Haitus Maximus
This is hardly news-worthy by anybody’s standards, but here’s me saying I’m taking an indefinite breather from doing live Syphus performances. Yes, I know it’s not like I’m kicking out the keytar jams 24/7 anyway, but my whole routine has sleepwalked into stagnation a bit, and I can’t find the time or head-space to evolve it. And besides, I’m something of a traditionalist and I don’t desperately want to contrive an evolution of my live chip-style outlet when it probably doesn’t need one. Why force it?
It started in my bedroom, on grey Sunday afternoons with ProTracker, then years later it coincidentally happened to become popular in the ‘real’ world and I had a great deal of fun playing it live; improvising; reinterpreting it for fresh audiences. So I guess now it’s going back into the Sunday-afternoon/bedroom domain, where it belongs and where I get the most enjoyment out of it.
I’ll still be making occasional Amiga tunes and working on demoscene productions, but I plan to focus on getting back to composing fully-sequenced music, expanding on the bits and pieces of games music writing I’ve been doing lately and generally driving myself forward rather than treading water. Maybe I’ll even get the swathes of unreleased tunes released, and unfinished tunes finished.
This isn’t some sort of tearful goodbye, and I’m not conceited enough to think that anybody should give a toss, but I do want to say that I’ve:
- met some cool people
- played some cool gigs with some cool people
- seen a few more crevices of the world than I might otherwise have done
- had my grumpy sourpuss old mind opened up to some things beyond the scope of the demoscene
- opened some other minds up to things within the scope of the demoscene
- had my Blip Festival visuals done by The C-Men
- got shitfaced with Firebrand Boy
- got lost in Manhattan with Trash80
- been attacked by a London gang, along with Minusbaby, Starscream and Nullsleep
- watched Nullsleep literally headbutt his way out of the situation
- driven a tour bus at 90mph whilst technically and medically asleep
- been part of some triumphant organisational successes (and some triumphant organisational failures)
- watched a hooker give a copper a blowjob in a Newport carpark whilst our audience were being arrested and loaded into a paddywagon across the road
- taught USK all conventional English swearwords, plus a few custom ones of my own devising
and much, much more. So, y’know, things could have been a lot worse ;)
December 23rd, 2009 at 1:35 am
“…been attacked by a London gang, along with Minusbaby, Starscream and Nullsleep [and]
watched Nullsleep literally headbutt his way out of the situation.”
That sounds, so, so epic…
December 23rd, 2009 at 1:43 am
This is sad sad news for me, only listened to your stuff for two years or so but you opened me up to a new side to chipmusic which i was blissfully unaware of at the time. I wish you all the best for any future projects and I hope to see you in 2014 when you make some kind of sabrepulse-esk return ;)
December 23rd, 2009 at 12:56 pm
Battle Lava – fairly epic, yeah :) We all escaped a stabbing, thankfully.
Joseph – cheers! New Syphus tunes will still keep coming, mind – probably no less frequently than they currently do ;)
January 3rd, 2010 at 6:21 pm
Wow, some of those events which occurred sound unreal man.
The best to whatever project you move onto to next, maybe when events come back together we can host the overdue ‘chip-disco’ night at a another time/place in future :)
January 13th, 2010 at 12:43 pm
that newport one brings back some vivid memories!