Once upon a time, I was born. In 1979 in the state of Florida in the USA, to be precise. And thus far
I have managed not to die, inactivity on this website notwithstanding.
I am very, very much into tracking. I was introduced to MOD files by my childhood
friend Chris "Hazard" Trawick, who at the time was very much more into computers than I was. He somehow got his
hands on some MODs and played 'em for me, and I thought they were cool and stuff, but didn't really get hooked
on them until years later. The year was 1990, and Hazard and I were each 11 years old.
I briefly tinkered with a shoddy tracking program called KingMOD before giving up on it, and MODs in general,
until 1995. By then, I'd started calling into local dial-up BBSs and one day stumbled across some MODs in a file
section somewhere. It didn't take long for me to get addicted, and by late 1996 I had found Scream Tracker 3 and the joys
of the new S3M, XM and IT formats as well. I started tracking, later switched to Impulse Tracker, and founded
my own website, Novus's Wide World of MODs.
The year was now 1997, and I was finally in college and just starting to get familiar with the Internet-based
tracking scene. I wasn't well-known at all, but two things were about to change that. First, I tracked and released
"Revealing," and 138,000 downloads later it is clearly a song with staying power and is still
my best-known song. Second, I started writing music reviews on my website, along with opinion columns on the state of
tracking and the tracking scene, and for better or for worse, those opinion columns ended up becoming a major part of
my legacy in the scene.
Over the years, I ended up releasing 11 tracker songs (along with a few remixes) between
1996 and 2003, including the aforementioned "Revealing," along with "Beacon," "Lucent Intentions," "Words" and
"The Titanic: Fanfare, Fantasy & Fate" among others. I was also involved with or on the staff of a variety of scene websites and
projects, including United Trackers, the Weekly Module Review (later re-named the Internet Music Monitor), Trax In Space,
Scene Rep, Scene Zine, and Static Line. I was also a co-founder of the short-lived tracking group Full Circle (along with Renn, Beat,
Traxler and Twiggy), and was briefly a member of the tracking group Sound Devotion (along with Outshined, Imode and Demmas).
I also ran several music competitions. In 1998, Renn and I put together the
Complete MOD Compo, a
monthly public-voting competition for tracker music. It only lasted 7 months, but in 2002 I resurrected the compo with an
updated voting system and kept it going for over two years, renaming it the
Monthly Invitational Compo along the way. And in 2007 and 2008, I
ran The Novus Compo, basically an updated version of CMC/MIC
with MP3s, OGGs and WMAs allowed instead of tracker formats.
My time in the tracking scene was never short on controversy thanks to my outspoken nature. But it was also never short on
fun. I made some good music, helped others make even better music, and got to interact with some of the finest musicians and
best people in the world. As such, my website now stands as my own small effort to preserve the memory of the tracking scene.
