Awww, my first-ever album. (Cuddly feeling.) It does sound a tad dated now, but I’m still proud of Bliss (track 9), which I think is, by far, my best song ever. My remix of Maelcum’s Supertron still ain’t too bad today either, although the cheesy 2 Unlimited vocal at the end does send me into cringes.

Many of the songs on Retrospection were partially done as a proud show of what you could do with a tracker if you employed a bit of sound engineering work. The music scene in the mid-1990s is pretty different from today: these days, hobbyist musicians can pick up a copy of Cubase, Logic, Live, about ten brazillion VST plugins, and can churn out stuff that sounds almost like it came out of a production studio. It’s not quite the same scene as the mid-90s tracker heydays, where we had serious trouble mixing together a mere 16 channels with no anti-aliasing on 486DX2/66s. Thanks to the incredible coding work by Jeffrey Lim, making professional-sounding work from the humble Impulse Tracker was actually possible. While Retrospection was published in 1999, most of the songs on here were written in about 1996, an era where the Gravis Ultrasound ruled over the Sound Blaster 16, and when we were still tinkering around with evil DOS memory managers like QEMM to maximise that 640k of conventional memory as much as possible. (640k! That’s less than half of a single sample these days!) I’m still somewhat impressed we managed to churn out these tunes on that kind of hardware.

And hey, if trackers were good enough for Force Mass Motion, they were good enough for me!


08 Taking Me Higher (Scratch The Surface Mix)

07 Supertron (The Aftermath Reconstruction)

06 On Me (Ozone's Radio Mix)

05 P. O. D.

04 Fee Fi Fo Fum (Heavenly Mix)

03 Taking Me Higher

02 Learn To Love

01 Taking Me Higher (Acidtrance Remix)

Anastasia Kukunova_Suite Bergamasque: Clair de Lune by Claude Debussy

Kukunova_Prelude From "Three Preludes" Op. 5 No. 3 By Dianne Goolkassian Rahbee

ozone