01 · LINKS
Sites, friends, music peers, and places worth visiting on the web.
03 · WEB RING
Friends, fellow travellers, and sites worth bookmarking.
04 · MUSIC & AUDIO
Artists and labels in the orbit.
05 · VENUES
Venues supporting the Birmingham electronic music scene.
07 · ORIGINS
Before Koala, before Neocities, before any of this — there was a tracker.
The Xaphoid catalogue on BuzzTunes goes back to around 2005 and was made almost entirely in Jeskola Buzz — a freeware, third-generation mod tracker out of Finland (1997). Earlier trackers like SoundTracker and ProTracker only played back samples; Buzz was the first to treat every sound as a routable plugin, with synthesis, filters, and effects done in real time by DSP rather than stitched together from pre-recorded audio. It predated the modern VST ecosystem and, because its plugin culture was freeware-only, it was the closest thing the mid-2000s home studio had to a modular synth. The long-form ambient structures, the texture-over-loop obsession, the patience for it — that all started here.