Horizons Below - Arcturus
Wow, I can't believe I actually wrote a song. I didn't think I'd be able
to write them in college, what with my lack of time and very limited
amount of resources. Most of the samples here come from the KFMF Archives
CD. Man oh man I wish I had a synth, then I wouldn't be strapped for
samps :)
This is a fairly generic style, I concur. I tried to counter that by
having some unusual chord progressions, trying to add some flavor to the
song. Does it work? You tell me. I think it works, but then again, I
never notice the flaws until somebody points them out.
Now then, as far as groups go. I've been a member of Shattered Fixtures
over a year and a half now (has it really been that long?) but the group
has long since been out of contact. Not like last February/March, when we
seemed to be coordinating well and getting all the stuff out. I don't
know what happened, but it probably had something to do with Ming starting
her own business. I admit, I was busy too, Operation CWAL began to
consume more of my time than Shattered Fixtures did. Maybe it's because
Operation CWAL has a larger audience, and I'm considered one of the best
in that group (no, it's not tracking, it's writing.) I've given this song
my current filename tag, AS (Arcturus of Shattered fixtures) but the
group, as far as I know, has split off into their own directions. In case
I never said it before guys, thanks for being the great buds you are!
-Arcturus
PS. If this song seems hastily prepared to you, it is. I wanted to get
this one done so I could get back to my other song I'm doing, called
Dayscream. I like it better than this one, but I'm having trouble giving
it some variances...yeesh.
arcmeister_pemail.net
Spruce Guitar
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Horizons Below
by Arcturus
arcmeister_pemail.net
5:16
Completed On:
February 27, 1999
The Good Stuff
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(Unrated)
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Looking back over 20 years after writing this song, I definitely feel pretty fondly about this one. There’s a good chunk of backstory behind it. It was effectively the first song of my final era of tracking. After this and my next three songs, I went abroad on sabbatical and never really returned to making music in earnest - though I did make a few songs after that and could still make more, it’s unlikely I’ll ever get back to making music at the pace that I used to.
Some sad events took place between the completion of this song and the one I completed before it, Indefinite Radiant. The Hornet Archive stopped accepting new uploads in the summer of 1998 which was a major blow to the demoscene. I now felt like I had no place to put my music. I uploaded this song to the Mod Archive instead, but I didn’t upload any other songs to TMA until several years later (a few other people uploaded some of my songs on their own). So, this is my song that has been on the Mod Archive longer than any other (and the only one that was uploaded in the 20th century).
My group, Shattered Fixtures, had drifted apart. This was also sad to me, but not terribly surprising. I think in my comments I unfairly attributed this to one of our members starting a business, but in reality it was more likely caused by the demise of the Hornet Archive. We weren’t the best mod music group by any means, but it was the right group for me, and I’m glad I was a part of it.
I composed this in my first year of college. Though it's hard to believe such a thing was possible nowadays, I did not own a computer, even being a computer science student! In fact, I didn't even own a cell phone! Those were still seen as a luxury owned by rich kids at the time. So, without owning a computer, tracking music was out of the question. I probably attempted to do some composing in the lab, but that just didn’t work out. This was why there was such a long gap between Indefinite Radiant and this one.
In early 1999, I found myself with the ability to compose music again. I switched rooms in my apartment. My previous roommate, the loud snorer, had a friend moving in and wanted to share rooms with him. So I lived with a different roommate, who was kind of a slob, but he had a computer which he let me use. So, I installed Impulse Tracker, put all the instruments from my Kosmic CD-ROM onto the hard drive, and got started. I would ultimately compose three songs on his PC: this one, Ascension, and Dayscream. A fourth song, Pray For Rain, came after the semester had ended, but I made it at my parents’ house.
I made a conscious decision with this song to avoid taking samples directly from other songs, and exclusively used samples from the Kosmic CD that I had purchased. This was a bit tricky for me, because I didn't know how any of these samples actually sounded in a song. I also tried to do something a bit more original without trying to imitate somebody else's song. So in a way, Horizons Below ended up being one of my most original works. And it's true, for a lot of my other songs at the time, I can listen to and think "Oh, I was just trying to do my best Purple Motion or Necros impression" or whoever it was I was imitating at the time, but not for this one. This song was 100% Arcturus.
Consequently, this song also took me longer to write than others - I spent well over a month on this one. I could also attribute that to being busy in school, of course.
So, on the whole, while I was kind of a nobody in the demoscene and in the tracker community, this is a song that I'm proud of. I’ve done better work in other songs, but I’m proud that I was able to come up with something original, and in circumstances that weren’t exactly ideal for making music.
- arcturus