Interview mit Vittorio D'Amore von Master Boot Record

Hi Vittorio, let’s start the interview with a slightly philosophical note. Humans are the creators of machines. Today you could almost get the impression that it’s the other way around. How do you see that?
Machines have to do what machines do. Humans have to do what humans do. A machine knows true or false. A human also knows “I don’t know,” and that’s where art comes from. If I write a note by hand in the sequencer, I’m commanding the machine. Ask it to decide for you, and you’ve flipped the relationship around. Machines don’t create us. People give up control.

Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, Konrad Zuse – those are all big names when it comes to the origins of what we today associate with state-of-the-art computer technology. Can you still remember your first computer?
Have you made music on it yet?
I had them all. I was seven when the VIC-20 (for audio and graphics capabilities, also by Commodore) and the Commodore 64 (formerly a Commodore home computer) moved into our home, then the Amiga, then every PC starting with the Commodore 286. My dad opened a computer store; at some point we had forty machines at home. I printed out software listings, labeled floppy disks, built PCs after school. I didn’t make music on it. I listened: game soundtracks, Ocean loaders (Commodore loading programs accompanied by music), cracktros (audiovisual Intros). That was my school.

What came first: the game developer Vittorio D’Amore or the musician Victor Love?
The musician – and by many years earlier: first other bands, then DOPE STARS INC. and around 200 shows. The game developer came along around 2016, when Elder0010, Valenberg and I started “VirtuaVerse,” which was released in 2020. I decided to write the soundtrack myself. That decision is MASTER BOOT RECORD.

You were already making music before and during your activities with MASTER BOOT RECORD. Among other things, you were in DOPSTAR INC. You also have your project KEYGEN CHURCH (I’ll come back to KEYGEN CHURCH in a moment). How do you remember the early days of MASTER BOOT RECORD?
A shitty moment. 2016: I had just quit my IT job, I was sick of industrial, collaborations were going nowhere. So I did something completely unhinged on my own. The “VirtuaVerse Soundtrack” forced me to write instrumental music for the first time: no vocals, so the lead voice became the voice. The sound came from a synthetic guitar that I had built for a secret project, “Hacking The Wave”, mixed with the chiptune, Commodore 64 and Amiga stuff I lived off. In September 2016 I put it up on Bandcamp with zero promo. It blew up on its own.

Sixteen releases over the course of ten years is pretty remarkable. Where do you get that kind of incredible creative energy?
I can’t sit still. And MASTER BOOT RECORD is more than albums: crypto puzzles and ARGs hidden in the records, an entire server to hack for a bonus track, a card game, a video game, more than 180 composition streams, each six or seven hours long. One thing fuels the next. In the end, only the music matters.

Of course, it’s not unusual in itself to make music with a computer. But the way you did it – at least until a few years ago – completely digital and without any “real” instruments is pretty unique. What fascinates you about creating music that way?
The limitation. An artist is someone who sets limits: this instrument, not that one. The Commodore 64 couldn’t play chords, so composers alternated notes at high speed, and that workaround became its trademark. It’s the same with MASTER BOOT RECORD: a synthetic guitar that only I have, a handful of leads, the same sounds on every album. I write as a composer, not with my hand on the fretboard. Real guitars were added with “Hardwarez” and became more on “Computer Metal”, for what a synth can’t do: palm muting, a real lead sound.

The predecessor to “Computer Metal”, “Hardwarez”, was – if I’m correctly informed – produced via stream, meaning with an audience watching along. What was the idea behind that?
Not just “Hardwarez”: Pretty much everything before “Computer Metal” was written live. I stream my Cubase session on YouTube, three or four hundred people watch, chat on our own IRC server. They come to see how a riff comes into being. Can someone steal that? I never play a piece from start to finish, and I put the album together afterwards, on my own. The risk is part of the fun.

By contrast, “Computer Metal” was written completely by you alone, as part of a meditative process. To what extent can you hear that different approach on “Computer Metal” compared to “Hardwarez”?
Deliberately, to change the dynamic: nobody is watching. Two weeks to write it, a year to finish it. You can hear the care: more time on the guitars, the same amp modeling we use on stage, tighter and more metal, and “Boot Sector,” a track without drums that Edoardo and I wrote together. “Hardwarez” was decided on in public. “Computer Metal” was decided on in silence.

How does the production of a MASTER BOOT RECORD album actually work? Do you have some kind of fixed process, or does it take on a different form every time?
Really simple. I write one riff after another, every note entered by hand. Nothing is generated. Everything is quantized, because that’s what a machine can do well. Then I close everything up and put the album together on my own. Then real guitars with Edoardo, mix and master by Joel Wanasek. The artwork follows the same rule: ASCII art (An art form combining numbers, digits, and special characters) in Codepage 437 (8-bit character set of the first IBM PC, released in 1981), typed character by character by Tainted of Fire. Some people have called it AI. It’s the exact opposite.

On your new album, you express a wide range of different metal styles through your songs. “Voodoo2,” for example, draws on death metal, while “Boot Sector” almost feels orchestral. Do you still remember your first encounter with the metal genre, and how does it still influence you today?
That’s the idea of the album: ten songs, ten declensions of metal in synthetic form. My first encounter with metal was “Kill ‘Em All”, and then came SEPULTURA, DEATH, PANTERA, MEGADETH and so on. I was mostly into thrash and death metal. Friends copied tapes for each other, and for me metal was right there alongside electronic music from day one. Back in the guestbook days, I got insulted for putting keyboards into metal. I never understood why those two worlds were supposed to stay separate.

At the same time, besides MASTER BOOT RECORD there is also KEYGEN CHURCH. The musical foundation is roughly comparable to that of MASTER BOOT RECORD, but KEYGEN CHURCH also brings in organs and even choirs. Against that backdrop: To what extent is classical music an inspiration for you?
Enormously. KEYGEN CHURCH is piano, church organ and operatic choirs: gothic, “Castlevania”, classical. Bach is the reference: he codified a language, and he is mathematics. Someone once told me that music is a code that doesn’t point to anything. Words point to things. Music points to nothing and still resonates differently in everyone. A fugue and a program are close relatives. In KEYGEN CHURCH, the computer becomes religion. Loda il codice – Praise the code.

To what extent do these two projects influence each other?
Both are computer metal: one is the machine, the other is the church built around it. They share the guitar-synth sound and the drum plug-in. Other than that, nothing. KEYGEN CHURCH is piano, choirs, and organ. MASTER BOOT RECORD is synths.

You’re now also performing live with a full band lineup. In a way, machine-generated music is being translated into a direct physical experience. How does that feel for you?
It’s the core of Computer Metal: machines play what machines have to play, people play what people can play, together. Others pretend they’re playing the machine part, or play it by hand and make it worse. We don’t hide anything: the sequenced parts are sequenced, the drums and guitars are real, and my Commodore 64 really sounds through its SID (programmable three-voice sound chip and miniature synthesizer) chip. I make mistakes. That’s exactly what it’s about: the human brings in the unpredictability that makes every show unique. Soon we’re going on tour, as co-headliner with FULCI.

Tell us a bit about the people who are on stage with you. How did you all come together?
Giulio Galati on drums was the first one there: before Covid, we played a few shows as a duo: London, Paris, then a videogame festival in Rennes. After that we did another festival in Italy, and a friend came to us and said he knew a guy who could play those parts on a real guitar. I sent him a MIDI of one of the heaviest things I had, from my “Vampire Killer” cover. A few hours later he sent a video where he plays it perfectly. That’s Edoardo “Shreddy” Taddei: 26, he gets sent around by Ibanez for clinics, and Jason Becker even lent him his own guitar on stage. I write parts that are almost impossible. He plays them. We also don’t live far from each other.

We just talked about how art created by computers can, in a way, be personified by humans on stage. Against that background: What do you think about the fact that for some people, a simple prompt is already enough now to call themselves a “musician”?
Precision first. What people call AI are language models. Code is language, and code can be tested: there they are a real tool. Generating art is different: the machine invents everything you didn’t specify. You can never say, “That is exactly what I meant,” so it doesn’t belong to you. An artist makes every decision. A prompt is not a decision. And yet, back in the day we were called cheaters because we used a sequencer. Tools are double-edged: the lazy stay lazy, the curious get stronger. Use them honestly. That’s all that counts, always.

No matter whether we’re talking about images, music, documents, or research: AI is becoming more and more important – but also more and more dangerous. Some of the leading AI companies have recently called for slowing down the pace of development. How do you assess the current situation?
You can’t stop it, just like nobody stopped the car. You can understand it and use it honestly. The wrong idea is “superintelligence”: a machine has to remain a machine, in service of humankind. And the waste: enormous energy gets burned by asking the same question a thousand times. Generate less, render more. Machines are binary; humans aren’t. There won’t be an Artificial General Intelligence in the foreseeable future: that’s marketing. They will become stronger at what they’re meant for: programming and language in all its forms. Remember: “In the beginning was the Logos.” Words and thoughts are powerful things.

What do you think Zuse, Turing and Babbage would say if they knew how powerful – but also potentially dangerous – the inventions they helped set in motion have become?
They would recognize their machine immediately: still true or false. The power wouldn’t surprise them. The confusion would: a binary machine that’s supposed to play the human, and humans who play the machine. Let the machine calculate, let the human decide, test everything. That’s the only way; everything else is marketing.

Vittorio, thank you very much for the great chat. To wrap up, I’d like to do our Metal1 brainstorming with you.
Terminator: A warning that we filed under entertainment.
Bach: The greatest coder who ever lived.
Next KEYGEN-CHURCH album: An 18-minute single, “Gloria Al Santo Sistema,” is finished and will be the next release. It comes together with a complex program. Just wait.
Sam Altman: Tech bros should calm down for once. Wrong direction, loud voice.
MASTER BOOT RECORD in ten years: Unpredictable. But it will still be human intent that writes those same sounds, one note after another.

Publiziert am 29. Oktober 2026 von Philipp Sorger