Next on our artist spotlight series we caught up with Anders Carlsson from Sweden, more known as GOTO80 on the music scene. He shares our background from the demoscene, with releases dating back as far as 1993. He’s not only a musician but also a research historian of sorts on all things textmode and 8bit. In 2008 we put out a music disk of his ownership on Enough Records, titled Open Funk Sores, featuring animation graphics by Raquel Meyers. Was originally released not only as .mp3 but also under the oldschool original .mod format and it’s own homebrew interface built for the Playstation Portable, later also ported to HTML5, Android and iOS.
Hi Anders, how you doing? Was my description of you somehow accurate?
Yes, I think that covers most of it. Could also add that I’ve been getting more involved in art projects the past years, but mostly with making music anyway.
Are you a musician full-time nowdays? Have you been able to make a living out of it?
I did make a living from mostly music for about two years, but it was pretty exhausting and sort of sucked the fun out of it for me. It’s not for everyone. Having said that, I think it’s super interesting to think about music economy these days when almost everyone is complaining about the current situation.
What’s your current setup for producing new music?
I often start with recording a live jam that I do on the C64, edit it, and add stuff with Renoise. It’s a pretty nice way of working, since you get to combine improvisation & this oldschool super-detailed tracking style. Works pretty well for me, and I’ve done songs like this for a couple of releases now. When I don’t do it like that I also combine Renoise+Ableton Live and also do things only on Amiga or C64. I’ve been getting back to the Amiga actually, and my next album on Data Airlines will contain some of that. It’s very inspired by early Protracker music, but with a modern & weird twist.
How does it differ from your live setup? Please tell us about your experience playing live.
My standard setup has been basically laptop+C64 for many years, but I’m trying to take the laptop out of it. I’m kind of bored with it. It’s a bit complicated to find the mix between pleasing the crowd with lots of pre-made material, and pleasing yourself with lots of improvisation. I’ve made many performances where I just start the C64 right in front of the audience and make a jam from scratch. Totally improvised, with not even instruments prepared. See for example:
But obviously that requires the right setting. For more clubby settings, I’ve tried with a full backtrack recorded on Minidisc, and then jam/sing on top of it. Kind of works alright, but… yeah… Minidisc is not the ultimate solution, believe it or not.
I know you have a big obsession with all forms of textmode, not just the more traditional ascii and ansi infofile culture but also C64 PETSCII, teletext, old printer art, etc. Can you tell us a little more of where that fascination comes from and how you been using it with your artistic work?
Growing up, I was fed with text mode graphics in games, BBSs, demos and stuff. I also ran my own BBS and made some Amiga ASCII art attempts. Then I’ve used it occassionally in demos and art projects, but it wasn’t until the past years that I really got into it. 2SLEEP1 was the first release of this wave, where me & Raquel Meyers started to explore the potential of text mode for live performance. Just like with tracker music software (which is often in text mode), text mode software is not really designed for it. Nevertheless, there’s tons of unexplored potential for e.g VJ:ing with text characters instead of pixels. We couldn’t really find any coders who were interested in this though.
PETSCII was the next step, and we did experiments with the old Letter Noperator software, mixing it together with the screen of the C64-tracker (which can also be seen in 2SLEEP1). The idea here was to really make the music interface come together with the graphics. The story melts together with the tools. It was also at this time we started text-mode.tumblr.com to gather images of text graphics in a wide range of disciplines, going back thousands of years to textile & stone carvings and things like that. But yeah, we basically wanted to make a well-curated archive of text graphics, because there wasn’t any.
Teletext is perhaps the most obscure medium we’ve used. After months of searching, we found a way to perform with teletext. Peter Kwan, an old teletext engineer, had made a hardware/software solution to do this. This meant that we didn’t need to have a videomixer anymore, since we could just overlay teletext on any video signal. The only problem was that no beamer supports teletext, so we had to film the screen of the TV… That’s the price you have to pay for using a medium that is nearly unrecordable, despite being data. It’s a broadcast technology and has not really been used by artists and hackers and stuff before. But we managed to do for example Mind the Volcano at Transmediale, and Datagården at Bonniers Konsthall.
But apart from this conceptual interest, we wanted to tell stories with good-looking graphics. We still wanted to make quality stuff, even if the technology in itself might be enough to peak the interest of journalists and curators and stuff. We did a musical together with Uwe Schenk and his jazz band in Stuttgart. Raquel made animated PETSCII-stories to songs that I made and Uwe re-arranged for the band. This was a very exciting project, and I doubt anyone’s ever made anything like that. :)
I think that text mode graphics really has a future. Text mode aesthetics is everywhere, not just on computer screens but in architecture, fashion and design. For example, I could imagine that web design could use more font-based design in the future, since Unicode and the supply of graphical symbols is getting pretty well-established.
You also curate your own label chipflip. Can you tell us a little about the concept behind it?
Chipflip doesn’t necessarily release new music, but music that should be released. I also try to follow the tradition of music disks rather than records. You know, not just release a bunch of MP3s and a JPG “cover image”. And not sell it and put licenses on it. But I haven’t had much time to maintain it, so I suppose it works more as a once-in-a-while thing. There is a very exciting music disk in the pipe though. Hopefully we can get that out this year. Or maybe next… hehe.
How do you feel about the current state of the netaudio scene? Do you think it’s still holding it’s importance in bringing in more listeners to niche music or are new platforms like bandcamp and soundcloud replacing the netlabel curation role?
I have to admit that I don’t follow it very much. I don’t really follow music much at all :) I have a feeling that music isn’t as exciting and important as it used to be, and I don’t seem to be the only one who feels this way. It’s become kind of interchangeable. I think David Bowie said that it’s like water running from the tap. Where there’s running water, there’s also a myriad of music streams. And if you can’t access one of them, you just choose another one. Not such a big deal. Some people say it’s easier than ever to find new music, which is technically true, but practically speaking it’s harder than ever. It’s a spam freedom.
So there’s a re-evaluation of the value of music. And of course that also relates to money. I’ve personally re-considered my previous view that everything should be free, since it makes it really hard for the composers who are trying to do this for a living. The same thing goes for all those “creative” fields, because there’s always some 21-year-old who’s willing to do the work for free because it’s “good promotion”. It’s not exactly a good situation.
I encourage anything that steers music away from the mafia-like music industry that gains the 1% and I’ve got a few experiments in the pipe…
Can you tell us a little about your most recent release?
I released a CD when I went to Russia. It’s called cйbзя tсaя and I do all of the production & distribution myself (with design by Raquel Meyers). That means that you don’t have to support some global music industry to buy it. I’m quite satisfied with the release, and someone told me it’s my best yet. Which is nice. And I don’t mind that it’s not online for everyone to have it. Hell, I even made an album called * that was only available in a wall. :)
Next up is a cassette on Data Airlines which will actually be available on iTunes/Spotify and all that too. I wanted to try it out, since I haven’t done that for a long time. With my text mode fetish I tried to make some very odd file names, but it seems like atleast iTunes don’t support the UTF-8 tricks that I did. Database danger!
I think i’m out of questions. Anything else you’d like to add? Can we hope for a new GOTO80 release on Enough down the line?
That would be nice. Especially with some interactive music disky gamey kind of weirdness. Open Funk Sores ftw, hehe. Next big project for me is to set a world record, actually, but I’ll get back to you guys when I’ve done that…