Around 1995, I started experimenting with electronic music. The idea for the first song originated when I was making some noise on the computer with a friend. We looped a sample recorded from a prank phone call and put a synthetic beat under it. As the victim of the prank call was a teacher named Hetty, the song was dubbed ‘Hetty-House’. I turned it into a full-length “song” by cutting and pasting samples in an audio editor, which was cumbersome and produced a pretty awful result. Yet, we managed to get the song played by a DJ during a party and people actually danced to it.
After this, I discovered “PlayerPRO”, a Mac program which allowed to create songs in an advanced version of the ‘MOD’ music format. It allowed 32 channels, 16 bit samples and mixing, stereo panning per channel etc. I created a more listenable version of the ‘Hetty-house’, and started experimenting with other styles. Most of the songs were related to techno music, and later on I attempted to make some drum n' bass songs, with varying success.
The problem with PlayerPRO and the MOD format in general was that it was too limited to do much interesting stuff. It only allowed to play samples at different pitches and volumes, hence any effects like echoes needed to be simulated by playing copies of the same track with a delay. With a lot of tricks, flanging effects could be simulated too. But things like lowpass and notch filters were impossible. In the end, it was quite difficult to make songs not sound as if they were MOD-like songs. In 1997, I discovered ReBirth by Propellerhead Software. This offered a vastly different way of making music, emulating two 303 synthesizers and an 808 drum machine (later on, also the 909). I did make a few songs in it, and planned to somehow combine it with PlayerPRO. But my interest started to decline and so did my amount of available spare time. Moreover, PlayerPRO evolved in a way I didn't like, so this gradually meant the death of my attempts at making music.
To give you an idea of the kind of songs I've made, here are some fragments and full songs. I picked some of the most differing examples to give an idea of how I experimented with styles. They are encoded in Xiph's Ogg Vorbis format, because this offers a very good quality vs. size ratio, and it's open source and royalty-free unlike MP3. Ogg can be played in most media players. For QuickTime, there is a Vorbis plug-in, which also enables iTunes to play Oggs. The bitrate on these files is pretty low to save on bandwidth, so don't expect hi-fi quality.
Important: You cannot play these files by opening their URLs in an external media player. It might work if you have a browser plug-in that supports Ogg (e.g. the QuickTime plug-in with XiphQT installed). It will most likely not work with the Totem plug-in (which I have never seen working at all, to be honest).
In the likely case that you can't play the files through a plug-in, download them by right-clicking the links and choosing “Save Link As…”. Then, open the downloaded files in your favourite media player. I know this is slightly inconvenient but it's a necessary protection against badly programmed plug-ins/media players and misbehaving crawlers.
These are the first 84 seconds of this song. The full version is almost three minutes long (or short, depending on your taste). This was an attempt at creating something really aggressive, and I think I was pretty successful at that. Beat rate: 187 bpm. It also has something that could pass as ‘lyrics’, which was uncommon for my mostly instrumental songs. But if you listen carefully, you'll notice that they're pretty ridiculous.
Download it (22kHz stereo 48kBps, 509KiB)
Something entirely different, and I think most people will agree, something better too. This was my first more or less successful attempt at drum n' bass. It took ages to construct the drum loop, which was created by speeding up a drum loop from a rather unknown Belgian band, cutting it up and repeating parts. But it was worth it. The song initially contained an insane amount of ultra-low bass sounds, and I believe this fragment is still from that version. I created a more balanced version in the meantime.
This fragment starts at about 1 minute into the song and takes 1 minute and 47 seconds, out of a total of more than 5 minutes.
Download it (32kHz stereo 64kBps, 814KiB)
This is my first successful song created with ReBirth. It only uses the 808 drum machine because the 909 wasn't yet available at that time. As you'll notice, this sounds entirely different from the other songs, because ReBirth emulates real synthesizers instead of just playing samples at different pitches. This is not a fragment but the entire song of 6 minutes. Enjoy!
Download it (32kHz stereo 80kBps, 3618KiB)
After I gained some ‘fame’ with my music, a local band called PN (formerly Portie Nootjes) asked if I couldn't do a kind of drum n' bass remix of one of their songs, called ‘Romance’, from their album with the same name. It wasn't too easy because I only had their finished song to start with, so I had to filter out the vocals myself which was not entirely successful. This is a much ‘drier’ kind of drum n' bass than ‘Dura Lex sed Lex’, in fact they seemed to have expected that I made another song in the same style and were disappointed with this remix. So eventually it didn't end up on their next album as planned. Well, nice try but no cigar. At least everyone can listen to the entire song (3'34") here...
Download it (32kHz stereo 80kBps, 2055KiB)
If you would be interested in better quality versions of these songs and the rest of my ‘oeuvre’, you can get almost all the songs I ever made (at least the ones that most normal people might appreciate). I post-processed them to give them a more balanced sound and some subtle effects. You can get an audio CD, including some exclusive artwork, or a download in a high quality format of your choice (MP3, Ogg or FLAC). All you have to do is mail me. Downloads will be free, but in case you want a physical CD, it'll cost you the price of a CDR plus the mailing costs, but not much more than that (I'm not like the RIAA!)
If you want to know what to expect, the above 4 samples are pretty representative. There are some songs that are vastly different from those four, but if I have to be honest, ‘Dura Lex sed Lex’ and ‘Code303’ are probably the best I've made, so don't bother if you don't even like those.
You may spread around these fragments & songs as much as you want, as long as you don't ask money for them, and it stays clear that I produced them (i.e. my name, whether it be "Alexander Thomas" or my pseudonym "Dr. Lex", must be visibly included). You're free to use samples from these songs in your own productions, on the condition that you mention my name in your credits and you restrict the sample length to 5 seconds. The simplest way to know if you're doing the right thing is mailing me and telling me what you're up to.
Dr. Lex' Site
Music