Cellular Magnetic (arc-cell.s3m)

 I composed this song probably in June/July 1996. There is no real significance to the title.

Reading my teenage comments on this when I thought I was being clever is, in retrospect, really embarrassing. As is the song itself, but I'll get to that in a bit (hint: it's bad).

This was (probably) the first song I released under the "Nucleus Software" label. If you've never heard of Nucleus, there is a reason for that: It was a tiny group of teenagers who were looking for some kind of creative outlet for their coding / artistic works. This was all entirely organized on a local bulletin board system called R-Squared. So it was basically a few teenagers in the Olympia, Washington area trying to do computer stuff.

I don't think I knew at the time that this was going to be released under Nucleus Software, and it was retroactively added to their "catalog." In fact, I think most of my Nucleus songs were done that way.

As for the music: I had originally written in this space that this song isn't great, but it's not my worst. That comment, however, was based on my memory of the song without having listened to it recently. So a few days later I actually listened to it (probably for the first time since the 90's).

It actually is my worst song. No question. Even Calm and Enigma are better than this.

The song itself has a main hook on a hard synth sample, which was written by, uh, randomly pounding out notes on the keyboard. Yes, seriously. I couldn't think of what to write and so I just randomly pressed keys and voila, a 16-row sequence of notes came out that I found compelling enough to write a song about.

The problem is that everything in this song is so loud and dissonant, that it just ends up being a big, unlistenable mess. I don't know what I was thinking.

The only vaguely positive thing I can say about this song is that I was starting to get an idea about percussion and what made it sound interesting, but obviously I didn't quite get it yet.

So heed the warning of the "Danger! Danger!" sample and proceed no further when you hear this song start to play. Unless you're a glutton for punishment or you are doing some kind of mod music history project and want to find an example of poorly done music. If you want to listen to a decent song of mine listen to Gravity or Indefinite Radiant or Pray for Rain or something. - arcturus