposed to be cutting the lawn, I wrote Withhold, Transistor Soul and Take. All of a sudden it was serious. I had started writing songs about things, and people, and specifically the things a certain person had been doing with her ex-boyfriend and not me a couple months before. I had told my girlfriend that I forgave her totally, but the truth was that I didn't trust her whatsoever and was struggling with the guilt of my own hypocrisy weighed against the demonstrated fact that she didn't deserve my trust. With a bucket of bulk Tetley Iced Tea (makes 23L!) in my lap, and armed with a new understanding of the power of a New Note Action in Impulse Tracker, I wrote those three songs and got myself in a shitload of trouble for not cutting the grass. Dave had been writing songs with me up to that point, and we had considered collaboration many times, so I called him over to listen to Transistor Soul, and he gave up tracking. "I can't compete with that," he said, which was a surprise to me since I didn't think we had ever been competing. Dave continues to offer me help and support to this day, but he has much greater musical education than I do and as a result, I think, expects certain things from music which my songs tend to only sporadically provide. I often find the people who I feel understand best what I'm trying to do are people who have fewer preconceived notions about what music is, and I don't know what that says about my musical skill. In early October of 1997 I dumped the subject of Withhold, Transistor Soul and Take, and was dating a much nicer girl twenty-two hours later. The next four months were marked by extreme happiness puncutated by extreme depression and I was surprised to find that most of the time that I was happy, everything I wrote was terrible. However, the much nicer girl dumped me a few days after Valentine's day and before long I was back in action, confirming a parallel between my ability to write music and my inability to remain happy that lasted until September of '98. Generally, the more tumultuous my love-life, the better the music I wrote. The relationship between my music and my relationships has generally been a hex on both. These days, most of the songs I write are lyric-less ballads, expressing what I connect with most about a particular moment or the space of a few hours. The motion associated with the event provides the flow of the music and the emotion gives rise to the content, in a less direct way.

2) Do you ever have trouble keeping your fanbase under control?

I used to.

I find that promising to release an album for two years and never finishing it, helps to keep a damper on things. Seriously, though, I have always tried to keep the number of listeners down so that I don't feel pressured to do anything ambitious.

3) Is it true that if you play Transistor Soul backwards it has satanic messages?

No, if you play it forwards it has Satanic messages. Most of my songs from that period are about other people, but Transistor Soul was a sort of fused commentary on the inner nature of both myself and my girlfriend at that time. The soul in question was always mine, but the song mostly expressed my outrage of what her implicit rejection of me had done to my motives. The lyrics for Transistor Soul were never recorded because I felt it didn't need them, but playing those backwards the only message I can find sounds sorta like "reef down a reefer"...but that was a completely unintentional side effect of writing "your eyes are fire and fear" in the chorus. If you're looking for amusement, playing Start Again backwards is a far more rewarding experience.