Note: I quite naturally use em dashes.

earlyneel #

Most stories are mainly about how people were raised by musicians and studied music from a young age, with the oh-so-fucking common trope of "when he/she was young, they were playing with cassettes and little sound toys".

Give toys to kids, they play with them; period.

I was not special — if anything I was probably dumber than most of my friends, with enough bravado back then to make up for it. I was not raised by musicians, intellectuals, and/or rebels. A teenager with no real sheen (except my hair was ever so naturally beautiful), a product of an average upbringing.

When I turned 18, I was able to pay for my first real computer with my own "accident" money — took a car windshield in the face when I was 12 — and since then, I have never had my teeth repaired. Before that, I was using old computers that were too slow for my dad, limited to 16 channels of XM (uuuuurgh) module.

I discovered the Internet and started making myself a website. I discovered sound trackers and, after listening to a lot of different things, I decided to try it out, put stuff online, and not think too much about it. This led me to meet people online, taught me how to speak a little bit of English (and later on, a lot more of it), and helped me make memories on the early world wide web.

Exciting times #

These were the times of IRC, bad Frontpage websites, Traxinspace and Modarchive, and other tracking groups.

It was also the time of demoparties and the beginning of netaudio and netlabels. Except I was a tiny wee bit late to the party and I had no idea how so many people were sounding this good. I was approaching my 17th birthday and I was absolutely immature (and still am, a little).

It's only much, SO MUCH, later that I actually found out that many of my "idols" back then had started making music at 12, and there I was trying to compare myself with them (classic me, always comparing myself against others).

At some point I got into Impulse Tracker II and printed out the entire manual, getting my parents to print it, and just started reading it at night.

After two changes of handles, I decided to pick a new name and live by this one. I figured it fitted the mood I wanted to convey, and I was not so wrong for the first year. Then it all went downhill.

The first years #

Got to meet a lot of people online and at the few demoparties I went to. 2001 (?) and beyond were the time of #camomille with my partner in trax, vizion. There was #hellven, #fromage too, and of course, #traxfr.

I was young, naive, and I wanted to make "cool choonz". I was inspired by everyone who had come before me, from the five musicians to the modernists at Merck Records — those were exciting times for a young French boi with too much time on his hands and a lot of WANT.

But shit, I was not ready.

I did not know where most people were finding samples, or even more baffling to me, how they were making them. I had to learn a damn bunch of things, and tutorials were just not as widespread as they are now.

But it was still much more exciting than anything that was happening in my hometown at that point. There was a feeling of discovery, novelty — shits be moving. I was still excited to go to local gigs but I had the feeling some shift could happen at some point.

Sidenote against some… #

Despite me saying those were the years and it was fun, I must be completely opened and admit that I've stumbled upon a lot of individuals in the scene that were not nice. There was gatekeeping and there was probably a lot of critics of the sound I was trying to achieve. And it was normal to me there would be. People are going to people.

And most of the time, the answer to this was "keep getting better".

And the rest… #

Because of this newfound interest, and because "shits be moving" as I already mentioned, I quickly figured out how to make nice looking websites, and one thing led to another — I got jobs making websites, which was practical since I had previously done everything in my power to be unemployed — or badly employed — for the rest of my life.

I kept making music and chatting with new friends every night that I could. I was going to bed after 2am and waking up at 8am for work — I was borderline exhausted, but yeah, eff it, "gotta make music", "gotta chat with friends".

Things were slowly changing. People were progressively leaving our little scene because real life could not wait, and some friends were also slowly moving to other cities for their studies.

But shit, we had some fun.

I was always trying to bring the net life to random places in my hometown, trying to bring people to the web. I had some fun years of livesets in bars and even in our flat. It's almost impossible to explain everything that happened, how it felt. So much connection happened — someone could get in touch with you and next thing you know, a few months later you're going to the same demoparty.

You could go to a Warp Records party in Paris and have someone come up to you and say: "hey, kaneel! HA! Recognised you from MySpace".
(True story, during Warp20.)

The petite&jolie years started, and slowly we arrived in 2010 — the year I released "here is a heart".

And I killed petite&jolie because I saw the wind change, but also because I was not in the mood for cute music any longer. Is all.

At this point I should have already done the handle dance and yet, in 2011, I had enough material to release "Your Average Best Friend". Something that sat well after the post-chip music of "here is a heart" and yet was still a bit samey-samey, and also slightly "where the fuck am I going with this".

Walking toward the end #

I won't bother finding too many excuses for the rest of this story. I had more responsibilities and needed to stop fucking around with music, get better jobs — at least to keep other parts of my life going. No way I was going through months without a computer again — it happened, and thank you very much pandur for sending me some parts in exchange for music for one of your demos. I was able to finish a track I had sitting on my computer and the demo made it much later to the main demoparty.

And there I was, making much less music because I had new jobs that required more work, more learning, and crunch time.

Finally, 2015 came and I had some material to release another album: "What You Hear Is What You Deserve". By this time I had already killed my first SoundCloud, my socials, and one of my many blogs.

Still some shits to do #

In 2015, after being absolutely gutted about how my latest album had done on the web, and how everything had truly changed vibe-wise, I was too busy preparing a move to a different country to think about the handle swap. I had to figure out so much stuff that I just parked the neel for a while.

And then came the decision to go back to it slowly, with no name, and record a few things that recently became "Traverses".

And finally #

Fast forward to now — after some fun work with evilpaul on some browser demos, and more responsibilities and grown-up shit I had to attend to — I've released once more, and once again, without changing my handle.

So done… #

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm done with kaneel.

It has served me for so many years, and I'll soon be 44. The young, angsty, idiotic tracker musician who loves the smell of cinnamon is still present but much eroded.

It's not that I want to stop making music — kaneel has been a living-dead project I felt I still had more to say about, and I believe hemispheres has probably looped the loop.

kaneel started as a soundtracker handle: a guy who really, really liked Impulse Tracker II, the tracking groups era, the netaudio scene, IRC, and so much of the old web. A guy who transitioned to Renoise (user #47, whaddap), who did the best ever infomercials for it even… a guy who got to meet some of his scene idols as equals, I'll dare say. But that guy? He changed.

Some may argue tracking is still a thing, but all that era is gone and I don't want a re-run. I'm always trying to desperately try to come back to it but nah, definitely won't do the dance of adding people, talking to them about a time they don't even know about, better move on, discover new shit.

Finally, s'effacer tranquillement takes on its full meaning.

And now, I probably can figure out what's next for the second half of my life.