keychain music can be as deliberately
difficult as black metal or esoteric
mysterious guy hardcore but it can also
be a lot more fun my own personal
journey with key gen music started with
a tweet from at duality jack in 2016 if
there's one thing that this exists is
all about it's making dreams come true
like a couple of years late maybe every
six months you know whatever whatever
works
up until this tweet sent me down a
rabbit hole keygen music was one of
those things you know I had heard of but
I hadn't heard which is a way of saying
I really didn't know that much about it
but I didn't want to sound like a total
fool but then you hear it and you
remember yes this this is the sound of
crime
[Music]
keep said music is based in 80s and 90s
hacker culture which I'm obviously very
intimately connected to and
knowledgeable of because of my extensive
exposure to the film hackers which I am
sure is a fantastically realistic
depiction of the era of which I am now
prepared to pontificate for you qualify
crews back then were competing to crack
software and this created a culture of
healthy competition and from that sprang
the introduction of crack introductions
crack intros or crack throws which would
be built by crews in front of their
pirated software to pump their to
call out members of the crew who had
done the work and to disrespect their
enemies
[Music]
[Applause]
[Music]
early cracked roads were just private
graffiti there'd be a name scroll maybe
a simple animation but they progressed
along with technology and as more and
more home PCs came with sound chips
music was added and visuals started
becoming more and more elaborate and
eventually an entire scene around crack
intros grew separate from the idea of
just pirating software this was called
demo scene in which crews would build
the most exciting and inventive visual
and sound thing for cool reasons
[Music]
music and cracked rose was made possible
by mod files which were easy to program
with esoteric music tracking software
and whereas a wav file or an mp3 file
which did not exist at that time would
have been way too big to fit on the
floppy disks that were you know where
pirated software lived a mod file could
feature a 3-minute song in 20 kilobytes
using just a single sample that could be
reap itched and rearranged or the sine
square and triangle waves of every day
sound chips that were all of a sudden
present in home pcs this sound this
limitation this computer-based sound is
the essence of what we now know as chip
tune and through this developing
technology for sound and the
simultaneously explosive growth of what
you could do visually on home computers
demo scene was born separate from
cracking and pirating software this was
just about the cracked rose just about
impressing other crews with just how
good you were at building a thing
[Music]
demo scene allowed crews to flex for
each other showing it was possible with
new technology for an audience of other
creative computer nerds and as cracked
software transitioned from being
exchanged on floppy disks to exchanged
via torrents often programs would come
with a key generation program that would
allow you to open up your copy of
Microsoft Office that you needed to make
your computer homework look good and
professional and inside of those key
generating programs was music called
from demo see all of a sudden keygens
became the largest platform for the
distribution of music that had
previously been limited to a tiny
community of hackers making music for
other hackers now normy is like me were
able to hear music that had previously
been restricted to those who knew that
hackers was not a realistic portrayal of
hacker culture
[Music]
I was joking off the top about
black-metal but I do think the
comparison is apt first of all there's
an inherent criminal element but there's
also the idea that this music is built
for a very specific community that will
understand the rules and the structure
of the music and sometimes when
Outsiders are piled into it it can be
very confusing and perhaps problematic
and ultimately all of this work all of
this creativity is in service of
bettering that community of building up
a scene that's really not for anyone
else whether that's cracked Rose or
whether that's you know burning down a
church and making a song it's just like
it may have been a few years but I
guarantee the sound of some of these
songs will ring a very nostalgic and
criminal part of your heart bells and
you can check out some of the best of
key gen music in an amazing article in a
comp from nest that is linked in the
description and I think some of it will
feel very familiar to you and even
though the heyday of crack cruise and
demo scene and key gen music may be over
I would argue that the spirit still
continues in artists who build up these
walls and create very specific
environments for you to listen to their
music in my favorite current example of
this is a band from Toronto called kam
boys
[Music]
can boys debut EP is called while city
and the only way for you to play it is
to play the video game that they made to
go along with it where you are the
titular can boys trying to get to a gig
but you're being stopped by longboarding
lizards and you have to power up by
getting hamburgers on your way to the
gig but there are five songs contained
within the levels of this video game and
you have to go through the five levels
of the game in order to listen to them
it's not a direct one-to-one comparison
with key gen music but the idea that you
are forced to be in a specific place in
front of your computer to hear what it
was definitely a lot of work seems very
spiritually connected to that spirit of
the 80s and 90s this makes sense in so
many ways for a modern audience to
consume music so much of our creativity
is attached to our computers it comes
from and through and around and is all
about these machines that control our
lives and so whereas mostly we
experience our music on our phone on our
commuter on our phone waiting for the
bus so we can begin our commute to force
someone to listen to something in a very
specific place doing a very specific
task whether that's stealing Photoshop
or playing your video game is a really
interesting idea and changes the way
that you experience that music this is
not going to be a surprise for any of
you because I have a youtube channel but
I am guilty of searching for praise and
recognition for just about every tiny
thing that I do and so it's interesting
to me that there are people in this
world who want to put all of that work
into something creative whether it's a
song or a video game and then wall it
off so that not everyone has immediate
access to it but anyone with the right
set of curiosities is able to experience
it exactly how you wanted them to so you
can check out wild city from kam boys in
the description and maybe get a sense of
what it was like to steal something
without stealing it and here's some good
music without having to steal something
what do you think do you see the spirit
of crack Cruz and demo scene and key gen
music in any modern music or is it just
the homage and the tip of the hat of
bands like anime Noguchi let me know you
think in the description and be sure to
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