Music in Ones and Zeroes: A Memory of Streaming Soundscapes

by Matt Johnson

It was an impulsive purchase in Orlando's Virgin Megastore that opened my ears to electronic music.

I was 18 years old and a high school senior in the fall of 2000.  Visiting from northern Minnesota for an academic conference, the music store was a chance to discover new tunes outside my three-year addiction to Nine Inch Nails.  On that day, I ended up taking home DJ Krush's Kakusei, Chris Fortier's Trance America and Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II.  The first album was enjoyable for a longtime drummer, the second was like a soundtrack for science fiction, and the third was an unsettling but captivating hallucination.

Soon, I was digging through CDs at Sam Goody, where I found Ministry of Sound's Global Underground series.  Not only was this an expansive collection of trance music from a variety of artists, but each double-CD's liner notes gave enviable details on the location, attendees, and generally euphoric atmosphere of each event.  Club nights for the young, rich, and famous; a far cry from the life experiences of a Midwestern teenager.  Still, I could live vicariously through the music.  Trance held my interest through college, where I collected hundreds of tracks and mixes by John Digweed, Paul Oakenfold, DJ Tiesto, Ferry Corsten, BT, Amoeba Assassin, and others.

Aside from enjoyable listening, I also found the music especially helpful with writing.  Creative writing was a fun hobby I'd started during an English class at age 15.  At first, I listened to whatever classical pieces were playing on public radio.  Generally calming, sometimes thunderous, the music helped me focus and inspired me when describing a scene's atmosphere or character emotions.

Electronic music took this beyond simple short story background tracks.  I'd already been interested in extracting music files from games like StarCraft, Fallout, and Diablo.  Later, I'd do the same thing with American McGee's Alice and Return to Castle Wolfenstein.  These new albums (particularly Aphex Twin) were perfect for driving, studying, chores, and even replacing the muted music of whatever game I was playing.  Sometimes hyperactive and intense, sometimes softly flowing and moody.  These experiences were not soundtracks, not popular songs referencing specific life events.  They were soundscapes - as much a part of my environment as wind rustling trees and tall grass, or the dripping of melting snow; in some cases, directly sampling those sounds.

Then I started college in the fall of 2001, and two innovations expanded my exposure to free music of all genres.  A modern campus interconnected with T1 lines, and file sharing sites.  Napster, LimeWire, Audiogalaxy, even Live365 for streaming radio.  I had all the music I could ever listen to, without ever needing to buy another CD.  Out of all these options, one streaming music site stood out.

Site and trademark registration for musicforhackers.com (MFH) appears to have occurred on Thursday, September 7, 2000.

In the registration, the site is described as providing "Entertainment services, namely, providing a radio program in the field of IT Security and Electronic music via a global computer network." 1, 2

The earliest versions of the site can be found via the Internet Archive.  It appears under construction in the first snapshot dated February 29, 2000. 3

This is followed by a June update referencing an IRC connected to 2600 Magazine, and a predicted debut of April 2001. 4

Through the remainder of 2000, the site progresses through beta versions.  It offers 32 kbps and 56 kbps streams, broadcasting 2600 Magazine's Off The Hook radio program. 5

The July 21, 2001 snapshot presents MFH in the form I first used, version 1.0.

A nicely rendered graphic is centered, depicting the MFH server (hosted on Live365) 6 passing data through a firewall into the 32 kbps dial-up and 56 kbps cable/DSL streams.  Along the bottom row are links to client applications used to play the streams.  As a Windows user at the time, I listened with the wonderfully customizable Winamp (it really whips the llama's ass!).  Linux users could access via the X Multimedia System (XMMS) while Mac users had iTunes (not even a year old at this point).  Finally, there is a link for users of BeOS, a discontinued operating system which was developed in 1990 and sold to Palm Inc. in 2001.  Stacked along the left-side of the site are links to /streams (depicted center-site), /playlist (current and three previous tracks), /home (the main site) and /null_news. 7  This was MFH's form as I discovered it while searching for electronic music stations in the spring of 2002, the intriguing tagline "Soundscapes for Compromising a Remote Host" drawing me in.

The news page provided links to such gems as:

"All your base are belong to us" - The Register 8

"Microsoft Obsecurity" 9

"Britney Spears' Guide to Semiconductor Physics" 10

"Gary Coleman Talks About Priority Queuing" 11

"Something Awful" - BetaNews 12

"Hack1ng f0r D09z" 13

How to describe being absorbed into a soundscape?

I'm writing a scene in a personal creative writing project - genre: corny, paranormal romance.  I'm chugging through calculus homework.  I'm skimming news articles and looking for new games to try.  Winamp ingests the 56 kbps stream and deposits music.  Maybe it's The Shield by Biosphere, or UT1 - dot by Polygon Window, or Kalpol Introl by Autechre.

Mentally, you enter an ocean current.  Maybe a thought "slipstream."  Your brain is taken along for a ride, swiftly and smoothly.  Surroundings fade.  There are only the task and the soundscape.  It causes an incredible sense of focus, an out-of-body experience.  Then there is the inevitable interruption.  Roommate returns, or the stream disconnects.

Returning to the regular conscious world causes mental turbulence.

It's a jarring effect, like suddenly slamming the brakes.  The dizzy disorientation of standing up too quickly.  Forcefully d-r-a-g-g-i-n-g your consciousness out of the soundscape like hauling a boot out of thick mud.  There's a re-calibration period as you adjust to your surroundings and the room takes shape.  That's true focus.

The final "first-generation" screenshot comes from April 23, 2003.

An addition along the left-hand side is a link to Jinx Hacker Wear: "Swag for Hackers and Geeks." 14  After that, the site goes dark until 2011.  It returns in an updated form, featuring a list of album art and a single listen.m3u streaming link.  This form lasts for two years, disappearing in 2013. 15

An MP3 horde replaced streaming music for me in the years between 2003 and 2015, when a hard drive crash cost me thousands of tracks (back up your data!).

After that, it was YouTube and sites like Nightwave Plaza that satisfied my growing interest in synthwave and vaporwave.  These days, I get my soundscape fix from Soma FM, an Internet radio site that, interestingly enough, first went online in 2000.  Genres and sites come and go, but I'll never forget the life events that were enhanced by the strange sounds of Music For Hackers.

In retrospect, probably the strangest connective tissue from MFH began with a track called Seven Day Galaxy from the 1999 album Oedipus Brain Foil by Randy Greif, Robin Storey, and Nigel Ayers.  Looking into other works by those artists, I discovered Robin Storey's (under the name Rapoon) album What Do You Suppose? (The Alien Question).  A well-crafted example of ominous droning ambiance, it featured several samples of a man giving a lecture on Cold War-era alien and secret government conspiracies.  Those words and music were perfectly complementary.

After some research, I discovered the lecturer was 1990s shortwave radio host and conspiracy theorist extraordinaire William Cooper.  The late Bill Cooper, whose program The Hour of the Time covered New World Order concepts in exhaustive detail, was perhaps most notable for writing the tome Behold a Pale Horse.

Strange journeys across wild lands, indeed.

  1. alter.com/trademarks/musicforhackerscom-78024924

  2. trademarks.justia.com/780/24/musicforhackers-com-78024924.html

  3. web.archive.org/web/20000229121447/http://www.musicforhackers.com

  4. web.archive.org/web/20000604080520/http://www.musicforhackers.com

  5. web.archive.org/web/20001206210300/http://www.musicforhackers.com

  6. web.archive.org/web/20010604040125/http://www.live365.com/stations/173099

  7. web.archive.org/web/20010721153755/http://musicforhackers.com

  8. www.theregister.com/2001/02/22/all_your_base_are_belong

  9. www.bbspot.com/Features/2001/02/obsecurity_server.html

  10. britneyspears.ac/lasers.htm

  11. web.archive.org/web/20001109102400/http://www.routergod.com/garycoleman

  12. web.archive.org/web/20011205053504/http://somethingawful.efront.com/jeffk

  13. web.archive.org/web/20010629010627/http://www.meydabbs.com/hack4d0gz/main.html

  14. web.archive.org/web/20030423203357/http://www.musicforhackers.com

  15. web.archive.org/web/20110207102117/http://musicforhackers.com
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