Assembly 2010 Begins

I thought I would have blogged about the demoscene and Assembly before, but if I have I can't find such a post now. So, today at noon I turned my TV on, and it's likely to stay on for the most part until Sunday. Why? Because Assembly 2010 has begun, and a live broadcast from there is shown on the local cable network.

Assembly is, of course, Finland's biggest demoparty, and one of the major demoscene (here's the Wikipedia article if you don't know what that is) events worldwide. Now, I'm not a scener. I've never been involved in any kind of demo production, nor have I ever even been, physically, to Assembly. But I've had an interest in the demoscene for a long time. I first became aware of it sometime near the turn of the millennium when I was introduced to tracker software (another Wikipedia link). Many of the sample tunes I downloaded, and loved, were by a guy called Skaven (aka Peter Hajba), from the legendary demogroup Future Crew. I love the now rather retro, oldschool sound of 90's tracker-produced electronica, which was largely associated with the demoscene.

Like I said, I've never been to Assembly, because a) it costs money, b) I'd need suitable friends to go with, and c) if I went, I'd really want to participate in some compo (which for me would most likely be some music compo), and that's easier said than done. But some years ago I discovered AssemblyTV, which is streamed online and also broadcast on our local cable network. Watching the compos and other stuff is fun. And as I once again managed to miss all of this summer's conventions, this is as close to any major event as I'm likely to get anytime soon...