Commodore 64 platform

As Vibrants was present on the Commodore 64 and later the PC this – is a two-parter – and this is part I.

Now

One of the main characteristics of Vibrants (or features, if you’d like), are the members. Most demo groups consists of a coder, musician, graphic artist, hacker, cracker, supplier, swapper, organizer, importer, sysop, webmaster (later). BUT for Vibrants, all members are musicians.

Also, this is a group that had multiple music editors at their disposal and of course created by the members themselves, but as time progressed, the main editor they’ve used was the editor by JCH/Chordian.

But first

Before we dive into the good stuff, I will mention that I haven’t heard any of these original tracks “back then”, as I never had a Commodore 64 myself. This means that I don’t have a “Totally best of” or “All time greatest hits” for any of these members.

But instead, I’ll look into my stash of downloaded file that was acquired many years back and select my 5 tracks, or I will look at the “Greatest hits” lists by Chordian, and do my picking from here.

But, not having a Commodore 64 doesn’t mean that I haven’t heard any of their music.

Now, lets begin …

Drax

Real name: Thomas Mogensen (Thomas Laurits Vedel Mogensen). One of my favorite Vibrants musicians. Below is two of my all time favorite Drax tracks – and even “growing” up with the AdLib versions, I do enjoy the original versions very much, also.

The tracks (above) can also be found on the Vibrants (PC) page as AdLib tunes, so these are only for comparison (original/conversion). And the same goes for the three tracks below (original/conversion).

These are my 5 picks from Drax. I’ve deliberately included Crooner once again, as this is another version of the tune (a more tight and electric/sticky bass).

Future Freak

Future Freak is in real life known as Kim Christensen and maybe the least productive member, with only around 20 releases.

But I was still able to find these 5 picks from Future Freak.

JCH/Chordian

JCH a.k.a Chordian, is of course none other that Jens-Christian Huus. Let me start by saying that I’ve only meet Jens once. It was at his parents house, sometime in the 1990’s. I was there together with Lars, Peter A, Peter J. and we talked music editor stuff and heard a lot of different tunes.

Maybe, we also gave him our PIS: Generator Amiga demo, as Jens had way more contacts than we had.

After the visit, we went home and then implemented some of the different score-effects, Jens had in his Commodore 64 editor into our Music Editor on the Commodore Amiga (e.g. Master volume).

Not keeping up with any Vibrant members, I was surprised to find a fairly new track from JCH, made in 2017 – his first in 25 years – and it is actually not bad.

Joss

Joss, best known as Johannes Bjerregaard and considered one of the most brilliant Commodore 64 composers of all time. During my search for his music, I wasn’t all that lucky when searching for his handle ‘Joss’, so he may only have used his real name when signing his tunes.

I believe that I once read that Johannes Bjerregaard wasn’t all that interested in composing and spreading his own music, but was very keen on doing remakes/covers of popular music from the radio, so there might be a lot of Johannes Bjerregaard music, that never will be shared with the public, hidden away on some floppy disks, somewhere.

I still managed to get my 5 picks of Joss/Johannes Bjerregaard.

Johannes Bjerregaard may be best know for his often jazz-type music style and in my search I found 4 tracks named ‘Jazz‘ but even though not being a huge fan of Jazz music, I still find these tracks interesting.

Laxity

This is Thomas Egeskov Petersen. On the Commodore 64, Laxity was a very productive composer with a very versatile music style. My all time favorite track is still “The alibi” as this has a awesome “feel” to it.

I’m almost ashamed to say, th748at I think I like the Commodore 64 version a little bit better than the AdLib version. It is in particular the A-piece, I like.

Many years back, I downloaded some tracks by Laxity, all starting with “D” and from that selection I picked these 5 tracks.

Link

Klaus Engell Grøngaard and yet another awesome composer from Vibrants. I really like the variety in these tracks. These are all selected from “Link’s greatest hits” by Chordian. I’ve selected my 5 tracks from that list in alphabetical order.

I recommend you to take a look at the “Link’s greatest hits” by Chordian, as there are many great tracks I had to scrap to get my 5 picks.

Metal

Torben Korgaard Hansen is also known as Metal from Vibrants (and others). As I couldn’t find a “Metal’s greatest” by Chordian, I had to look for tunes myself and I of course used DeepSID for this, as I didn’t have any downloaded SID sources from Metal.

This is my 5 picks from Metal.

After selecting my 5 tracks, I had two tunes left ,that still intrigued me.

Therefore, I added them to a new list (below), under the category “Interesting” as they both are somewhat odd but still fairly okay tunes.

Observation, during my processing and selection of tracks from Metal, I saw more complete tunes than from the other members and also another funny thing; Many of Metal’s tracks actually ends – and not just loops.

Source of inspiration and material: csdb.dk, HVSC , VGMPF Chordian.net & DemoZoo