Mark Dastmalchi-Round

Mark Dastmalchi-Round

I’m a DevOps architect, musician, animal lover and all-round geek. If it’s got shiny lights on it, makes loud noises or purrs/wags its tail when you stroke it, I’m all for it. When I’m not writing code or fiddling with computers for a living, I produce my own music and provide the low-end rumble for my band in West Sussex.

Flashback

Updated:

This is my rock/metal cover of a tune from the classic Mahoney & Kaktus Amiga demo, “Sounds of Gnome” (http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=5583). Specifically, the tune was called “Jobba” and the intro also borrows from the intro song on The Great Giana Sisters.

I loved this track when I was a kid, and watching M&K demos (along with the other late 80s/early 90s classics from Anarchy, Rebels, Animate!, D.O.C. etc.) was what drew me into the UK demoscene (shout out to any old members of NFA!). I remember watching this on a friend’s A500 and it was one of the first things I ran on my first Amiga (A600, eventually traded up to an A1200).

As well as getting me into the scene, the Amiga also kick-started my interest in making computer-based music. Mahoney (who wrote the original tune) was also responsible for NoiseTracker which was also my first introduction to making music for myself. I eventually ended up on OctaMed and now my Amiga is solely there for retro sessions as I’m on Cubase these days. But I still miss the DIY approach of Trackers, and I learnt so much from playing around with other people’s MODs.

The Amiga was a real life-line to a geeky kid like I was back then, and it set me on my path for both my career working in IT, and my hobby of making music. The Amiga scene gave me friendship, an escape from troubles of teenage life, and showed me that it’s only imagination that holds you back from achieving something that’s supposed to be “impossible”.

So this is a tribute to the Amiga scene really; I’m not exactly the worlds greatest guitarist but I had the time of my life recording this. I also stuck a shot in, right at the end of my pimped-out A1200 (HXCE CF, Blizzard 1230, 16Mb. Indivision fixer) playing the original demo and track.

Hope you enjoy, and remember : Only Amiga Makes It Possible!

Update: I also wrote to Pex “Mahoney” Tufvesson letting him know I’d made a tribute to one of his old tracks and we exchanged a few really nice emails. He was also kind enough to include my video in an fascinating talk he gave at a scene conference.

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