My first direct contact with the band was in 1995, when I first had access to the internet while I was still at PUC-RIO. Initially, I started talking to Kurt regularly via email, and I would inundate him with questions, mostly technical, mainly about stage instruments and everything else related to his music.
I have always studied electronic music on my own, and I was fascinated by music in this style, from big names in music like Information Society, of which I am a big fan, to music from games, and initially from MSX, which had fascinated me since I was a child.
In Brazil, it was extremely complicated to learn about this, firstly because no one here knew much about it, and then there was the language barrier, because at the time my English was terrible, and there was simply no quality material in Portuguese. And of course, the biggest barrier of all, the financial one, synthesizers and computers for music were extremely expensive, especially for a poor kid from a third world country.
I had many private lessons with the great Professor Luiz Costa Netto, who happened to be a friend of my mother and taught me everything he knew about MIDI, where he was an ambassador here in Brazil, and one of the most knowledgeable. But despite knowing everything about music and music theory and knowing MIDI very well, he didn’t have the knowledge I was looking for, which at the time, very few in the world knew in depth.
Kurt was always very attentive to me, and had the patience to explain many things to me in detail that I had never had access to before. Like all professional musicians, he worked with MIDI, and I tried to adapt everything he taught me to the world of Tracked Music, because it was the only way I could produce my music at home at the lowest possible cost, without having a professional keyboard or synthesizer, a requirement for making music with acceptable quality at that time, when there were no virtual instruments or machines capable of processing all of this that were accessible to me.
Kurt was certainly my greatest mentor in music, and studying his work at the Information Society alongside Paul and listening to his tips and explanations, opened my mind and especially my ears, in the way I listened to and produced my music. It was the first step in everything.
So in 1995, my knowledge of synthpop music production took a huge leap in quality, I was able to perceive things that I had not noticed before. I used to send Kurt a review of each new track I produced, and I took seriously every criticism and input he gave me, as did Paul, James, Will, Murat and other great musicians whose work I admired and whom I got to know online over the years. And so I developed and grew within the field.
This year was very productive, I studied a lot in my musical education, producing dozens of tracks, and as part of this learning, I started to study “Running” by Information Society very deeply, which despite the low quality of my equipment at the time, focused on the programming itself, not caring much about the quality of the samples, because I knew that all I had to do was change them to improve their quality.
My first “work” with InSocwas actually a kind of for fun track back in 1995, when Kurt made available on his newly created website all the Samples he used on the Information Society albums. From that I made the “InSoc Dream” in XM (eXtended Module), which I made available on my website for download. Kurt participated in a chat via mIRC once a week, and the InSoc Dream became the topic of conversation with very positive feedback from everyone.
The years went by, and in 1998 the InSoc Internet Tribute Album was started, which was a project that started in the old #insoc chat room created by Kurt himself, which spread through the Newsgroup and ended up reaching interested fans all over the world, and had Kurt‘s full support.
I decided to participate with a version of “Repetition” with Isaon vocals, which, although it was really cool, was far from professional quality, due to the very low quality of my equipment. The microphone used was the one that came in the Sound Blaster multimedia kit that a friend had lent me, to give you an idea of how poor the production was.
So I also released “InSoc Dream ’98” with much higher quality and much darker than the previous one, earning a lot of praise from both fans and Kurt. At this point, the version of “Running“ that I had been using to study since 1995 was already on another level, with very good programming, and incorporating a bit of my vision of the song. That was when, in 1999, Michael from the American band Synthetic Conspiracy heard it and asked permission to work together on my programming, and I believe that the final result was truly incredible, remembering that at that time it was very difficult to have professional quality without being in a professional studio with very expensive equipment.
Information Society was really the ground zero in my career as a music producer. It was through studying their work and their “family tree” that I learned a lot, and it formed a solid foundation for my learning. Since then, I have maintained a long-standing friendship with all the members, doing countless jobs over the years, of the most diverse kind, from audio and video restoration, compilations, the band’s first Brazilian website, and later collaborating a lot with both their official websites, both the American and Brazilian ones. I did a bit of everything, from Aphex Music to even finding places to play or even participating in events or as a DJ.
In restoration alone, there were more than 30 jobs. I believe the most difficult was back in the 90s from a show in Taubaté, when I had to mix and synchronize the video that had been recorded for playback on the big screen at one of their shows, which had no sound, with the sound of a cassette tape recorded from the audience. This was done without a professional editing desk, without computers, without digitalization. It was extremely laborious, but the result was very satisfactory. It was a project that started out completely informally on my own, and over the years, all the members and former members approached me at some point, and then I got Paul‘s approval, who commissioned me to do a huge amount of stuff.
In 2006, Paulinvited me to remix the song “Burning Bridges” with Christopher Anton‘s vocals. It was one of my best works and was highly praised by all the members, and it was only published on MySpace, becoming their most listened track at the time. I even produced a music video for it, and after Chris went solo, he asked me to use it in his live performances, a version that he still plays today.
Above is the radio version that was released on the band’s official MySpace, but the original remix was kept for many years, as it used old samples and to avoid problems they asked to make another version without them. I finished this other music video with the original mix at the same week that Sonja left us, and I ended up dedicating it to her.
Looking back now at writing my website, I realize that I had really great mentors in both music and gaming, where I would pester John Romero and Gooseman (and many others) on the forums to learn as much as I could about developing FPS games, while in music I did the same with Paul and Kurt from Information Society.