Inclined (arc-inclined.s3m)

 Composed in August 1996.

So my brief comments on this song suggested that it was the best track I had ever written, which was true at the time! This song was clearly better than any of my other work up to this point, and I was rather happy about that. It wouldn’t measure up as well later on of course, but at the time I felt pretty good about it, like a kid learning to balance a bike successfully.

As I’ve mentioned before, there were multiple other teenagers in my town who also made mod music (most of which were uploaded to our favorite local BBS, R-Squared), but there were two in particular who inspired me to get into it myself. One was Kalanaras, who I talked about in Echo's Call Remix. The other was Subliminal. He was clearly the most talented of the local trackers. When I first downloaded MOD4WIN, I downloaded a handful of songs from R-Squared to play on it. One that I really, really got into was called Ditty by Subliminal. I couldn’t stop listening to it. It was probably my earliest favorite mod.

Later, after I had gotten a few songs under my belt, I got to work on a rock-style song using percussion samples from Ditty, and guitar samples from a different Subliminal song, Burning <8:15> Subliminal.

The song is a two-parter, which is something I did a lot back in the day. When I ran out of ideas for a song but it was too short to call done, I would just change the tempo and key. So Inclined starts with a slower guitar intro, but then speeds up and plays a different melody. The slower part at the intro was inspired by the beginning of Bruce Springsteen’s song “Dead Man Walkin” which I heard while watching the Oscars in March of that year (it had been nominated for Best Song, but lost to Pocahontas “Colors of the Wind”). The faster melody, which makes up the bulk of my song, was most definitely styled after Ditty.

On the whole I think I achieved the rock sound that I was looking for, but I really stretched the guitar riff sample beyond its limits, especially later in the song. Maybe a kick drum would have been nice to round out the sound a bit.

I never met Subliminal in person but we did correspond somewhat on R-Squared and maybe via email later on. We had a few real-life mutual acquaintances (I heard stories about him from some of my theater friends). He was probably the only mod music composer from our area who kind of made a name for himself in the broader demoscene.

As for the title, like many teenagers, I had imagined being in a rock band and had come up with some potential band names if that ever happened (it didn’t.) One of them was “Inclined.” I figured I would use that as a rock song title since it was unlikely at that point that I would ever be in a band (my older sister was briefly lead singer of a band named “Ennui” which of course never really went anywhere). At least one other band name I came up with was “Stone Pillow.” These names were kind of lame, of course, which is why nowadays when I talk about rock music I’m always sure to mention my punk band “The Snot Rockets.”
- arcturus