Blasphemy Demography

Byter/Blasphemy, Slyde/Blasphemy

After Louis Lane, various co-productions with Purple and Moral Handy Candy, Blasphemy is at the peek of its popularity. The Danish group is one of the representatives of what other call the "Danish style", a demo style mainly based on design than technical excellence. Hugi asked Blasphemy to recapitulate so that our readers learn more about the development of this group.

History.

Back in 1995/96 a group of computer-interested people from a high-school in Aarhus, Denmark met each other and decided to team up, with the intention of making stimulating audio/visual demonstrations and drinking obscene amounts of liquer. None of them had any actual experience in that field, demo-making that is, but tried to compensate with enthusiasm and energy. Soon Blasphemy consisted of Slyde, Dreyer, Vampire, Pukmaxi (formerly Morphine), Byter and Shameless, the same people who make up the group today.

Us. The Blasphemy Crew.

Dreyer: Dreyer is the musician in Blasphemy. Unfortunately he insists on tracking on his old Amiga 1200 which he fanatically loves, not accepting the wonders of 32 channels and 16-bit samples. Being generally "retro", he prefers the old demo-style music. Dreyer is very hard to impress, so when he speaks highly of something you've made, you know it's gotta be good. Or oldskool. Besides that, he wears colorful clothes and funny sunglasses and is a bit of a party-animal.

Vampire: Vampire's role in Blasphemy is a bit vague, since he was drafted in '97, and after that mostly has provided moral support while spending most of his time in the army. Vampire is the only one we know who can eat two pizzas in a row from the legendary Alo Pizzaria. He can also drink a lot of beer, and he usually tries to convince everybody else to follow him.

Pukmaxi: Pukmaxi is the secret X in Blasphemy. Or maybe the three secret Xs. His train of thoughts boards at funny stations, making him able to produce absurd ideas and inspiration no one else could have dreamed of. He was the one who modelled the cube with holes in it, seen in Louis Lane. He grows his own weed in his mother's greenhouse and is generally a very entertaining person, if you can cope with his sense of humour.

Slyde: Slyde thinks in hexadecimals. Or binaries sometimes. That is alt.celebreties.binaries. He is mainly the coder in Blasphemy, but sometimes he gets weird ideas about being a graphician or modeller and makes something you in no way can convince him is anything but great. When he codes though, he is in his element. He stares straight through his monitor and into the void for three minutes, then types furiously for another couple of minutes, and *poof* out of nowhere jumps a radial-blurred, texture-mapped, bilinear, s-buffered effect. Or he goes "I coded this effect yesterday..." - "Oh, is it cool?" - "I don't know, I haven't tested it yet". But he's always up for a beer or two when he's not busy with his obscure hobbies like playing tennis or reading niche books by Portugese writers.

Shameless: Shameless is also a coder, but hasn't been very active lately, busy with his studies. He compensates for his short stature by talking very loudly, usually about programming or math problems. He takes it very personal when one of his friends has a faster computer than his, so he spends a lot of money on hardware. His weird brain makes him able to think out new optimisation algorithms while drinking beer or eating hot-dogs, granting the surrounding people with weird eureka! experiences. Relative to his size, Shameless is probably the biggest boozer in Blasphemy.

Byter: He is the one who makes weird 3d objects while smoking Caine's cigarettes and scratching his short red hair. You can be sure he also has Photoshop and Illustrator running behind Max, mostly to show off his dual Pentium II. He is always ready to comment on any graphic design he sees and tell if it's cool or, more likely, if it's not. Besides knowing his way around graphics software, he also has some basic programming skills, he even wrote lowlevel stuff in assembler years ago. When he is not sitting in front of his computer, he is probably watching some movie, trying to memorize all the cool quotes by his favourite actors.

Our releases.

Zero Gravity

13th at tp96.

Our first production, written in ugly assembler code. Nothing special, but we all had a great time and learned a lot making what would become the only production featuring the entire Blasphemy crew. Vocals by Tina Dickow, an upcoming Danish singer/songwriter.

Beamed

3rd at se97.

The only Blasphemy intro so far. Music and code by Slyde with help from Dreyer. Who knows what ever happened to those cute little lightballs?

Sense

5th at se97.

Colorful, slow and moody demo. Coded almost from scratch in about a week in unoptimized C++. This time we used 32-bit true-color as you may notice. Colors everywhere.

Mundai

2nd at tp97.

This time we wanted to do an up-tempo demo. We spent quite some time working on it and originally meant it to have a "story" of some kind, but it ended up just having a certain "feeling", which is probably for the better.

Urknall

6th at tg98.

We decided to make a demo but we were not too inspired or focused. Therefore, this is a somewhat messy and incoherent series of effects. The music was made in a rush and it didn't improve things when Slyde had to change some patterns at the party-place to make it fit.

Louis Lane

2nd at se98.

This is one of the productions that make us feel like we have succeeded in making something nice. It's all very plain and simple, but the way the music works with the visuals gives it this lovely feeling. We wanted to do something clean and stylish in a high resolution, inspired by great productions like te-2rb and 24/7. Skrig/Prone joined us during the making, contributing with design and ideas, and Carebear/Orange played the drums. We got the music the night before the party, so we didn't sleep until after the deadline since everything had to be put together and timed at the party-place.

After this, we promised ourselves to finish our future productions before arriving at a party. We didn't keep the promise.

The design in Louis Lane turned out to be quite like Plastik by Purple, which was released at the same party. We had previously talked to Purple about doing a co-op production, and since we apparently had very similar ideas regarding design, we decided to work together on a demo for The Party 1998.

Kkowboy

3rd at tp98.

We spent quite some time in "megabyte", the Purple/FudGe hippie commune, discussing design, screen modes and effects with Vipa and Thorsten, while Craft/FudGe was hanging around, trying to steal our secrets and do general sabotage. He didn't succeed though, and we managed to finish before deadline after some intense work at the party place. Mellow-d composed some music that fitted the style perfectly, and the result was a demo that we were, and still are, very pleased with.

Moral Hard Candy

1st at se99.

Our latest production is based on a tune our Suomi friend Mellow-d sent us and some ideas we had been working with during the spring of '99. We wanted to move away from the very clean style of Louis Lane and Kkowboy and do something more "dirty", with photographic backgrounds and several layers moving around the screen all the time. We arranged a photo-session, walking around the city of Aarhus taking snapshots of weird things, which gave us material for the graphics, although an old telex manual also played a significant part in the design. Since we (Byter and Slyde) were working two jobs at the time, we were forced to work night and day, taking time off from work, in the week before the party.

The Blasphemy web-site is located at http://xxx.blasphemy.dk/.

(This page is now defunct, in 2009. The URL http://www.blasphemy.dk/ leads to a blog. Use pouet.net to get the releases of Blasphemy.

There were two more releases, which were made after this article: "Megademo 2000" and the Java demo "No you dont".)

Slyde/Blasphemy & Byter/Blasphemy