"Horse" cover artwork We finally reached the end! Have a taste of "Horse", the last track from my upcoming album "No Synths!"! This is a remix and remaster of the original song written in 1997 using Fast Tracker 2 on a Pentium PC and a very amateurish sounding sample library. All channels have been exported from the original XM file, and no new sequences have been recorded. The song structure was edited heavily though, cutting almost 3 minutes away since it was way too long. Of course, modern mixing and mastering techniques have been applied for the rest of the production. This is the original version: And this is the new one:

Row, Toshi y Madbit together in Montevideo. Yes, I know. I'm absolutely terrible at writing regular articles on this blog . But better late than never, I suppose. And I say that because it took me so long to write this summary of BEHELiT's presentation at Flash Party 2024 that it's going to end up being accompanied by another one about Flash Party 2025. But let's start from the beginning. As I've mentioned elsewhere, my return to the demoscene was thanks to BEHELiT , a demo group I founded with Row and Toshi in mid-2023. After that year's Flash Party, we got together to plan our debut. Row started developing Vexel™, a game engine made in Kotlin that we would also use in our demos, and Toshi began creating the boilerplate we would use for our 4kb intros. Flash Party 2024 Starting with this edition, Flash Party moved to a new venue called Tacheles , located in the center of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires . The event format remained the same as in the previous edition (see Flash Party 2023 Report - 25th Anniversary ), but with performances by Necrologic + Morgana Autumn , Milagro de Catamarca + Galgo con Piloto , L4t3r4l , and Dan Chelger. Row and I traveled from Montevideo again to represent BEHELiT in person. For this edition, we contributed 5 productions across 4 different competitions. Man in the vox (PC demo / Streaming music) "Man in the vox", winner of the PC demo competition. After nearly a year of research and development by Row, Vexel™ had its maiden voyage with " Man in the Vox ." This PC demo shows a little man made of voxels living in a cube with his cat while coding demos. The engine features global illumination, ray tracing, a simple editor, and animated voxels (imported from Magica Voxel using our own tool ). Once it was sufficiently developed, we began production of the demo itself, which took about a month and inaugurated our lore of constantly pushing deadlines. The effort paid off: both the demo and its soundtrack took first place in their respective competitions. Teenage Mutant Capybaras (Text art) Teenage mutant capybaras in ANSI. Just like in 2023, I participated in the text art competition with an ANSI font size of 218 lines and 80 columns. Continuing with the theme of animals doing human things, this piece depicts a supposed Argentinian equivalent of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which, of course, consists of four ninja capybaras ready to attack some part of Nordelta. As you probably remember, I'm not an illustrator, so the process began with creating some reference images in Midjourney, which I then combined into a composition using Photoshop. From there, the rest was done entirely by hand in Moebius over approximately two weeks, and it ended up winning first place in the competition. Below is a video documenting the entire drawing process from the beginning. The drawing process, from start to finish. ISS and ICS (4kb intros) Almost literally on the deadline, and after finishing Man in the Vox, Row teamed up with Toshi to try and complete a 4kb intro in the few hours they had left. Surprisingly, they didn't make one, but TWO. Toshi wrote a lengthy article explaining the development process step by step. I recommend reading it if you're interested in this kind of technical stuff. When I saw that the intro was working, I got to work and in a few hours I had composed the music. This song, "Nano," was my first production with Sointu Tracker and would later inspire an extended version. The interesting thing is that the file generated by the tracker contains about two minutes of music in just 600 bytes. Yes, bytes. Finally, ISS won the 4kb intro competition, despite an excellent second place entry made in 172 bytes . "I.S.S", winner of the 4kb intro competition. ICS, on the other hand, was more of a troll entry that we presented for the sake of it, and obviously, and to no one's surprise, it didn't get very far. Conclusion 2024 was a super intense year for BEHELiT. Vexel™ debuted, we learned to work as a team, we presented our first productions, and we took the first steps to establish a name for ourselves in the demoscene. But above all, we had a lot of fun doing it. As a bonus, here are the results of each competition, the recording of the full stream , and a review of Flash Party 2024 by Psenough of Demoscene Report that covers all categories and most of the entries.

I have just uploaded "No Synths!" to Spotify, and will also be uploading a couple of Mindprobe albums soon. Make sure to follow me and check that out! Click here to visit my Spotify profile . In addition, I have also added quite a few playlists that I created, organized by music genre. If you are curious about what kind of music I listen to, follow those too. I plan to update and refine them regularly, as well as add new ones. Enjoy!

Here's some more acid house for "Destroyed Brain", the penultimate track from my upcoming album "No Synths!"! Only one left now! This is a remix and remaster of the original song written in 1997 using Fast Tracker 2 on a Pentium PC and a very amateurish sounding sample library. All channels have been exported from the original XM file, and no new sequences have been recorded. The song structure was edited heavily though, cutting almost 3 minutes away since it was way too long. Of course, modern mixing and mastering techniques have been applied for the rest of the production. This is the original version: And this is the new one:

Approaching the finish line now. Here is "Planetarium", the sixth track from my upcoming album, "No Synths!". This is a remix and remaster of the original song written in 1997 using Fast Tracker 2 on a Pentium PC and a very amateurish sounding sample library. All channels have been exported from the original XM file, and no new sequences have been recorded. The song structure was edited heavily though, cutting almost 3 minutes away since it was way too long. Of course, modern mixing and mastering techniques have been applied for the rest of the production. This is the original version: And this is the new one:

We're halfway there. Here comes "Euphoria", the fourth track from my upcoming album, "No Synths!". This is a remix and remaster of the original song written in 1997 using Fast Tracker 2 on a Pentium PC and a very amateurish sounding sample library. All channels have been exported from the original XM file, and no new sequences have been recorded. The song structure was edited heavily though, cutting almost 3 minutes away since it was way too long. Of course, modern mixing and mastering techniques have been applied for the rest of the production. This is the original version: And this is the new one:

Only three more to go after this one. Here is "Seagulls", the fifth track from my upcoming album, "No Synths!". This is a remix and remaster of the original song written in 1997 using Fast Tracker 2 on a Pentium PC and a very amateurish sounding sample library. All channels have been exported from the original XM file, and no new sequences have been recorded. The song structure was edited heavily though, cutting almost 2 minutes away since it was way too long. Of course, modern mixing and mastering techniques have been applied for the rest of the production. One interesting fact is that the original song did not actually have a bass line, so it ended up sounding way too thin. To fix this, I took a note from the 5th stabs that start at 2' and got it heavily processed until I turned it into a bass note. Then I created two bass sequences from that note. This is the original version: And this is the new one:

It is now time to listen to "Extasy Device", the third track from my upcoming album, "No Synths!". This is a remix and remaster of the original song written in 1997 using Fast Tracker 2 on a Pentium PC and a very amateurish sounding sample library. All channels have been exported from the original XM file, and no new sequences have been recorded. The song structure was edited heavily though, cutting almost 3 minutes away since it was way too long. Of course, modern mixing and mastering techniques have been applied for the rest of the production. This is the original version: And this is the new one:

It is now time to listen to "Occultus", the second track from my upcoming album, "No Synths!". This is a remix and remaster of the original song written in 1997 using Fast Tracker 2 on a Pentium PC and a very amateurish sounding sample library. All channels have been exported from the original XM file, and no new sequences have been recorded. The song structure was edited heavily though, cutting almost 5 minutes away since it was way too long. Of course, modern mixing and mastering techniques have been applied for the rest of the production. This is the original version: And this is the new one:

As promised, here's "Re-Evolution", the first track from my upcoming album, "No Synths!". This is a remix and remaster of the original song written in 1997 using Fast Tracker 2 on a Pentium PC and a very amateurish sounding sample library. All channels have been exported from the original XM file, and no new sequences have been recorded. The song structure was edited heavily though, cutting almost 5 minutes away since it was way too long. Of course, modern mixing and mastering techniques have been applied for the rest of the production. This is the original version: And here's the new one: Please let me know what you think about it in the comments!

After approximately 6-7 months of hard work, "No Synths!" is finally complete and ready for release. This album contains remixed and remastered versions of 8 songs I composed back in 1997 with just a Pentium PC and no synthesizers of any kind. Not hardware, not software. Only Fast Tracker 2 and a pretty crappy library of samples. By the way, the screen in the album cover is showing exactly that, with the original project for "Re-evolution" loaded. The challenge I decided to take for this album was to make every song as good as I could, without recording any new material of any kind. Given the amateur nature of the source material, this was not an easy task. I was, however, allowed to rearrange songs and in fact I did cut a lot of minutes from them. After that, everything would be mixed and mastered just like if the material was new. Tracklist: I will be releasing one song per week starting with "Re-evolution" on Saturday 5/11! In the meantime, I'll be making arrangements to have the album available on all digital stores.

If you want shorter, but more frequent updates on whatever it is I'm doing, you can now follow me on Twitter here: @madbit. For example, I'm now almost halfway mastering my upcoming album "No Synths!". I'll keep providing small updates on it until it's finished, and then there will be another blog post right here.