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Andrew Sega

musician from America

Andrew Gregory Sega (born 20 May 1975), also known as Necros, is an American musician best known for tracking modules in the 1990s demoscene, as well as for composing music for several well-known video games. He is currently part of the group Iris, a live member of Stromkern, and has his own recording label known as Diffusion Records. Sega is also the founder of The Alpha Conspiracy project.

A song is not just a collection of melodic riffs, it is an emotional statement.

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  • I feel that music is the art which can best express the emotions which flow within us. It conveys something bigger than it is.
  • One of the most common failings [when writing a drum track] is repetition. Nobody wants to hear that same stupid 16-line bass-snare pattern throughout the WHOLE song. Didn't your mother ever teach you that variety is the spice of life?
    • "Melodic Structure", Necros, TraxWeekly #15, 1995
  • If anything I probably gravitate to things with great melodies/harmonies, and interesting/syncopated beats.
    • Connexion Bizarre interview with Iris, 2009
  • One of the issues these days is the sheer amount of music out there to be listened to. There are more bands than one could ever hope to explore.
  • Ideally, a song should contain both elements of high melodic tension, and low melodic tension. No listener wants to sit through a totally high-energy 180 BPM non-stop 6-minute ride through synth mania unless they are already busy grooving madly on some dance floor in a smoky club somewhere. Also, unless your listener is on heavy sedation, he or she will not enjoy your sparse 18-minute ambient tune which consists of the same languid piano riff repeated over and over again.
    • "Melodic Structure", Necros, TraxWeekly #15, 1995

Static Line interview, 1998

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  • Once you have a basic grasp of the theories underlying music, you can pretty much pick up any instrument you want.
  • I've been fascinated with arcane chord progressions since I was young. The trick is to keep them interesting, while still in the realm of 'normality' (otherwise the listener has no context to appreciate the progressions in).
  • Well anyone can make a 'weird' [chord] progression by randomly picking triads.
  • As with any collaboration, you have to find someone that's in your 'mode' of making music.
  • Usually musicians have egos and personality quirks which makes it difficult to form collaborative efforts (for long periods of time, anyways).
  • I'm not a big fan of asynchronicity just for its own sake - a lot of people push rhythmic variation so far that the basic pulse of the music gets lost (and the listener is confused).
  • Unfortunately, as technology has improved, that which was 'underground' now heads towards obsolescence.
  • I think that the public judges a song on the overall feel, not individual samples. If a sample contributes too heavily to the song, and the sample is recognized, the opinion of the piece goes down.
  • It's hard to quantify a 'top ten' list of songs for many reasons. I like many styles of music, and it's difficult to compare radically divergent types of music with each other.
  • If I was obsessed with making money off of my music, I wouldn't have released it for free on the internet for the last 5 years.
  • I'm much more into 'electronica' (yeah, I know it's cliche these days).
  • A lot of [my] songs have various strange oddities in them - usually this is the result of late-night dementia.
  • Sometimes if you polish too much, you rub off the shine.
  • Every musician, I guess, wants to alter the world to his or her taste in some fashion... That's part of why I write music.
  • I try to avoid categorizing music as much as I can, though. Everyone steals so much from everyone else these days, the lines between genres are very washed-out.
  • Stylistic evolution comes from listening to what other people have done and making a Darwinistic modification.
  • I'd like to see people try to sample the sound less and try to sample the style a bit more. Some people see this sort of 'copying' as offensive... I'm inclined to think the opposite - all music is built on imitation and expansion.
  • Unfortunately Sting's jazz work isn't nearly as inventive as his rock songs.
  • I think we'll soon see a new breed of musicians who have both a modern chordal sense (jazz) and a high comfort level with synthesizers and new breeds of sounds (from the electronica/techno/dj scene).
  • Music is nothing but ratios and harmonic math, anyways.

Andrew Sega Shrine interview, 2011

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  • A lot of my tracked music was written when I was very young, relatively speaking. I was very optimistic, I had finally discovered some sort of public musical outlet, it was generally a very happy time. So, the music of that time sort of reflects that, I think? By the time I started the Alpha Conspiracy project, I was older, a bit more sophisticated (and, well, cynical), and so the music got more complex.
  • We started out in the middle ages creating music which had certain desirable physical properties (for example, a major chord sounds "nice" because the frequencies are in integer ratios to each other). And then as society evolved, we created these emotional contexts for certain instruments and progressions. Major-chord arpeggios sound "happy", minor chords sound "sad", chromatic scales can sound "scary", et cetera. In the 20th century, film soundtracks reinforced this point as people associated certain kinds of music with certain visual and emotional experiences. It's a giant feedback loop, really; once you grow up in a given culture, it leaves this musical fingerprint on you which colors your experiences.
  • To impact someone emotionally, [a musical piece] has to contain "interesting" melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic content, and what defines "interesting" is up to the listener.
  • You could argue that there's maybe some mathematical interest in a Bach fugue, say, but the only thing that music does really well is "move" people -- make them feel something.
  • So, if you played a C major chord to pretty much any person on the planet, they'd say that it sounds "harmonious" (or pleasing, or happy, etc, etc). But now when you want to put chords and melodies in an ordering and make a larger piece called a "song", then that is a much more difficult process, and gets very subjective. At that point, it's not just the chords, it's the lyrics, rhythms, instrumentation, tempo, intensity, any number of other things that goes into a song... so many variables that it's almost impossible to predict how a song will affect a given person.
  • Certainly there are songs out there that are massively popular, and you can use some reverse analysis to see how they're put together, but it's difficult to reliably engineer a "hit". Add to this the constantly swirling winds of cultural taste, and you can see that the music industry is more akin to playing the lottery than anything else. Having some talent or taste can give you a bit of an edge, but it's still a huge roulette wheel..
  • Well, when music "moves" someone, it doesn't necessarily have to be in a positive direction. Some people certainly get moved by darker music, and there are all sorts of emotions which music can create that are interesting -- aggression, foreboding, anger, fear. Not everyone wants to feel happy all the time :)
  • If someone only ever listens to, say, Nickelback, their opinion [about music taste] is valid but largely meaningless since they don't bring any depth to the discussion :)
  • I think there are some objective [musical] qualities... how complex something is, how melodic, how diverse the tonality is, et cetera. But I could also make a piece of music that contains all of those and yet isn't "good" from a subjective viewpoint. For example, take Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata", Beatles "Yesterday", and Underworld's "Born Slippy", and play them all on top of each other at the same time. Great music in their own right, but terrible sounding together.
  • Imagine presenting a Nirvana or BT track to someone from the 1850's, they would probably see it as noise and not much else. Society as a whole has a much more nuanced and wide view of what music can be now. It still usually contains various rhythmic, melodic, and vocal components, but they can be combined in so many interesting ways now.
  • The usual problem with progressive rock is that the band can get so wrapped up in their own fantasy land that their music becomes completely inaccessible. "Wanky", if you will.
  • I have a love for cheesy music. I don't want to list any bands and embarrass myself ;D
  • I think [Britney Spears] is a perfect example of an artificial construct -- someone with a decent voice and a very marketable image, that producers and business people turned into a pop star. Unfortunately, I think it took a toll on her, mentally, and I feel bad for the trouble that success has brought onto her. However, her music is pretty disposable, and she doesn't have the intelligence and cultural impact of someone like, say, Madonna.
  • The problem these days is again just the sheer amount of music available, and that music isn't as important an experience in people's lives in the 21st century as it was previously.
  • If someone gave me a million dollars to run a music label, I would focus on creating a specific artistic point of view, and creating some channel to build a fanbase. Warp Records was a great example of a label that had a particular style, and many people would buy records just because the artists were associated with the label.
  • I love philosophy. It's fascinating to try to discover how perception, or experience, or memory works. I've always been a diehard relativist at heart, and I find it very interesting to read other people's philosophical ideas and how they see the world through their particular lens.
  • I think much of the conflict in the world is directly the result of people's varying interpretations of reality, or perhaps you could term it the "distortions" in their lenses. The best one can do is to try to consume as much knowledge as possible, both from your experiences, and from the words of others, in order to try to form a complete picture of the world.
  • A human is a complicated organic/electrical system, which is immersed in a culture. Try raising a monkey like a human, it won't work, you need the human's certain brain characteristics (including self-reflection) in order to create a truly intelligent creature. The brain processes inputs and perception in very particular ways, and I think until we understand the underlying processes better, there is no way to really simulate it in software. Computers will continue to be good at simplistic analysis, and raw processing power, but the subtlety of emotions is something intrinsic to the human organism and culture.
  • Religion is a simplistic answer that society has created in order to make people feel better, but there is little evidence as to its validity. There are thousands of religions in the world, each with their own "correct" answers, and each contradicting each other. For now the most sensible explanation to me is that we are the result of a lucky combination of cosmic factors, we're the "mold" that has grown on this particular planet and in a universe as vast as ours, it's expected that somewhere this would happen.
  • There may not be a high-level purpose for humanity, but that doesn't mean we can't find inspiration in the world. I think there is a combination of psychological and environmental factors that combine to create various urges in humanity -- most importantly the urge to create, to contribute something to the world, to express your personal worldview and see how the world responds. Art doesn't happen in a vacuum, and if it were only for personal gain then nobody would ever release music to the public. The process changes you, and also changes the world itself, creating ripples of inspiration which flow between the artist and the listener.
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