Jeskola Buzz

Jeskola Buzz is, at heart, a sample tracker- if not the geekiest form of music production software, then it’s certainly in the top 5. Programs like OctaMed for the Commodore Amiga and FastTracker II for the (pre-Windows!) PC were a revolution in home music-making- the first truly self-contained, affordable home studio software, allowing users to construct entire, finished songs out of sampled drum loops, hits, stabs and hoover noises. The churning, energetic soundclash of early UK hardcore rave was born out of this defiantly DIY approach to music making- the software is a blunt but effective instrument compared to today’s sophisticated production tools, but the massed ranks of bedroom producers took full advantage of it- ‘chipmunked’ vocals, brutally re-triggered samples, horns down-pitched to juddering bass and countless other rave tricks- the sound of talented people pushing hard against limited technology is always an exciting one.

Structurally, and in spirit, Buzz is the descendant of those revolutionary programs- the same austere programming screen- no graphics, simply a list of hexadecimal numbers, note letters and dashes scrolling jerkily up from the bottom of the screen. However, Buzz’s stroke of genius is to add to this dirty, hands-on interface a beautifully open approach to constructing the actual sonics of the music- by allowing users and programmers free rein to create their own virtual instruments and effects (sometimes recognisably aping vintage hardware, sometimes bewilderingly abstract) and users to wire them together in whichever way they saw fit, Buzz allowed a far greater flexibility in terms of sound-crafting than I had ever come across before- a single sound source can be taken down multiple paths, split, mangled, recombined with itself and with other sounds in an almost infinite variety of ways- perhaps fortunate given that many of those sounds were in themselves rather thin and uninspiring. It’s user-unfriendly by today’s standards, is guaranteed to crash at least 3 times in any given music-making session, and the guy who wrote it lost the source code in a hard drive crash, but despite all this I love it. Up until my ‘Signals’ 7” track, everything I have released as Line has been written on this quirky, unstable, frustrating but ultimately incredibly inspiring piece of software. I don’t use it much these days, but it will always have a place in my heart.