Interview with the demostsener - kb ^ Farbrausch

Farbrausch is undoubtedly one of the most popular groups in the demoscene. They release technically flawless and visually sexy demos and top the top of the charts of the best bands , and
kb , without a doubt, the icon of the demoscene. He started back in the 90s, and as a coder, musician, organizer of demopati, he always achieved success. The interview will cover some of the myths around Farbrausch, how the demoscene works, what inspires him, and about his favorite leaves ... (not the ones you thought).

For a start, please tell us briefly about yourself.

Hello! My name is Tammo, in the demoscene I am known as “kb”. As a scener, I started on C64 ( Commodore64 ) in the Obsessed Maniacs group in 1993, visited Reflex and Smash Designs , then I became a member of the Farbrausch group, which I still have today. I mainly do programming, but also wrote several musical compositions. In addition, I organized the German Easter demopati since 1997, and now I lead the Beam Team (a group of people responsible for displaying images on the big screen) on Revision Demopati.

I read somewhere that you became interested in programming at a very early age. When did you first see the computer?
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I was always attracted to things with buttons. My parents showed me how the light switch works when I was two years old, and from that moment my fate was sealed. At the age of six, I discovered those strange things, like typewriters, that were connected to a TV in a store. I remember well how excited, I approached and pressed the “shift” key on some Commodore, and what was my disappointment at the fact that nothing happened ... it most likely made me understand what these things are. And, imagine, when my father copied the instructions from C64 on the copier and I read that you can program this thing to do whatever you want, I fell in love for the first time in my life.

At 6 years old! Do you have that copied instruction?

Ha, no. if I remember correctly, I threw it out right away when I received my own C64 with normal instructions. And even from him nothing left. Only one of the computers I used has been preserved, sometimes I think to bring it back to life.

You understand what you want to do in a fairly early childhood. What kind of baby were you?

I've always been busy than that. He built strange Lego figs and disassembled old electronics, which he pulled out from his grandfathers, experimented with electronic components (he did not collect anything serious, but he himself discovered that capacitors affect the sound). Sitting in front of my C64, I swapped the parts and looked at what would happen. You might think that I was a "typical nerd" and will be not far from the truth.

Ok. And how and when did this inquisitive child discover demos and demos?

I first encountered it when I saw the first cracktro for games on C64, and then by chance I got a whole disk with intras and crects, but without the games that usually went after them, and I was hooked. It turned out that there are people who make cool computer graphics and music just like that, and they had such strange names, and they said hello to each other, and ... wait, this picture is drawn directly on the border, the same can not be!
And then, in the early 90s, there were paid German magazines on diskettes for C64 that came out every month or so, and one of them included a contest for the best demo. Readers sent small demos to this contest, and received 50 German marks of the time (about 25 euros now), if they won first place. I had a friend who was also obsessed with deams, but we were not in any group. So we met the guys from The Obsessed Maniacs and decided to team up with them to write a demo.

And what is it like to create your first demo? How much time did it take?

It took us about a year to write the first big demo (“ Who Cares (TM) ”). It was a classic Megademo from several parts with loading screens between them, different parts were not related to each other in any way, we just put together everything we had and released what we got. Then we distributed this disk wherever we could. The first serious demo worthy of demopati was released later, about a year later.

I know that you were in several groups in the 90s, but in 2000 you founded your group and called it Farbrausch. Why was it necessary to create a new group and who were its first members?

The birth of Farbrausch was actually the result of frustration. Black, then Yoda, Ronny, and I were fed up with the “politics” that reigned in our groups. People who call themselves “leaders” tried to impose their opinion on what to do and how to do it. There were a lot of disputes between the band members and a bunch of other negative nonsense, which we dealt with instead of doing demos. On the other hand, we still had fresh impressions of the success of Elitegroup, who ridiculed those old school stamps and stereotypes that most of the scenery had followed at that time and which even in 2014 had not completely got rid of. Elitegroup not only amused everyone, but also gave a good impetus to everyone else to be more creative than before.


Kasparov by Elitegroup (1999)

As a result, three of us founded Farbrausch with a simple desire: "Let's do cool demos and never do bad ones." Each member of the group could do what he wanted, and there was no leader, no leadership, no other nonsense. Nobody said what the group should release and what not. And this attracted a lot of our friends, such as Chaos, Fiver2 and some other former Elitegroup members.

And even when we suddenly became famous for opening a new era of 64k intro, the basic principles remained the same. To be honest, there were several works from other participants that I would not like to see under the Farbrausch logo, but it’s not for me to decide, and I shut up and started thinking about how to cut 8-hour 4k intro fr-0 what we have there the next number.

Wait, are you talking about politics inside groups? How often does this occur in the demoscene?

Now almost nothing like that. It was at a time when the Internet was not so common, and people had to send diskettes across Europe and even farther. Some people were the best organizers, and could gather a group of like-minded people around them. And the transition from the organizer to the dictator is very fast, which actually happened. Or it was the founders of the groups who were well aware of how their demos should look and what releases the band should release, and they did not want to listen to anyone else.

Of course, now people can communicate in real time at any distance, and you do not need a strict organization to complete the work. Fortunately, these days, installing MediaWiki on a dedicated server no longer entails a delusions of grandeur. :) And it makes even more ridiculous those kindergarten disputes among old school groups on such resources as pouet.net. There you can easily find someone forty years old who behaves as if the rules written by him 20 years ago must be followed exactly. And this dude spends all his free time trying to pour out multi-page rage posts on forums just because someone in 2014 has released a job that doesn’t quite correspond to the old testaments of the 80s.

To be honest, I am very surprised that your group has no leader and is not organized at all. I imagined a strict hierarchy ... then, as usual, Farbrausch decide what one project or another will do? Could you tell us more about the process of creating a demo?

As I said, the main slogan in Farbrausch is “Do the Thing”. Thus, we do not have any one process of creating demos. Take 5 of our demos and I will tell five different stories about how they were created. But there is one common feature: usually the demo starts with the fact that someone has an idea and the others support it because it's cool. It could be Chaos, who wants to boast of his multi-core physics, or Fiver2, who always wanted to make a demo with disco music (and thanks to the glow effect, we finally did it in the.popular.demo ), or Ryg, who said Once on Evoke, he wanted to do a “nice demo” and with the help of Ronny and me, we unexpectedly made “ Cargo cult ”. But the similarities end there.

Okay, then what is Elitehaus, where do you go to do demos? I heard about this place a couple of times, and there are rumors that this house has magical power to help make killer demos. It sounds very suspicious for the uninitiated ...

As I said, the creation stories of all the dem are different ... I lied. They were all made in Elithouse.



Elitehouse is the place where we met, when we made releases for Elitgroup and when we needed to retire together to create some cool projects to show who the boss is on stage. Thus, we rented a country house in Denmark, about an hour from the German border and 10 minutes walk from the supermarket, and we, computers and a swimming pool literally locked themselves there for a couple of weeks. And, after 14 days, we rolled out almost ready Kasparov, which was polished on The Party (demo party in Denmark) and I must admit, we broke everyone there!

From that moment on, it became a good tradition and we try to keep it. We don’t do that every year, and 15 years later we don’t work on releases as crazy as we did at the very beginning, but all the big releases from Farbrausch, such as “ The Product ” ( video ), “ Poemtoahorse ” ( video ) , “ The Popular Demo ” ( video ), “ Of Spirits Taken ” ( video ), “ Debris ”, “ Rove ” ( video ), “ Magellan ” ( video ) were made in this country house. And many of the work of our friends were also made there. Last year, Mercury came to Denmark, and we invited them to Elithouse to finish working with them for Revision 2013. And in 2005, Paniq was also there with us: he read several of his poems and we decided to make a demo on one of them . Thus was born “ Die Ewigkeit Schmerzt ” ( video ).


“Fr-041: debris.” By Farbrausch (2007)

I think “locking yourself in a house with computers and a pool” is a heavenly condition for some creative people. :) Unlike other groups, Farbrausch often invited other people into their projects: was it a conscious decision?

The very atmosphere of Elithouse pushed for this. Even if you do not work on any part of the project together with others, you constantly see the screens of their monitors, and then you suddenly begin to feel part of the team: you give good advice, help with graphics or code. Everything happens spontaneously, by itself. For example, I helped to optimize the code in “Rove” and “Magellan”, although I was going to do my own projects, I had enough milliseconds to squeeze myself and help. Chaos at this time was very busy writing effects and final fitting demo.

Farbrausch numbers each release, and sometimes you use the “minus” next to the number to show that this is not a big release. By what criteria do you determine this?

As I said, the main rule in Farbrausch is “Do what you want.” But somehow it happened from the very beginning that we began to number our works (although, for example, we have “ Masagin ” ( video ) which has no number) - we wanted to separate the serious works from the rest of the slag that was released. It’s just a tag to make it easier for people to navigate. But this is not a prerequisite. We released frankly weak work with numbers, just like there are some fr-minus demos that occupy a special place in my heart. In general, having a number is not a sign of a cool release.

Cool I thought you had a set of rules and requirements. :) By the way, when I watched a live broadcast from demopati, the auditorium exploded only from one Farbrausch inscription on the screen. People usually expect something incredible from you. Do you feel the burden of responsibility, or is it the other way around - inspires you?

Indeed, after “The Product” and, possibly, after “The Popular Demo”, everyone expects a similar breakthrough from us. Even today, people are minus some of our work just because they are not as cool as Debris. But over time, we have learned not to pay attention to it and do what we like, regardless of whether it is cool or not. We even played a bit of people by releasing “ Farbomat ” on The Party 2001 one year after “The Product” was released. The people are still writing angry comments.

Sometimes I watch different demos and think: “how could they release it? Do they have any such thing as EYES? ” I'm not very cool in graphics and design, but even I would not have released this to the masses. But after a minute, I understand that this attitude to the result is perhaps one of the reasons why I have not released anything for 3 years. Well, besides the Partymeister, a system for displaying works on the big screen for demopati, also known as “everything you see between the entries for the last few years”.

“To control the demoscene” is a very bold step. :) How do you manage not to bathe about the negative reaction to your releases?

Of course, no one can live in complete isolation. If everyone didn’t care, no one would have released competition entries for demopati, no one would fidget in the chair and would not be afraid of how the audience would react at the end of your work. But we in Farbrausch have learned not to pay attention to cheap praise and stupid assaults: we have a circle of friends whose opinion we value and respect, and whose opinion is weighty in the demo scene as a whole.

Thanks for the details, now let me ask you a little about how you implement your ideas, what inspires you to make a demo or write music?

Every time is different. It could be a melody that was born in my head, or it could be the result of experiments, as happened with my 4k intro “ sunr4y ” ( video ). I decided to try out a few new rendering algorithms, and gradually it formed into a complete intro. Or as it was with the music for “ Candytron ”: I couldn’t think of anything for a few weeks, I didn’t even know what genre to write, and then, quite by chance, I heard a melody in the club that was perfect for the intro and wrote my track based on what I heard. But in general, for me personally, it is easier to write code than to compose music. Programming is a fairly linear, sequential process, while music is either in my head or not, and in the latter case I have to just wait for it to appear there.

"Fr-030: candytron" by Farbrausch (2003)


Regardless of which group or project you are working on, is there anything that you pay special attention to when you make demo / music?

I think the main thing is that I like what I do. All the tracks I did were necessarily tested on me with the five-hour continuous playback. Demo, in which I participated, should also please the eye. Of course, for smaller projects I do not always present such harsh conditions, but the basic idea is that I should like the result.
It should be noted that I do not consider myself to be creators - people who enjoy the process of creating and consuming the results of their creativity. I grew up in a culture ready, and that helps me to create more lyrical work than is usually found on stage.

Yes, I read something about your gothic past. Since you mentioned this fact, do you see any similarities in these two cultures - goths and geeks?

Once again it is worth noting that this was true in the 90s. I think that both of these groups share a common feeling of “being not like everyone else”, which probably the majority of participants in these movements experienced in childhood and, accordingly, a common view of “ordinary people”. The commonality of these feelings is enough for these two cultures to get along well with each other.
Unfortunately, this is no longer so relevant in recent years, when both of these cultural movements have become more popular and widespread, although they are still quite provocative for the general mass of people.

Very interesting topic - you can write a good dissertation. :) Let's go back to the creative process. Do you have any habits or rituals that you use during the creation of demos? For example, do you drink beer after midnight ...?

Darkness and tea really help. Unfortunately, after work and family affairs there is not much time left to devote to the demoscene. But really, I rarely see the sun when I write code or music for my own pleasure. Usually we shoot the Elite house in the middle of winter, and at this time in Denmark the days are very short, and with our sleep mode, we do not often see the light. Something like that ... Darkness and Tea, a lot of tea. You can hardly catch me at work without a cup, or even a cup of tea.

Hmm ... you seem like a serious tea lover. What kind of leaves do you prefer?

My favorite is Darjeeling, the first harvest, and the more letters before the TGFOP (tea leaf category), the better. I also like Jungpana, especially all its flavors. :) In addition, I like some green teas (Senta and Jasmine) and sometimes white tea (Bai Xue Long), and for evening tea I always have special sets of fruit and herbal teas in my kitchen.

Wow, how many things! Your kitchen probably looks like a tea shop. What about music? What do you listen to while you work, music or pink noise?

As for music, when I write code, I prefer different electronic music, preferably without words that often distract me. Any melodies and harmonies will do, the main thing is to occupy my right half of the brain, while the left one is occupied with algorithms and code. Songs with words in languages ​​I don’t understand go well too. :) If I need to finish something urgently in a couple of hours, I will most likely turn on J-Pop.

Imagine this picture. What programs do you use when you make demo / music? Or do you have your own tools?

Well, Farbrausch is just well known for making their tools for creating demos, and I try not to fight back from the team. :) I think the reason is that programmers like Ryg, Chaos and me are not very well versed in design and graphics, so we need tools so that we can focus on the effects math, and give the visual part to customize people with artistic taste. So actually was born the well-known visual designer Werkkzeug and many other utilities that we use. It's the same with music - when it comes to writing a track for 64k intro, then “I am a coder” should write tools for “me a musician” that he will use with pleasure. This is how the actual synthesizer appeared, which can also be used by anyone with any other software. I would be able to write that music for “The Product” right in the source code in C ++ or just in a text file, but I wanted it to sound more “real”, and not like something crooked and hard.


"Fr-08: .the.product" by Farbrausch (2000)

In addition, I use the following programs: Visual Studio for writing code and everything else, for music, this is usually Reaper with a bunch of different plugins. Different text editors, file managers and a bunch of small command-line utilities that make the coder's daily life easier.

Ok! The time has come for the classic question - your favorite demo, which you remember most of all, which changed your life and all that?

1993, my parents' room. A friend brought me a broken Amiga 500, which I managed to fix and run. We connected it to a large TV and speakers, took the first disc from the box with demos, on which was written “ State of the Art ” ( video ) ... After 5 minutes, I realized that I had to do better!
The funny thing is that with my minimal knowledge of Amiga, then I understood that this demo is not technically so difficult, but visually it was something completely new and crazy, it was a moment when it became clear that boring scrollers and effects on a black screen - this is yesterday.
The fact that I chose a demo from Amiga twenty years ago does not mean that only on Amiga then everyone was so cool :) Future Crew and Gravis Ultrasound predetermined my fate to become a PC stage designer. Then, DirectX and the first GeForce brought a new era of pixel shaders and raised the demo scene to a new, hitherto unattainable level. This development was not fast, but now many excellent works have been released that realize all the possibilities of modern iron.

You saw with your own eyes the sunrise and sunset of the demoscene as a culture, and not only as a scener, you were the organizer of demopati for quite a long time. I heard you didn’t celebrate a “normal” Christmas for more than 10 years. What makes you live this way?

One of the tUM party (demopati in Germany, passing between Christmas and the New Year) a couple of years ago had the slogan "Christmas with your REAL family"

It suits me. I don’t even know how it should look, this is a “normal” Christmas, and I’m not sure I want to. I still love what happens on stage, it is a fact. I still love my work, which I do for Revision, and standing there, in the hall, looking at the works of the contestants, knowing that you have invested a part of yourself in everything that happens, it is worth any stress experienced.

Did you ever get the idea of ​​“tied up with the demoscene”?

And you could? I did not release releases in recent years until the moment when I began to torment my conscience, that I participate in demopati, without even making a competitive work. I still feel part of the scene. It seems to me that when people are “tied up” with the demo scene, this means it was not their place, they should not even have begun to make a demo. Because on the other hand there are always a lot of “former” scenery and veterans of the gaming industry, and whatever it is, all these people still love to watch demos, and most of them still want to sometime participate in demopati, especially after such the number of impressions told by people who returned to the scene after 10 or more years of recess, and it took them only 2 days off for Revision to completely return their forgotten feelings to them.

It's great! I hope we will see a lot of demos with ideas and character of adults. What do you expect from the future demoscene?

I have no idea :) but honestly, I would like the scene, at least in part, to become less dependent on the legacy of the old platforms, and for more people to look for self-expression in new technologies. There are a lot of new things on stage, people who make not so much demos as simply beautiful things on computers. Unfortunately, the attempt to release this new wave on, say, Revision will create tension in the ranks of ordinary participants in the demostsena, and most of such attempts, excluding, perhaps, Assembly, were not crowned with success.
But, I'm afraid, this is too big a topic to discuss in an interview. Wait and see.

I think, yes. And what would you personally like to release in the near future?

I have a lot of vague ideas, but so far none of them have been formed in the demo. I have a couple of started music tracks that are waiting for the right moment to be finished. As for ideas for demos, I really want to try to play with new rendering algorithms, because in recent years they have made a significant technological leap, you know, all these HDR textures, rendering with physics, and other fashionable things. It should be fun - to make something really cool looking on the same technologies that are used in the so-called AAA games, which actually look like a gray-brown turd. But since I myself am not very good at design, I need to finish the current demo engine and add all these new features. I hope someone from Farbrausch also has ideas in his head and I am ready to support them.

Well, goodbye, your message to demoscenters and just fans of this kind of art.

Message?

Yes, for current and future generations!

Make your demo messages!
True, run a development environment that you like and write something visually promising. Make screenshots, and send them to a familiar artist to paint them. Try to code everything that the artist has painted. Then make all the visual parameters customizable and pick the most disagreeable combination of them. Now find your favorite musician and send him a video of what you already have, and let him give you any track that fits or write something new. Pack everything in a heap, zip up, copy to a USB flash drive, and just in case somewhere in the clouds, buy drinks and show your work on the nearest demopati to a couple of cool sceners, listen to their advice, finish right on the party code and submit your work on the compo. Now you can start drinking and wait for your work to be shown on the big screen.
Everything!There is a demo, maybe even a new group came up on the demoscene ... is it really that difficult?

I think that many who have read this interview have discovered new aspects of Farbrausch and kb. Thank you so much for answering my questions!

On the kb site you will find his works and posts in blogs, as well as you can download the “ V2 synthesizer system ” (the synthesizer mentioned in the interview). On the official website of Farbrausch, you will find all releases of the group, development diaries from Elithus, and maybe even download the source code of their “werkkzeug” demodule.

Thank you for reading to the end.

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