Thursday 15 August 2002: the journey day
It was early in the morning when me and Synteesi/mfx woke up in Torino, Italy
(my home town, that is). After packing some stuff, we swallowed our morning coffee and jumped on the car,
on the way to Berne, where we were supposed to meet Genox/Calodox and PS/Calodox, in order to prepare the
live gig planned for the next day, at the partyplace.
After 4 hours we arrived in Berne, a beautiful town with really ackward planning, that makes it impossible
to hang around by car or even walking... after some desperate search for a parking place, we dumped the
car in a random place and headed to the railway station, where we set up the meeting with our friends.
We found them after some attempts and we walked back to the car, which amazingly was parked right IN FRONT
of the partyplace (because of our huge demoscene luck or maybe due to some mfx paranormal attitude).
After drinking a couple of beers at the restaurant near the partyplace (just to start in the right mood),
we went to Genox place, where we met Choi/Vantage (who was coding his demo) and, after a fast pasta dinner, we started
practicing for the live gig. We realized that doing chillout trancey music just messing up some filters
and sequences is quite easy, and after four our of random jamming (in which Genox played synths, Synteesi
provided Reason-made drumloops, PS played weird movie samples through Buzz, while I tweaked some sequences
with Noisetrekker 3.2) we decided to pass out on the comfortable
wooden floor of Genox's place.
Friday 16 August 2002: Party!
After some breakfast-like food, we stuffed my car with all the hardware for the gig (PCs, synths and shit like that)
and, already sweating like pigs, we tried to find our way back to the partyplace.
Thank to the mighty demoscene god, we easily found it again and parked the car in the inner courtyard.
We suddenly realized how cool the partyplace is: imagine a small opera theater, with a big stage, quasi-baroque
decorations, cool lights and a nearby bar selling beer, coffee, food (the orgos also provided free ice tea for
everyone). We got our first brick of ice tea, some pizza from a nearby pizza-taxi and started chilling out in the
chillout-zone sofa.
In less than one hour many cool demosceners started gathering at the partyplace, including Pan and Drift from Spinning Kids,
Ile/Aardbei, Shifter/TPK, Florent/Lobster (damn, what's your nick, pal? :D), Black/Twilight, Willbe/Orion and Melwyn/Haujobb.
To make the atmosphere more cosy, I turned on my laptop to play some sid tunes and watch c64 demos, while someone else
ignited the hemp joint-factory, which was out to last for the whole party.
The organizers did their best to entertain people, playing demoscene music from the "demodulate" collection by Phoenix/Hornet
and showing some demos on the big screen.
At some point Genox and Choi arrived and we started assembling the
stuff for the gig on the stage. As soon as we finished sorting out
cables and shit like that, Bigbear/Citron joined us and we started some
slow 100bpm improvised chillout music, while Fred/Calodox played some
amiga demos on the big screen behind us. The time passed fastly, the
gig was fun (for us at least), and in a moment we were again
boozing outside in a cool scene atmosphere. Lotsa hemp got burned, many
beer cans hit the ground and Melwyn sponsored some Salmiakkikossu
(salty licorice vodka drink) which brought back many Boozembly memories.
[now entering the blurry memory bank]
Melwyn got very drunken and started some weird drunk talks, while
Synteesi had a neat pair of red eyes and a merry smile carved
on his face. After some more delirium, the happy posse decided to move
inside to watch the demoshow that the orgos were starting.
As soon as I got my chair, I noticed that Melwyn and Synteesi went to
the organizers floor (on the first floor balcony in the theater) and
took over the demoshow by brute force: the thing was very obvious also
by looking at the demo choice, since all the cool/weird finnish
productions were shown, including lovely prods like Kromiset Sienet by
mfx and Chimera by Halcyon. While something from TPOLM was hitting the
screen,
I gently passed out on the sofa, and then moved my ass to a better
place for some quality floor-sleeping.
[back to real life]
Saturday 16 August 2002: React!
I woke up with smelling like a dead animal, with horrible taste in my
mouth, broken bones but no hangover. I went to the supermarket together
with Pan (and I realized that swiss prices are quite fucking expensive
for italians) and came back for more party time. I guess the graphic
compos were shown at
some point, but I happily skipped them, chilling out outside and
getting ready for our second gig. Since Bigbear was somewhere else,
Melwyn came to the stage to play some background keyboards, and we
jammed for something like 2 hours with nice results (we even got great
feedback from someone, I'm still very amazed about that).
We went outside again for some more scene talkings (a belgium beer keg
magically appeared there) and then finally the compos started.
The surprise competition was about doing an ironic animation in the
line of some famous show. The winner made a great Episode 2 parody
using garbage and stop-motion ("Garbage Wars").
The music contest featured average entries (7 tunes in the multichannel
compo and 14 in the streamed music), but I can't really remember any
impressive entry. For some odd reason my tune "Loollabye" got 3rd place
in the multichannel, even though it wasn't meant for a music compo at
all (I still find it too plain and boring).
Since I am not much into Wild compos, I decided to get some chillout
time behind the big screen, waiting for the real compos to start. I
remember some details about an evil dude
cooking Cowee (Buenzli mascot puppet) in his wild entry, which in the
end won the compo.
After about one hour of fun, I woke Pan up (who was sleeping like a
baby near me) and we zombie-walked to the hall to watch the intro
competition. All the entries were quite enjoyable:
Kewlers' "Deutsche Telekom" featured cga colors, resolution loss
achieved through render-to-texture and weird chip music by Fred Funk,
"aN eWgene" by Spinning Kids (yeah, me and Pan) showed minimalistic
graphics with cloud effects, TPOLM (Alkama, Dake and Xhale) won the
competition with a nice intro in the same line of Calodox productions
like "death in Vegas" and "98 seconds", with neat multilayer effects,
while "The Next Generator" by Oezgyrs showed nice openGL scenes with
shadows and fast code, but very badly focused design (too bad, I guess
the coder had quite a big lot of work putting all that stuff together).
After a short while, the demo competition started, with 4 entries as
well. "Amour" by Orion was shown first (and it also won the compo), and
it consisted in a 3d plot-demo with great ironical taste and good
modelling, even tho I think many foreign visitors could't get it fully
due to the french text; after that, XXX demo by Lunix got shown,
featuring impressive 3d mesh modifiers, quasi-gabber music and weird
synchs, all in software rendering, making it the most impressive demo
in the compo from the technical point of view. Vantage released a demo
as well (the one Choi was coding on the first night), with minimalistic
effect which built a good overall feeling, and the last place (also in
the final chart) went to a weird french demo ("CoinCoin" or something),
about which I only remember the weird ripped joke soundtrack, filled
with duck-like sounds. After that, I guess a demoshow started, but I
just felt like going to my sleeping bag to lay down, in order to
collect some energy to drive properly towards Italy.
Sunday 18 August 2002: Alllleeeez!
I woke up just in time for the price giving ceremony (you pretty much know all the results already, check them out on Scene.org
for details), and after receiving some small prices for our entries
(who goes to parties for prices, anyway?) I packed all the stuff on my
car and started driving back to Italy together with Melwyn, PS and
Daniel (a friend of PS), who are playing with my PS right now, and will
continue their interrail journey through the rest of Europe.
Closing words: Buenzli does rule, the partyplace is small but awesome
(even if it might change place if the party grows bigger), the
organizers are excellent scene dudes and
know what they are doing, the audience is fully sceneish and very
international (if I remember correctly, people from Switzerland,
France, Portugal, Finland, Holland, Germany, Slovenia and even Canada
showed up) and the entries are great. Ok, Switzerland is a bit
expensive if you come from places like Italy (tho it might even be
cheap for you, in case you are Norwegian), but the party is definitely
worth visiting.
I hope to meet even more people there, next year, since I am definitely
going to be back!