I first started trying to write music in 1994 using OctaMED 3 on an Amiga 500+. My initial influences were early-to-mid-90s breakbeat and happy hardcore - especially The Prodigy and Ultra-Sonic, along with poppier Eurodance stuff like Culture Beat and er.... 2 Unlimited. It took about 18 months to 2 years for me to get to a point where I took it seriously enough to give it a name (which was kind of academic anyway as basically, this was all mostly just in my own head). Around 1996 I started compiling songs onto floppy disks as "singles", typically with 4 songs: an A-side, maybe 1 or 2 remixes and 1 or 2 B-sides. I had sort of adapted some magazine cover disk as the format for these "singles": something that would be self-booting and had a splash screen that I replaced with my own appallingly bad graphics done in Deluxe Paint III as "cover art", and a copy of the OctaMED player program, along with the .mod files of the songs. I think I'd done perhaps 15 of these by the end of 1996.
On the 1st of Jan 1997 I made my first album called Into The Unknown, comprising a couple of remixes of existing tracks, and a bunch of brand new tracks, all done in one day: 10 tracks in total. And as insane as that sounds, I actually did the same thing again the very next day, with three remixes amd eight originals... another 11 tracks made in one day, and that was my second album, Decision Time. I basically produced 21 songs in about 32 hours. Absolutely batshit... I can't even fathom how I did that, especially now as it routinely takes me weeks to finish one song. Obviously, I was a supernoob with very low standards, but even so that level of productivity makes my head reel.
I had gotten a keyboard for Christmas 1996 and while it was MIDI capable, I never figured out how to set it up so I just used it to sample notes and chords via a sampler called Techno Sound Turbo 2. I never really understood how to use that either and the audio quality was, in hindsight, terrible. Still it did help me develop a bit in terms of composition. Before that I had been reliant on whatever samples came on magazine cover disks or that I could rip from demoscene stuff like Jesus On E's, Desert Dreams, 9 Fingers, etc, and from the tunes you used to get on the cracker splash-screens on pirated games.
By the late 90s I was starting to feel limited by this set-up and so I started saving up to get a PC. Once I got one it still took a while to transition away fro the old Amiga: I think my last tracks were done in 2000/01. In those tech-stunted days I was still recording my music onto cassette via my brother's old hi-fi (and it was only when I started doing this that I realised OctaMED had a janky hard-left/right channel separation instead of real stereo: I had been using the Amiga with a small portable TV that only had mono sound so it drove me nuts hearing half the song coming through one speaker and half through the other). In the end I finished up with 25 tapes full of music: some 550 tracks in all.
Discography
COMING SOON-ish