I still remember the excitement I felt when I first got hold of the demo of Renoise. Here, first of all, was a tracker like OctaMED that got me back to familiar ground after my MIDI misadventures. But more than that, it was a tracker that had capabilities I'd always dreamed of having with OctaMED: unlimited tracks, with sub-tracks that allowed me to layer samples into chords... and FX! Filters and reverb and distortion and all sorts of other goodies I'd never even heard of before. I was the proverbial kid in a sweetshop. The sheer joy of finding Renoise has never entirely faded, and though I would later make occasional efforts with other music software in attempts at trying to force myself into new ground, I always came back to Renoise. (Honestly, the reason I did so was because my limited - in fact, solitary - attempts at working in FL Studio, Reason and later Reaper, all just resulted in songs that sounded no different to what I was doing in Renoise. There didn't seem any point in using different tools to express the same musical ideas.)
The chronology of this time is a bit hazy for me so I'm not really sure if the name "Rude Corps" pre-dates my discovery of Renoise. From what I can gather (from a bio I wrote 15 yeas ago for the old Rude Corps website), I was possibly still thinking of the two Cubase albums as part of The Unknown, though neither of the CD masters mentions it. Clearly they've been mentally de-coupled since then. At any rate, once I started using Renoise I really hit the ground running and immediately had a new album come together (Life In The Shadows, finished summer 2004), and now I was online, for the first time had some meaningful way of actually publicly releasing music, necessitating a name for the project. I know that by this point I was finding The Unknown as a name faintly embarrassing and so the switch to Rude Corps made sense. The name itself came about while I was stuck on a shit jobsearch scheme: one of the many utterly pointless and inane activities we had to do was a wordsearch with a health & safety theme. One of the search terms was "fire procedure", which happened to be printed backwards, and there it was: Rude Corp. I changed it to Corps to align with my anti-corporate inclinations as Rude Corps suggests to me a ragtag peasant militia, which neatly dovetails with the rough and ready ethos and style, as well as the radical politics.
Looking back at it, it's kind of strange to see myself as being part of a great wave of indie DIY musicians that emerged in the 2000's thanks to the new possibilities provided by the internet. (Particularly strange as I wouldn't consider myself a child of the internet: I was already in my early 20s before getting online, and the most significant things that moulded me were offline / pre-internet.) I vaguely recall having a Myspace page, and as mentioned earlier, had a website and stuff scattered across a bunch of hosting sites. However, for me the online focal point was Soundclick. I joined in 2004, though it wasn't until 2005 that I realised there were forums, where I quickly became a fixture. The community that existed there was weird, volatile, talented, delusional, genuinely supportive and helpful, while also being Grade-A trolls and shitposters. I know these days there's a nostalgia for that wilder pre-social-media internet age – I'm occasionally prone to it myself, though for one reason or another, I haven't been able to commit myself to participating in forums like I used to. Clearly though, the community at Soundclick had a crucial role in how Rude Corps developed. They were my audience and collaborators, giving critical feedback, support and technical advice, as well as ideas and motivation and opportunities to work with other artists. I was genuinely gutted when they eventually shut the forums down, and though I've heard they've been re-established and some of the same people were there, I've not gone back to it.
The upshot of having an actual community of musicians around me was a significant improvement in my work that, for a time, created a sort of feedback loop, where the more I improved, the more I invested in time and resources and study, and the more I improved. There was, throughout these years, a recurring revision of existing projects, going back and cleaning them up because the development was so fast and noticeable from album to album that I was always seeing room for improvement in relatively recent works. (In fact, it's suddenly occurred to me that this isn't something I've done with any of the post-Rude Corps projects. Guess I've plateau'd.)
A pivotal year I think was 2007. It was then that I had finally saved up to get some proper monitors – a pair of Alesis M1 Active 620s – to replace the cheap PC speakers I was using. (Incidentally, these monitors carried me all the way through 'til late 2023 when I finally replaced them with some Focal 65s.) This allowed a massive improvement in the quality of my mixes. It was also then I really started using VST/i's which massively expanded my sonic palette. Late in the year I also got a lend of an electric guitar – I suppose at this point I've stolen it – and though I couldn't play (still can't), it was quickly integrated into my music and marked the beginning of my gradual adoption of actual instruments to go with the programming.
In hindsight it was also a year of dissolution. Between 2004-2007, I wrote 10 albums and 4 EP's. The remaining seven years of Rude Corps' existence produced only 1 album and 2 EP's, and one of them was a joke written in 12 hours for a forum tournament. There was also an orchestral album I started (and still hope to finish some day, though I haven't touched it in 15 years) that only got a third of the way completed. It's not that I wasn't writing music: I was still regularly releasing individual tracks in an increasingly ambitious and adventurous range of styles, incorporating guitar and vocals. It's just that for some reason, none of it came together into a more substantive work. The final project from Rude Corps was Designs Of Anarchy And Community, released in 2010. There was still well over a hundred songs released after this - a lot of my best work I think – but it was all just disconnected fragments.
By 2015 this lack of focus was starting to weigh down on me. It felt like Rude Corps had become too varied for its own good and the aimlessness was becoming demotivating. This happened to coincide with the collapse of the anarchist group I was involved with and so this felt like an appropriate moment to retire Rude Corps and start something new.
Discography
COMING SOON-ish