Uruguayan Gnat Farmer-Arc (arc-ugf.it)

 Composed in November 1996.

My two best friends in high school were Pretzel and The Pro (not their real names, of course, but I’ll just refer to them by their aliases here). Both of them took up tracking to varying levels of success. Pretzel got good and graduated to Fruity Loops (now known as FL Studio) in a couple of years and still composes music today. The Pro never got too far and would either compose typical “I’m trying to figure Scream Tracker out” songs or do very blatant plagiarism to impress us. I’m not talking about just imitating the style of other songs as I tended to do (including this song!) but straight-up just taking other people’s songs and putting his name on them. I remember him doing this with Lavender Hill, Clap Your Hands, and most blasphemously, space_debris. For some reason I never explicitly called him out on this when I discovered his ruse, but he knew that I knew (I think).

This song arose from one of The Pro’s original compositions. It was the second time I wrote a song based on a theme he came up with, the first being Apocalyptic Reprisal (one of my terrible early songs). By this point my skills were much improved. Some time early in our junior year of high school, he came up with a theme for a song that he called the “Uruguayan Gnat Farmer” but never finished the song. I decided to run with it, and even came up with a contest idea for it. The idea was to take The Pro’s theme and turn it into a full song. This was my first - and last - contest that I hosted myself. It wasn’t popular. As it turns out, few people are interested in a contest where they don’t get to choose the tune of their song. Only one other person composed a song for it, another high school friend, and he never sent it to me - he just played it to me over the phone once. So I guess that means I won by default! Yay!

So that leaves me to talk about the song itself. As I alluded earlier, this song is a clear imitation of somebody else’s work, in this case Range of Motion by Pinion. I wasn’t even trying to be subtle with it either - the piano intro, Hammond organs, and intro bassline all use the same samples and it sounds pretty obvious that I’m just trying to make a song that sounds like Range of Motion. After the intro when the main sequence begins (the aforementioned “Uruguayan Gnat Farmer” theme) it sounds more like my own work, though it’s extremely repetitive. I was pretty lazy with the drums, relying mostly on a drum loop sample for the duration of the song. I’m not entirely sure what to call the style of this song - maybe a piano ballad with a mix of demoscene and jazz influences?

Regardless, UGF won’t go down as one of my greatest songs, nor my most original, but it definitely has my weirdest title, and kind of has a story behind how the song came to be.
- arcturus