FWSC FastTracker Music – Personal History

The musical side of FWSC was probably never planned, structured or even meant to become a “project”. It was very much about learning applications.

The name grew naturally out of the same world as FreeWare Data and FreeWare Data/2 (FidoNet 2:200/213) – late nights at the computer, curiosity, and the feeling that anything you made was worth saving just because it existed. The BBS era was chaotic, experimental and completely unpretentious, and the music followed that logic perfectly.

How it started 🎧

4 Tracks

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I didn’t approach music as a musician. I approached it the same way I approached BASIC: try something, see what happens, break it, try again. The results weren’t tone-deaf, but they weren’t exactly polished either. FastTracker became the tool of choice simply because it worked, and because it made it possible to test ideas quickly – even when those ideas tried (and often failed) to imitate techno or rave. Kristian (Miazma) pointed out more than once that I had a habit of hammering snares way too hard, which was probably fair. Still, rhythm was already “a thing” for me back then, and that might be why genres like DnB, jungle and house eventually became so interesting.

The FWSC prefix appeared for the same reason the name appeared in my software – it was the identity of everything I created at that time. If I wrote a program, it went under FWSC. If I made a module file, it ended up with FW- in the filename. It wasn’t branding. It was just me putting a small signature on whatever I played around with.

Working With Miazma 🤝

One part that stands out is the collaboration with Kristian Olofsson (Later also Miazma). We weren’t trying to make releases. We weren’t thinking about demos or charts or reputations. We were just two people creating and trading modules.

Tracks like Tranceflash (there is no official release on this one) exist because we thought it was funny – and because the tools made it possible. Whether it became a “Hardcore Edit”, a “Hypermix” or a random experimental version didn’t matter. What mattered was the process: that feeling of the screen glowing at 2 AM, the modem humming in the background, and FastTracker patterns scrolling by faster than the music itself.

The Sound of That Time 🔊

FWSC music wasn’t polished. It wasn’t refined. It didn’t try to be anything. It was:

• short experiments
• trance and ambient ideas
• half-finished riffs
• a few working loops
• sometimes chaotic, sometimes surprisingly good

Files like FW-PIANO.XM, FW-GUITA.XM, FW-AMBI.XM – these were snapshots. Little fragments from a time where every small test felt like its own project. None of them were meant for an audience, which is probably why they still feel honest today.

What It Means Now ✨

Looking back, the FWSC music represents the same thing as the rest of the era: a phase where creativity was effortless because there were no expectations. No plans. No goals. Just the pure joy of making something, storing it on a disk, and letting it sit there.

Most of the tracks survived only by accident – backups, old folders, forgotten archives. But together they form a tiny musical footprint of FreeWare Data. Not a career. Not even a catalog. Just a timeline of experiments from someone who wanted to create, and who found a way to do it with the tools that existed at that exact moment in time.

That’s what FWSC music was. And, honestly, that’s enough.

Later Musical Identity 🎶

In the years that followed, I continued making music under several names beyond FWSC:

• Tomas Tornevall (my own name, used for more personal or experimental work)
• TMM (an early alias during the transition from tracker-based music to more refined styles)
• DJ TT (used for electronic, trance and dance-oriented productions)

These identities represent the evolution from small FWSC experiments into a more defined creative path, even if the early tracker era remains the foundation of it all.