Portal story: SceneSat story by Ziphoid
SceneSat started in 2008 out of the fact that I (Ziphoid) had been broadcasting for SLAY Radio for two years but was kind of let go from there, primarily because of the simple fact that I had a hard time sticking to playing C64-related tracks only since I wanted to show off the whole of the scene with all platforms. At that time, Hazel had set up his own little demoscene radio called ‘Radio Future Vision’ where he had a lot of tracks from the demoscene playing on the rotational.
When I got the notice that I had to leave SLAY Radio, I spoke to Hazel, Fnord and Sir Garbagetruck and we decided to go for it, to bring out a proper demoscene radio with live shows from various parties and events. We quite quickly decided on the name and got our nice logo created by my dear friend LMan and could get started on establishing the radio. We chose the name SceneSat with the meaning of us being a satellite around the scene, trying to cover the demoscene all over the world. Hence the Sputnik in our logo, since that is an iconic depiction of a satellite.
During 2008, we were building the system behind the station and were doing various small shows as test runs. We decided on doing an official launch in February 2009 to get out of the beta period and for that, we prepared a compilation of unreleased music, specially made for us by various friends and composers around the demoscene and its surroundings. It ended up to be a 4-CD compilation with 54 tracks ranging from orchestral to EDM to rock to chillout to trance and everything inbetween. During the launch show, we played all of the tracks through during an almost 6 hour long show where we gathered a bunch of people in my apartment and had a really good time. The first thing that happened was that the server crashed because we hadn’t switched off a lot of debugging stuff, so it couldn’t really handle a lot of people joining at the same time. Once that was fixed, we could at least enjoy creating the show in its own chaotic way. The build-up to that show – with an amazing intro created by Hazel – was really exciting and thanx to the show replaying tool we’ve made called reLive, we could re-live that moment by following the chat log when listening back to the show since we couldn’t really follow it live due to the stress with everything crashing.
After that, we have been at numerous parties broadcasting and narrating on top of video streams, but have also helped organizers utilize our streaming system to handle broadcasting themselves in case we can’t actually be there in person. We aim at being the go-to place when it comes to bringing the parties to the sofasceners, and I think that we’ve managed to become that pretty well. There can still be improvements on that area, of course, but that’s what we’re working on today, by rebuilding our system to be more friendly to work with and also be able to let organizers manage it themselves if they want to.
Apart from rebuilding our system, we’re doing continous work on our reLive show replaying tool and will try to take that as well to a new level, hopefully with a new mobile app as well. One other major thing we are doing is compiling more volumes of our Sound of SceneSat compilations. Right now we’re up to volume 5 with all volumes available on all major streaming outlets as well as on Bandcamp at https://music.scenesat.com and with an own web player at https://sound.of.scenes.at/. We hope to start working on volume 6 sometime early 2020. It is truly amazing how people are willing to contribute to these compilations and I really hope that will continue in the future.
The SceneSat crew now consists of about 20 people with various level of involvement. The biggest obstacle for being involved is this little thing called life. Many of us have families or work that limits the amount of time available to do this, but we’re doing what we can to work around that. Having more people involved now than before also allows us to rebuild the system way better than we’ve been able to do before when it mostly have been me and Fnord who have been doing any sort of development and system configuration. We are slowly progressing in that regard and hope to have something new to show people in a not too distant future.
One of the major things we’ve noticed lately is that even though people are interested in watching and listening to broadcasts from parties, there’s also a lack of continuity with regular off-party shows from our end. This causes the community to shrink a bit compared to what it was before, when we used to have a lot of people involved on our chat channel on IRC. This is probably due to the lack of steady shows as well as the fact that people are getting older and busy in other levels of life, I guess. We will try to change that too, at least when it comes to making more steady shows. 🙂
A really nice thing to see is that people are taking us showing up for granted and have really helped keeping our interest up through the years. Also, we couldn’t do what we do without the support from the community. We rely on donations and after pumping in way too much private money through the years, it’s great to feel that we get help from a lot of small, but highly appreciated donations every now and then. When we had a serious server crash, the community stepped up and helped us solve it within a couple of weeks. Amazing! Also, the SoS compilations are actually bringing in some much needed money as well, thanx to you people listening to them on the streaming outlets and buying them at our Bandcamp. We also have a registered non-profit assocation now, which helps when we’re trying to organize things such as merchandise and possible an event or two in the future. We have our thoughts about setting up either a SceneSat demoparty or another kind of event, such as a concert or something, but that will need a lot of planning and preparation, so right now it’s only an idea.
To sum it up, what we aim at is to grow by creating a system that can allow us to both handle shows and the radio with easy as staffers, but also allow party organizers to utilize us for their streaming needs and handle it pretty much by themselves. More shows is always a goal, but that goes hand in hand with what’s going on in our lives. At least we seem to have been making our mark in the demoscene history by doing all sorts of broadcasts from a lot of events and we will surely keep doing so for as long as it’s fun to do. 🙂 If anyone would be interested in helping out in any way, don’t hesitate to contact us at info[at]scenesat[dot]com or just ping us on any social network or at a party we’re attending.
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