The weblog True Chip Till Death got an in-depth interview with Oliver Wittchow, the very creator of the Nanoloop-gameboy sequencer. Oliver tells some very interesting things about the history and the making. I want to highlight some “magic things”, that are also remarkable for the locally interested people. He speaks about the first public performance of Nanoloop:

The first public performance I did with Nanoloop was in spring 1998 at a ‘lo-fi contest’ at the Liquid Sky club, Cologne. I started selling it in late 1999, initially only within Germany. Worldwide sales began in 2000.

And it seems, that this event was somehow a historical one, also with other interesting contributions. Oliver continues:

I remember one guy who brought a matrix of chemical test tubes, filled with different levels of water. Below the tubes, there was an array of small electric heating plates which were controlled real-time. When a tube was heated, the water started boiling and made a sparkling sound. Some tubes were closed with rubber corks which popped up when the water boiled. Due to the different filling levels, the sparkling and popping sounds had different frequencies for each tube so that he could actually play melodies via the popping corks and create some very fine and crispy sparkling pads. The sound was recorded with one or more mics held in place very close to the tubes. A very elegant concept I think.

This is what music is about, isn’t it? And this is over 10 years old now! Eventually the cool netlabel-people at netaudio-cologne are going to repeat and go on with things like that?

PS: This is the first part of the interview at True Chip Till Death, the second will follow shortly.