Eruption (arc-eruption.it)

 Completed December 1996.

Since I completed this song and Sorrow's Undoing on the same day, I’m not certain which one was my final song for Quasar. There’s an outside chance it was also Valor. But it’s kind of a moot point. Sorrow’s Undoing had a bit more backstory to the song itself, and since this one has less, I’ll use this one to give my thoughts on the end of my days at Quasar.

Eruption is a song in three acts, but I originally didn’t intend it to happen this way. I wanted to make a song around the concept of a volcanic eruption, and it naturally ended up having three parts: a build-up, the actual explosion, and the aftermath. I lived near a very famous site of a volcanic eruption: Mt. St. Helens, which happened to erupt within a week of my birth (my birthplace was not in Washington, however). Subliminal and Pretzel (two other local mod musicians in my area, the latter being one of my best friends in high school) also had recently completed, or were working on, three-act songs of their own: Three and Three-Act Dream, respectively. I mentioned in the comments that I was joining in on the fun.

Musically, the first act is the most unoriginal of the three, taking inspiration from Starshine - PM by Purple Motion and Jupiter by Trash. The second act is fast-moving 90’s techno style, complete with orchestra hits and poorly integrated audio clips from Independence Day and Duke Nukem 3D (which makes reference to a different kind of a natural disaster, earthquakes). The final act draws mild inspiration from "Ascent of the Cloud Eagle" by Necros, making use of its flute sample. To me, the third act is the strongest, and is the only one that really evokes the mood I was going for. None of the three acts really integrate very well together.

Fun fact: The “feedback lead” was originally titled “Pink Floyd guitar” or something along those lines (I did not give it this name, that is how it was named from the song I pulled it from, whose name I do not remember). Because of this, I had to re-submit it to the mod download area on the Microsoft Network, because the moderator there thought it was too close to copyright infringement. I don’t recall using MSN to upload songs much after that.

And that was it for 1996. I completed and released 41 songs that year. That means in just 8 months or so, I had written about two thirds of my entire catalog. By comparison, I would write 23 more songs through 1999 - about half as much, but in a span of over 2 years. I slowed way down in 1997 and took more time to put songs together. Other activities would also take precedence, finishing high school and starting college, most importantly.

I would drift away from R-Squared and Quasar around this time. I lost interest in door games, and I was realizing that good mod music could be better found at other places, like ftp.cdrom.com (a mirror for the Hornet Archive, I later discovered). Quasar was a weird initiative of mine. There was really no need to create a separate division of Nucleus software focused on music, but I wanted my own group to lead, so I did. Of course, nobody else really joined. It was probably for the best that I did this on our BBS rather than on the broader internet, since it would be better for it to disappear into obscurity than to fail more publicly. Early in 1997, I discovered Kim’s Mod Page, Modplug Central, and a group named Shattered Fixtures. I decided that my skill level and experience made me a good fit, and applied to join the group. And that would determine my mod music fate for the next two years.

Once 1997 rolled around, R-Squared, Nucleus, Quasar, and the local mod music scene were all in the past for me. I’m fond of that part of my adolescence and all the memories that came from it. I doubt anybody who knew me as Arcturus in 1996 will read this, but if you are one of them, I’m glad you were there.
- arcturus