From a 386 to a home server

Basement

The first work, Alexander wrote in 2003, was "Another Beat", made "with an old 386 DX 40Mhz, 4 MB RAM and a Soundblaster AWE32 soundcard". The band's biography of 2000 is blunter about the machine: "a crap computer (PC 386, 40 MHz, it sucked even back then…), a midi keyboard and the famous pink noise generating, Soundblaster AWE 32". Andreas had made techno of his own since he was 15, in tracker programs on an Atari 1040, and when he, "who by then was a tracker boy came for a visit the whole project started to grow".^1,2,3

What money there was went into gear: a Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold with 12 MB for samples, then the first real synthesizer, a Yamaha CS1x. Reading up on it, the two found the CS1x Archive on the web and mailed it their tracks: "the first step towards the WWW was taken". A Roland MC-303, a Pentium at 166 MHz and an Alesis Quadrasynth followed. By May 1999 the studio page listed a Fostex hard-disk recorder and two computers, and by October a Pentium II 400 with 512 MB of RAM and a Novation Nova on order.^2,4,5

A studio on the web

In 2001 the band's studio page swam against the stream: "These days most producers out there move towards a 'synthesizer free' studio ... We on the other hand don't." The July list had a Pentium III at 933 MHz and a dual monitor setup; by December an Oberheim OB12 and a Roland TB-303 had joined it. From August a webcam sent "both video and audio around the clock", and Alexander passed the stream on to DI.fm.^6,7,8,9

Robbed

In the night between 13 and 14 January 2003, between 01:15 and 02:30, the studio was broken into and emptied, and so were three other studios on the same floor. Gone were the computer with about three years of original work, two Creamware Pulsar II cards, the TB-303, a fully expanded Clavia Nord Rack and the power amp: about 85,000 kronor's worth, not covered by insurance. Some work never came back; an unfinished WennE track, "Lindas Theme", "was never fully completed before our gear was stolen".^10,11

Listeners asked how to help, and the band set up a donation page. By February 2003 it held $392.25; by 12 April, $1,169.58, and the new computer was "RUNNING IN THE STUDIO!": an Intel P4 at 2.4 GHz with 1,024 MB of RAM and a 120 GB disk. When "Lobotomized Unicorn" came out that September, it was dedicated to the donors.^10,12,13,14

The studio came back as software: the P4 with an Emagic Audiowerk 8 card, a MIDI keyboard, Logic Audio, "A huge load of VSTinstruments & FX" and AKAI sample CDs, with softsynths from V-Station and Reaktor to Stylus and Trilogy. Mastering was done "all in Logic". In October a TB-303 emulation, Bass Line from Audiorealism, arrived from "yet another software sponsor", and WennE tried it out the way the band described it: a madman in a room with a TB-303, some hard drum samples and a distortion effect.^{15,16,17,18,19}

Server #1

The MP3 Vault ran from one machine. "For now the Server #1 machine is only a PII 400 running a regular sql, php, web & ftp server," Alexander wrote on 1 March 2004. In January the MP3 files alone had used 65 GB of bandwidth, for about 1,000 members and 24 files. Listeners were turned away with "Too many users are connected"; on 2 March he installed "a new un-capped webserver", and on 26 March he wrote: "Right now I'm on a 10Mbit connection and 2,500+ registered users will probably make that a bit slow." A 100 Mbit line was promised for April.^20,21,22

Ten megabits at home was rare. In Sweden Bredbandsbolaget had offered 10 Mbit/s for 200 kronor a month since 1999, when a 56 kbit/s modem was the normal way online, but dial-up still made up nearly 84 percent of Swedish internet subscriptions in 2001. The telecom regulator put the share of Swedish households with a fixed connection at 21 percent in 2003 and 28 percent in 2004, and those with 10 Mbit/s or more at 4 and 6 percent.^23,24,25,26

File sizes were argued over in the forum. Alexander set the ceiling: "192kbps is the absolute maxium we will use... In almost every case 160kbps is more then enough". The calculator below works out how long the files took, as file size over line speed: a calculation, not a record of any real download.²¹

Back to a room, and to one keyboard

In 2012 Alexander set up a new studio, a 3×4 metre soundproofed room in central Gothenburg around a computer and Logic Pro, and in August he drove off to fetch a 32-channel Soundcraft Ghost console, chasing "that analogue warmth, coloration and saturation".^27,28,29

The console was sold again. Studio 7, 15 minutes outside the city centre, was where Alexander, from 2015, designed a passive summing box of his own. Today the studio is a single M-Audio Axiom 61 keyboard and no other gear; the summing box is still not finished.^30,31