Albums of Influence: Amber by Chill Productions

1998

In 1998, my life was in a strange and uncertain place.

The original cover image for Amber by Chill Productions, 1998

The music industry was rapidly changing due to the sudden rise in home studios (enabled by high-quality, low-cost mixers from Mackie and affordable digital tape recorders from Alesis and Tascam). Tastes were veering from early-90s grunge and pop towards the next big thing: electronica. Napster would release a year later and set the whole thing on fire.

The internet was also starting to enter wider public consciousness. I had ISDN at home, delivering a whopping 128 kbps connection, which was lightning-fast compared to the 28.8 kbps dial-up I could get at work.

I didn't have a band or regularly active music project, and was trying to figure out what exactly I was going to do, both in the music business and for a job. My work by this point was fairly uninteresting and trivial. I had a lot of free time, and spent much of my day exploring FTP sites dedicated to trading MOD files.

MOD files dated back to the late 80s and Amiga computers. The files consisted of a blob of samples with instructions for how those samples were to be played, similar to a MIDI file. It's analogous to a text document with the fonts embedded at the end. As a music file format that were highly efficient and well-suited for electronic music. A 5 minute song might only be 64k, and thus easy to upload or download over a dial-up modem.

Even better, MOD files could be opened and edited. The same software used for playing them back was also used for creating them, which meant that you could easily remix or modify other people's work, rip out the samples and sounds for your own use, and learn how people had created their pieces. It also made collaboration easy.

The software you used to create these MOD files was called a "tracker", and many of them were free. Here was a truly revolutionary new music business: All you needed was a computer (not even a very powerful one!), and you could be making electronic music and sharing it with the world.

Trackers were also a very different way to make music. Trackers look like giant spreadsheets, and instead of thinking about notes on a staff, you indicate when in time you want a sample to play, and at what pitch and volume. All these and other parameters are input by literally typing numbers into the spreadsheet grid. If a digital audio workstation program like Cubase or Pro Tools was music software with a GUI, trackers were like making music with a command line or assembly language.

As noted, you had to use a tracker (or, later, a Winamp plug-in, though these were frowned upon as poor emulations) to play back MOD files. That also meant you had to be at your computer to listen. In 1998, that was unacceptable for me, so I hooked up my cassette deck to my computer's line out and made several compilation cassettes of my favorite MODs, with titles like "I aM 31337, gIv3 mE wArEz, d00d!".

Cyberspace's Local Music Scene

A small but rich, complex, and devoted community had formed around this file format. The artists all hid behind handles and the complete anonymity of the early internet, with names like "B00mer" and "Maelcum". It was like a local music scene from William Gibson's cyberspace.

As is often the case, young people were the driving force behind this music scene. Many of the MOD artists were teenagers, who wanted "real gear" -- a synthesizer, drum machine, or guitar -- but who wouldn't let that hold them back and would use a computer and free (or pirated) software instead.

Granted, like a lot of local music scenes driven by young people, much of the music was neither good nor interesting. There was a lot of fast techno and generic house, undistinguished and derivative. But there was so much, coming from kids/musicians/artists all over the world.

The scene included sites, groups, artists, and "labels", and of course, critics and fans. Some blurred the lines -- a popular site might be run by a group of artists clustered around a particular style, vibe or sound. Tokyo Dawn, for example, seemed to focus on a kind of jazzy downtempo. Legendary site Kosmic Free Music Foundation was more electronica-based.

My favorite group was Chill (later known as Chill Productions). They had an unknown number of members. They covered far more varied musical territory than most. And in 1998, shortly after it was released, I discovered their second "disk" or compilation of pieces from their group, "Amber".

Sprawling across 24 tracks and featuring contributions from a number of "guests" (including Kosmic.org founder Maelcum), the album took only a few minutes to download and played for more than 90 minutes. I didn't (and still don't) love everything on it, but there were a few pieces that I immediately found outstanding, moving, and surprising.

Vildauget and TEG's "Deus Ex" is a beautiful ambient electronic melody (written as an homage to John Taite, the founder of Chill, and their friend) that gently floats and bounces along, and is one of those pieces I love so much I have to restrain myself from playing it to death. kjwise's "Black Desert of Freedom" is a downtempo ride across Iceland's volcanic plains. In_Tense surprises everyone with "Piano", which is, somehow, a beautiful rubato piano improvisation that drifts through classical forms, and demonstrates how MOD files, when programmed creatively, could handle more than electronica.

The rest of the album shifts between uptempo electronica, acid-ish beats, downtempo grooves, and ambient beauty and strangeness. I think it is a good representation of Chill (and to some extent, the MOD/tracker scene) at its peak.

My favorites all still live on my phone, in my car, and on my computer as MP3s.

A Different Kind of Influence

"Amber" was not a big musical influence. It delivered something in line with what I thought contemporary electronic music sounded like in the late 90s. As noted, I loved (and still love) many of the tracks on it. You may not. But "Amber" turned out to be profoundly influential in other and surprising ways.

For one thing, it made me realize this "underground" internet scene was far more interesting, cool, exciting, and of the moment than anything happening in the "real" Los Angeles music scene. More than that, "Amber" and the scene it represented felt like the future, where music could, should, or must go: the internet.

I ended up joining Chill. I emailed the group and sent some samples of my work. I unfortunately never released as many tracks as I wanted under my "Captain Kirk" ambient alias, but being so quickly accepted by a group of such remarkable musicians was validating at a time when I needed it. I (literally) repaid the favor by helping keep the metaphorical lights on a few years later.

"Amber" was a turning point for me realizing something about both DIY and the music business. Just a year before, I had spent nearly $2K to create a thousand copies of a compact disc of "Songs For The Last Man On Earth". I couldn't get any stores to take it, couldn't promote it, couldn't distribute it. That is why 20 years later, I still have copies of gathering dust in my garage (well, it also wasn't very good).

"Amber" pointed out how purely digital music, divorced from any physical media, was the future of distribution and consumption. CDs were obviously inefficient, outdated, and useless for kids whose lives were going to revolve around computers (especially when those computers shrunk to the size of a phone a few years later!). This helped plant the seeds for my big second act, including Rhapsody and the digital music revolution. In fact, when we were prototyping Rhapsody, I emailed the Chill group about it to get their read. Most of them thought it was a terrible idea that would never work. We still haven't decided if they were right nor not. But I see a direct line from the FTP sites that hosted MODs for people to download and what became the initial concept for a "music subscription service".

Several of the Chillies have become close personal friends. In_Tense, of "Piano" fame, in particular. We have collaborated on a number of projects, both musical and extra-musical. He played in Sid Luscious and The Pants. I attended his wedding.

kjwise acted as tour guide me and my wife when we chose Iceland for our honeymoon, and we have managed to see each other every so often since then (including just a few months ago), and collaborated on a few musical projects together. 

U-235 and I (as Sid Luscious) are in the final stages of finishing up what most people say is the best thing I've ever done. I've known him for 20 years and still haven't met him in person!

I have had the pleasure of meeting many of the core members of Chill over the years. Quasimojo (the funniest Chill member). MN-L/MattV (who made some of the weirdest music). b0b. I may be forgetting a few. We keep talking about a Chill meet-up but it keeps not happening. Maybe next year?

Artwork for the 2013 remastered re-release of Amber

"Amber" also confirmed for me the computer was going to become the centerpiece of everyone's studio. Not just as a replacement for a tape recorder, but as the whole studio. As computers have continued to improve their speed and capability, new instruments and platforms have developed to enable this. And as we transition to phones, so has the industry started to move real music creation tools to our phones and tablets.

Not all influential albums in your life have to make a critic's top whatever list. The best and most satisfying art discoveries are the ones where you feel like you've stumbled across something that almost no one else knows about.

Thank you for the music and so much more, Chill.

Epilogue: The End of an Era

Not long after "Amber" was released, the MP3 file format began to break out in a big way, and many of the MOD scene artists shifted to releasing studio recordings in MP3, either because they were frustrated with the limitations of the MOD format, excited about the benefits of releasing final audio rather than a file, or because they wanted to use studio gear and not just samples on a computer.

The scene had many discussions about what to do, but they all knew it was just a matter of time before MP3 won. Sure enough, within a few years all of the biggest labels had started to release MP3s, not MODs. Kids who didn't have big studio setups were left out, and the explosion of Napster just a year later made MP3 a household word. MODs -- and their accompanying scene -- were effectively dead.

Some of the net labels -- including Chill and Tokyo Dawn -- made the transition to being "internet labels", releasing MP3s rather than MODs. Most just stopped releasing.

Chill slowed down. The members (many of whom were teenagers when I joined) got jobs, got married, got divorced, got mortgages, and so on. Some disappeared. Most have continued to make music with some regularity, and all of them have improved as musicians. None of us make MOD files anymore.

The rise of new music platforms like Spotify and Soundcloud also means that destination websites like Chill, Tokyo Dawn, and Kosmic don't make sense for the general public. Chill still has a website, but some of the links don't work, and besides, you don't have a MOD player. You can, however, hear our music on Spotify or on Soundcloud, and buy it at iTunes if you like.

You can hear thousands of MODs from the scene's heyday at The MOD Archive. Some of my favorites are up there, including:

"Un (extended)" by B00MER
"Leeloo" by Falcon
"Life After Midnight" by A-Move

Just click the links and choose "Play with Online Player" under the heading "The Good Stuff"