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. Oh, and this picture of me is no longer
accurate, since I now have a goatee.
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 S3M, XM and brand-new 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 7000 downloads later it is clearly a song with staying power and is still
my best-known song. Second, I opened up a section on my website called Great New Songwriters, offering reviews and
promotion for little-known-yet-highly-skilled trackers. The new section quickly ballooned in size, and then caught
the eye of Kosmos, who had just started up the new United Trackers website (which sadly is now dead).
I renamed the page Rising Stars of the Scene and merged it into UT, but quickly got a lesson in how NOT to run a major
scene project. After a tumultuous year, I turned over control of RSotS to TeamZero, and it later morphed into the
UT Sounding Board (which sadly is also dead).
In the meantime, I also served as a reviewer for the Weekly Module Review, later re-named the
Internet Music Monitor, and was an admin for
several other aspects of United Trackers for several years.
Running RSotS got me in contact with many new trackers, among them Renn, Beat, Traxler and Twiggy. The five of us
banded together to form the tracking group Full Circle, which then promptly collapsed. I think Beat and I each managed
to release 1 track each under the Full Circle label ("Z-Zone" and "Lucent Intentions,"
respectively), while Twiggy disappeared and Traxler ended up in a coma after a skiing accident. (He got better.) In the
meantime, Renn, Beat and I all entered creative droughts, ensuring a quick end for the doomed group.
Perhaps the biggest product of Full Circle was that Renn and I put our relative
skills together to found the Complete MOD Compo in 1998, a
monthly public-voting competition for tracker music. But after a promising start, CMC quickly became a quagmire of
poor planning and poorly-conceived compromises between Renn and I. We kept coming up with ideas that could've been
great on their own but weren't meant to go together, and then kept trying to make them work together anyway. CMC died
a quick death after 7 months, and little did I know it would someday be resurrected...
In 1999, my tracking friend Outshined invited me to join his tracking group Sound Devotion, and I joined just in
time to watch Outshined, Imode, and Demmas all enter creative droughts and slip out of the scene.
So, by the time 2000 rolled around, I had flunked out of college, joined two tracking groups that quickly collapsed,
run two major scene projects right into the ground, and had lost a lot of interest in tracking any new songs. I returned
home to Florida and became a reviewer for the original Trax
In Space for a short time before getting fed up with the ridiculous reviewing climate there. And that was the end
of my scene involvement for a while.
It wasn't until late 2001 that I really got active again. I released a cover of "Wir Happy
Hippos," revived my website, and in 2002 I resurrected the Complete MOD
Compo as a solo project. (CMC later morphed into the Monthly
Invitational Compo.) I also started a new feature for the
Static Line tracking newsletter called The Lineup, in which
I would sift through the new releases among the archive sites and highlight the best songs of each month.
In 2003, I released "Words," my first new original song since 1999. I also transformed my
website into The Novus Revolution, my attempt to shake up and
revive the tracking scene. This angered many people
and has been widely regarded as a bad move. (Bonus points if you get that reference.) As more and more people in the
tracking scene told me how full of it I was,
I took on a bit of a martyr complex. Finally, in mid-2004 I snapped and
began a sudden and bitter retreat from the tracking scene, shutting down MIC,
dropping out of Scene Rep (which I had been an agent and writer for),
and ending my Lineup article for Static Line. Things
came to a head on January 3rd, 2005 when I wrote a profanity-laced tirade against the
tracking scene and posted it on my site.
But eventually, I got better. With time, I finally realized that many
of my problems with others in the tracking scene were my fault, and that I still had things I could offer to the tracking
scene if I changed my attitude. And so, my site has been born again under the simple name of novusmusic.org, with
many updates and rewrites planned for the future.
