Performer: Max Tundra
Genre: Electronic / Funk / Soul
Album: Selected Amiga​/​BBC Micro Works 85​-​92
Released: 2015
Style: Abstract, Chiptune, Electro, New Wave
MP3 version ZIP size: 1698 mb
FLAC version RAR size: 1493 mb
WMA version ZIP size: 1848 mb
Rating: 4.2
Votes: 610
Other Formats: AU RA DMF VOC MPC WMA MP1

Tracklist

1	Pellegrino	1:44
2	Progrock	1:27
3	Mode 92	3:03
4	Funnymix	1:18
5	Vogons	1:33
6	Thrashmetal	0:25
7	Every Chart Record	0:33
8	Agifagagi	3:25
9	Bakachika	1:18
10	Sweaty	1:10
11	Landlerscene	2:07
12	Induztrial	1:44
13	Organsolo	2:51
14	EasternDoes	0:45
15	Bodmix	2:15
16	East Feast	0:44
17	Papiergarcon	1:25
18	Bodmix 2	2:21
19	Ghostblasters	1:11
20	Safety Matches	0:44
21	Edit2	2:21
22	Flaming Chair	1:25
23	Benjamin Mountain	1:14

Credits

• Programmed By – Ben Jacobs

Notes

Available from artist's Bandcamp page.
All songs programmed by Ben Jacobs between 1985 and 1992.
This is an album of two halves, entirely recorded during my childhood.

Selected Amiga/BBC Micro Works 85-92 is a curious mix of throwaway song-titles, rave- and videogame-influenced programming and pubescent reimaginings of the musical themes of the time. It is a fascinating precursor to "With Love To Mummy" - the next stepping stone on the path to the subsequent Max Tundra sound - also available here on Bandcamp. It is fairly easy to infer the kind of music I was listening to as a kid, some of which is still buzzing around my head these days.

Tracks 1-13 were created on my old Commodore Amiga 500. Tracks 14-23 were done on a BBC Micro at school. The latter were produced first - from the age of 11 - but I've put them at the end so as not to scare you off.

Tracks 1-13 (Commodore Amiga 500, 1MB):

Programmed using a variety of tracker sequencers, before eventually settling upon Teijo Kinnunen's marvellous Med v2.13, with which I then went on to produce almost everything on my three Domino albums. Not bad for a free floppy disk on the cover of Amiga Format magazine (Issue 31, December 1990).

All sounds via the Amiga 500's Paula sound chip, with four 8-bit PCM-sample-based sound channels and no external instruments as I hadn't rigged the thing up to MIDI yet. Panned centrally and compressed slightly, but otherwise untweaked.

Tracks 14-23 (Acorn BBC Micro Model B, 32k):

Recorded in the computer lab at Alleyn's School in south London, onto a compact cassette tape recorder, the microphone of which was shoved against the tiny external speaker of the BBC Micro, hence the insistent background chatter of eighties schoolchildren.

The "sequencer" was a BBC BASIC program someone had written, which played a bleepy version of "Close (To The Edit)" by The Art Of Noise. The notes and "drum" sounds were represented by a string of letters and numbers in quotation marks after a bunch of complex code. I would sit at my Granny's kitchen table with squared notepaper and a biro, writing out representations of songs which would then replace the letters and numbers in "Close (To The Edit)" so as to reproduce the tune in question.

Bodmix and Bodmix 2 are my first attempts at "megamixes", and are influenced by the "Max Mix" compilations I heard once on a summer holiday in Spain. It is with these two tunes that I really feel I pushed the squared-paper-and-biro working method to its limit.

All sounds created within the constraints of the BBC Micro's inbuilt Texas Instruments SN76489 sound chip, which provides three square-wave tone generators, plus a white-noise generator for approximating drum sounds. Additional sonics are the clunking and hissing of a tape recorder and the aforementioned pupil-based background noise.

Other versions

Category	Artist	Title (Format)	Label	Category	Country	Year
none	Max Tundra	Selected Amiga​/​BBC Micro Works 85​-​92 ‎(23xFile, FLAC, Album)	Not On Label (Max Tundra Self-released)	none	UK	2014
none	Max Tundra	Selected Amiga​/​BBC Micro Works 85​-​92 ‎(23xFile, MP3, Album, VBR)	Not On Label (Max Tundra Self-released)	none	UK	2014