Zustand Vortrefflichkeit (zustand_vortrefflichkeit.s3m)

 Completed in May 1997.

I don’t usually start with comments about the title, but I will in this case. I didn’t initially have a title for this song and I wasn’t quite sure what to call it. Some of my friends, more than likely with The Pro as their ringleader, demanded I create a song with the title “Clowns Aren’t People.” So that was the working title for this one. Before release, I named it something else because I didn’t like that title. I was taking German classes and decided to give it a German name. I wanted to name it something like “Achieve Excellence” so I looked up the word “achieve” in a dictionary. I’m not sure how I got to “Zustand” since that’s not a German imperative. It’s the past tense of the verb “zustehen” which means something more like “to be entitled.” “Vortrefflichkeit” I think is technically a word for excellence but I don’t know if it’s actually used by anybody. The title probably translates to something like “state of excellence.” A title for what I was going for may have been “Erreich Exzellenz” but maybe I should have just kept it in English - or stuck with “Clowns Aren’t People.”

This song was notable as my final song in S3M format. Why was it in S3M format? I have no idea. I had been doing mostly IT format for months by this point. My penultimate S3M - Gymkata - Camelot's Theme - was in that format because my friends needed to be able to play it for their project and they didn’t have an IT player. I had no such excuse for this song. Since my friends were involved in the title discussions maybe I wanted to give them a copy they could play? That’s a plausible explanation, the only other one I can think of is that maybe I had started this song before I had switched over to IT format. That’s not impossible, but it seems unlikely, since that means it would have taken me at least six months to finish and I didn’t take that long in those days. One other possibility was that I had simply decided to do an S3M because I felt like doing it, and with no other justification.

As to the song itself: it’s built on a driving beat rhythm and a sequence of a simple set of filtered sawtooth pads at varying levels of resonance. I referred to this style as “acid” but truth be told I don’t think I really understood what that genre of electronic music meant at the time (come to think of it, I still probably don’t - is it even a real thing?). I also used a lead sample I had been using for some time, a looped guitar-like sample that I had first used in CP/DP. This was possibly the last time I used it. It has an almost intolerably bad loop, but I had no means of fixing that at the time. The chord pads I had used before in Flight Through the Clouds, and I would use them again later in Solitude. I don’t recall where I got them from, but nowadays I most associate them with Siren’s excellent song Merciful Lie.

This song holds up better than I remember. From a pure musical perspective, it’s nothing special, but from the perspective of my development as a mod musician it had a surprisingly solid construction. The percussion holds together well, I keep it reasonably interesting throughout, and I don’t fall into the repetition trap quite as much. So while at the time I didn’t really think of this song as anything particularly great, in retrospect I think it was better than most of what I had put together by this point.

And, just so we’re clear: Yes, clowns are people.
- arcturus