A bunch of Kosmic Free Music Foundation tunes remixed by myself around the years 1998-2001, comprising almost 50 minutes of bloopity-boop computer music. Actually most of the work on these were done when I was going under the KTFOD name, but the retroactivity of the Antlerland name applies as usual.
These files have been encoded as mp3s in LAME -alt-preset-standard for maximum FUN! Right-click and select "Save link as ..." so you only have to download each song once.
Frequent Flyer (Graham the Happy Scum remix)
8'17" - 11.2Mb - original by Maelcum (Dan Nicholson)
previously released on his album "The Future Is History" (now deleted, I guess)
The original version is available here as "k_ff.mp3". Another alternative remix by Genosha is also available in the same directory as "k_ffbm.mp3"
Northern Lights (Antlerland Remix)
4'33" - 6.1Mb - original by Quarex and The Hacker (Drew Hunt and Krisjanis Gale)
13a (Antlerland Remix)
6'59" - 8.8Mb - original by Grubwerm (James J.)
The original tune is available here as "k_13a.mp3". Other remixes by Ranger Rick and Pwax are also available in the same directory as "k_13b.mp3" and "k_13lit.mp3" respectively. The latter is particularly cool.
Suicide Is Pop/LSD Was Coloured Music (Antlerland Death Trip Mix)
15'11" - 20.7Mb - originals by Placid (Tuomas Mettanen)
the first three minutes are largely derived from Suicide Is Pop, and then the rest is based on LSD. Original tunes available here as "k_suic.mp3" and "k_lsd.mp3". I accept no responsibility for any damage caused to your health or your sound equipment by this remix.
Minorglide (Antlerland Remix)
5'49" - 7.2Mb - original by Mental Floss (Andrew McCallum)
Kleptocracy (a homage to KFMF)
8'04" - 9.1Mb - original artists: too numerous to mention.
This was a kind of megamix of various KFMF songs with assorted other crap thrown in. I hadn't even bloody heard of the term "mashup" until after I put this... work together in 2000. Besides, mod trackers have been throwing these travesties together since the four-channel MOD days. It's just that bittorrent is a more effective way of disseminating this stuff than echoing through Fidonet was. (And ACID is more idiot-friendly than Scream Tracker 3 for making this stuff...)
BACKGROUND
With the launch of the official Antlerland site, and the forthcoming retrospective, it seems apt to put these remixes of various KFMF songs on the site as a whole. Most of the remixing was done during 1999-2000, and I learnt quite a bit in the process, musically and technically.
During it's active period from 1991 to 2000, the Kosmic Free Music Foundation, one of the more well-known music groups associated with the demoscene. It was originally named the Kosmic Loader Foundation by Dan Nicholson aka Maelcum and had a continually changing roster that included some pretty talented exponents of the module tracker. Anyway, I'm not going to write a big fat essay on the history of tracking in general, go read up on it at Wikipedia.
When I started tracking myself in 1996, I of course downloaded a lot of mods for listening, as well as learning how to get better at the technique. A good many of bore filenames with the K_* prefix, but there were countless other groups, some specialising in trance or drum'n'bass or IDM, others more eclectic in their nature.
Since tracker modules contained all the samples and the sequences required for the song, it enabled three ideas that served mod tracking well when it came to the "remix" culture so beloved by dilettante post-modernist hipsters:
Some remixes which came out of the scene were inspired, often exceeding the original both musically and technically; others were, well, evoked the opinion "what the hell was the point of that?".
Much of my learning how to track came from checking out other people's songs, and on occasion I might try to do something new with the song, take it some place else, or even just make it more bangin', as may have been said in the parlance of a few years back.
As I got better at tracking, generally I was more capable of putting my own stamp on a tune. I'm not entirely sure how good these are, but generally if I start something I think has potential, whether it's an original or a remix, I'll usually keep working on it for a while until I can do no more with it.
Aside from the remix of Minorglide, which deserved to be finished from my first jabs at it, until I finally got around to doing that in 2003, the others have been kicking around various hard drives since I stopped screwing with them around 2000 and 2001. Although I planned to inflict these onto the outside world as a set at some stage, I just hadn't gotten around to doing so until now.
I should also note that if you can figure out how to use a module tracker itself, the modules are still available to check out and remix this stuff yourself. This could prove to be an interesting exercise in masochism for young players, given that development of Impulse Tracker ceased in 1998, and these days I have to run it through VDMSound to get it to go in Windows XP, though it still works surprisingly well in spite of all the convolutions. A word of warning, though: it ain't FruityLoops.
Enjoy! Graham Freeman, April 2006.