Subliminal Extacy
#03
01 апреля 2001 |
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Complex 99, And The East/West Divide
Complex 99, And The East/West Divide By Gasman / RA A recent issue of the PC disczine Hugi included a report on CCOO0, in which Raver explained that Russia has an 'internal' scene which mainly works separately from the rest of the scene, because people prefer to use the Russian language instead of English. However, I've recently come to the conclusion that there is more than just language separating the two sides of the scene. I've seen a lot of argument about Russian and western musicians, and I decided to try and find out some facts from the results of the Complex 99 competition. First, an explanation: I know that it's not totally accurate to talk about "the Russian scene" - I really mean all the countries of the former USSR, but 'Russian' is a bit easier to say, that's all. Maybe other people see it differently, but for me this is where I've always imagined the boundary between the two halves of the scene to be - some time in late 1996, Russian demos arrived suddenly in the UK, and it was a shock to discover that so much activity was happening unknown to the west. Anyway - the organisers of the Complex competition took the unusual step of publishing the individual votesheets along with the full results. This meant that I was able to count the results again, but making two lists this time - divided into western voters and Russian voters. This is what I found: "What if only western sceners voted?" 1 Sad Tune Yerzmyey (W)122 2 For Majam Andy Fer (R) 92 3 Twister's Andy Fer (R) 88 4 Startrash TDM (W) 80 =5 Eliminator X-Agon (W) 78 =5 I'm A Powr Ravager (R) 78 7 Peace TDM (W) 73 8 Driver Kriss (W) 66 9 Memories Mast (R) 63 10 Nothing Zhenya (R) 62 =11 Utopia Catman (W) 61 =11 Seeing MMcm (R) 61 13 Seduction Factor 6 (W) 59 14 Satellite1 Black Lord (R) 53 15 Broken Joy A.Gobuzov (R) 50 16 Back2Life Blk Groove (R) 48 17 Kettary's Siril (R) 45 =18 Draw Kriss (W) 40 =18 Concept Sector (R) 40 =20 Flowers Siril (R) 37 =20 Needle McMaker (R) 37 22 IWTEnlight Black Lord (R) 35 23 Shock Phant Lord (R) 2 "What if only Russian sceners voted?" =1 For Majam Andy Fer (R) 59 =1 Twister's Andy Fer (R) 59 3 Nothing Zhenya (R) 54 4 Memories Mast (R) 53 5 Flowers Siril (R) 47 6 Satellite1 Black Lord (R) 33 =7 Kettary's Siril (R) 31 =7 Driver Kriss (W) 31 9 Peace TDM (W) 25 10 Seeing MMcm (R) 22 11 IWTEnlight Black Lord (R) 21 12 Eliminator X-Agon (W) 18 =13 Seduction Factor 6 (W) 17 =13 Startrash TDM (W) 17 15 Back2Life Blk Groove (R) 16 16 Utopia Catman (W) 14 =17 I'm A Powr Ravager (R) 13 =17 Needle McMaker (R) 13 =17 Concept Sector (R) 13 20 Sad Tune Yerzmyey (W) 4 =21 Broken Joy A.Gobuzov (R) 0 =21 Shock Phant Lord (R) 0 =21 Draw Kriss (W) 0 Incidentally, these results suggest that the overall winner should be "For Majam", whereas the compo was officially won by Andy Fer's other entry, "Twister's Dance Machine". This is because the crucial vote was made by a South African scener who wasn't included in either of my lists :-) So, what can we see from these results? Firstly, we can see that the Russian voters gave the top 7 places to Russian entries. In fact, the average score given to the Russian music was 28.9, while western music only received an average of 15.8. With the western sceners, it's a different story. They awarded significantly higher votes to western tracks - on average a western entry scored 72.4, compared with 52.7 for a Russian entry. But the most surprising difference between the lists is the place reached by Yerzmyey's entry "Sad Tune". This attracted top scores from many of the western voters, bringing it to first place in that chart, but on the Russian side only one voter mentioned it at all. At this point, I should remind you that the voters did not know the identities of the musicians. But I think it's true to say Yerzmyey has one of the most recognisable styles of music in the scene - whether you love it or hate it - and it's possible that this may have influenced the voters. Maybe some people weren't even conscious of it, and they'd just associated that style of music with good or bad. Or maybe you can explain it by saying that people found out the authors of the entries, and voted for their friends. OK, "friendly voting" will happen at any party (just look at the Eurovision Song Contest ;-) ) - but we can't allow it to become a major reason for the scene being divided. I don't know what to believe - either there's a deep cultural reason that makes Russian and western musical tastes incompatible, or the two sides are just being unfriendly. Either way, it shows how hard it is to encourage co-operation in the scene. We're seeing real evidence of the split already - I would have liked to investigate other party results in the same way as this one, but sadly very few parties have attracted as much East-West co-operation as Complex. Only Forever 2e3 has come close, and those results tell the same story - a Russian entry won the compo, but on average the western tracks received more votes from the (mostly) Czech/Slovak audience. Other parties have only been supported by one side of the scene, and this sends out a bad message - for example, Russians might look at the results of Paradox and think that there are no good composers outside Russia, while westerners look at Doxycon and come to a similar conclusion. I hope that my research has shown that there's no sense in saying that one side of the scene is better than the other. Instead of arguing, there are two things we can do. The first one is my suggestion to compo organisers. If you want to preselect entries, that's fine - nobody wants to judge 30 or 40 tunes at a party. But why not invite people from both sides of the scene to be on the preselection jury? Otherwise. how can you claim that your compo is really showing the best of the scene? And to everyone else on the scene - musicians, coders, graphicians or just voters - don't just discard the activities on the other side. Contribute to the whole scene. Observe the whole scene. And most of all: Open your mind. Gasman / RA - Full results of Complex 99 are at: http://www.fortunecity.com/skyscraper/emacs/49/f_compo.html PS. One more thing... don't believe any of those party organisers who claim that counting results is very hard work that takes several weeks. I counted this lot up in about an hour :-)
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