                                                           













a group that Lizard confesses to have never officially left! Moving over to the hyper-active TBL (Amiga), Lizard was behind the main soundtracks of the chart-hitting demos Darkside (1996) and Panacea (1997). And then, all of a sudden we did not hear any Lizard aural masterpieces... that is, until 10 years later, where he successfully did a very welcomed resuscitating trick, and joined the ranks of Scoopex!

Magnar Harestad (real name) was born in October 1974, in a small farm house in Randaberg, a lovely Norwegian municipality just off North from Stavanger. It is believed that the first inhabitants of Norway settled in this area, more than 12000 years ago. No wonder then, that even to this day, Randaberg is still a very profitable agricultural community, and produces over 80% of Norway's parsley output. Magnar is the youngest child in a family of four older sisters and a brother. His father passed away when Magnar was only 10 years old, so he spent his teens living in the farm alone with his mother, since his older siblings had moved out of town. Magnar had a keen and eager interest in music since his early childhood, where his days were mostly spent learning to play the piano.
Randaberg youths were no mere farm boys in the eighties, and the C64 was as popular in this town, as it was in the rest of Europe. Indeed Magnar remembers that most of his class mates had one. So did his best friend Glenn Ivar Jacobsen, who used to be a heavy weight swapper of 5 1/4" floppies filled with games... and scene demos! And so Magnar kid pestered his mother to no end, and got a C64. "I was amazed by what was possible to do with computers, and all the great productions intrigued me into getting more involved in the scene community", he says. Lizard spent all his time trying to code and draw pixels on the C64. "I found others to be better than myself in both coding and drawing. I didn't have the patience to pixel great full-screen pictures either. However, programming in various languages is something I have always loved and still do from time to time". In 1987, by a matter of pure chance, he got hold of a copy of Chris Huelsbeck's Soundmonitor. He was literally hooked on his new-found interest in chip-based sound, and his sisters vividly remember a 13 year old Lizard making music all night long and going to bed at sunrise!

The pattern based audio sequencer posed a true challenge to compose large scale songs through the sound chip of the C64, using drums, bass, melody and chords with special arpeggio techniques. So Lizard moved over to different trackers on the Amiga, where during his active scening period (1990-97) he probably composed around 500 songs of various genre; from diskmag melodies to chip tunes, from bouncy demo tracks to acoustic tunes. In 1991 Lizard won his first freelance assignment from a Switzerland-based Amiga game developer. This set his mind on turning his composing hobby into a lifelong career. Whilst at the utmost peak of his scene years, he was headhunted and offered full-time employment at MagiCom, the game company which in coming years evolved into FunCom. Being only 17 years old at the time, the offer was kindly neglected, by insistence of his family.

On Amiga, Lizard even tried to work with other musicians, although he confesses that the results did not always end up being very successful. "Differences in skills and opinions usually make these collaborations not work out so well. I remember my very early attempts at making a midi project with Geir Tjelta and Trond Lindanger, a remix of one of their Moz(ic)art C64 songs. We did that in OctaMed using my synths. It just didn't go very well. First of all, we wanted the end-result to be different, and secondly we didn't have enough skill or equipment to achieve the final sound quality we wanted. It is easy to aim too high with what is possible to do when different persons and influences are fighting to take control over the mixing process"

In 1995 Lizard took the challenge of organising the year's edition of the infamous Norwegian seasonal prime event, The Gathering.
"Never try to organize a party for 1500 people when you are aged 20, especially together with four almost total strangers and no money at hand!", he says. According to Lizard, The Gathering 1995 was merely a one man show with a very strong will to make it happen. "I envisioned myself being hanged from chains from a high window every time something went wrong. It was frightening and a speed-trip all in one go! It was a 5 day marathon of non-stop hard work without sleep. My girlfriend picked me up after all was over and I slept for 26 hours. After breakfast, I went back to the sports center to clean up everything with the help of my mother. It looked like a bomb had hit the building. I had only one day to restore everything back to normal before a national broadcasted TV sport indoor event was to take place". The Gathering 1995 had many incidents, ranging from power failure to overlooked factors like toilet and shower cleaning. "It didn't go as smooth as I hoped from day 1, and most of the organization crew we had talked to beforehand didn't even show up, so I was almost running the whole event on my own. A few dear friends stood by my side to help, and with their efforts things improved as the event rolled on. I am certain that the majority of the visitors never noticed the constant fire-extinguishing we had to deal with in the background. Most of the visitors were happy about their stay at the event. That made me happy too, and it felt very comforting".













In no time at all, he grabbed the opportunity, which has kept Lizard full-time employed for the last 13 years!

During this period, Lizard was also playing in a band. "It was a great way to interact with others, and build up songs by not controlling everything yourself. We did go into studios and record a few songs, and we even got some releases. But my experience is, even though playing in a band was great fun and we learned a lot from each other, it really didn't pay back compared to the time and efforts you invest".

Subsequently Lizard moved to Oslo in 1996. While being very dedicated to his work, spare time for making music became very limited and restricted. He did not even have the time to join another band. Years passed without any new demoscene releases, and whilst his name was still present in the member list of the many groups he was in, Lizard was a ghost from the past. "I never left any group by making any official parting or saying goodbye to everyone, and I don't think any of the groups I was part of ever kicked me out either. I kept joining other groups to widen up my possibilities to release my work, as well as to meet more skilled and creative sceners". Indeed, over the years Lizard was active in groups like Anarchy, Andromeda, Lemon, Noiseless, Pure Metal Coders, Reflex, Scoop, Spaceballs, The Black Lotus and The Silents, amongst the many.
Lizard had lived the demoscene dream. It was time to get rid of the reptile skin, and metamorphose into Magnar. Magnar moved over to Sweden during the summer time of 2000. In the next 2 years he arranged a few counter-strike LANs for 50-100 gamers, who were mostly friends, and friends of friends. Organising is in his DNA, and old habits are here to stay! "I must admit that those events have been a lot more successful than The Gathering. It is just so much easier to make things happen as you get older and find better connections, using established office buildings with proper tables and chairs, and a decent internet connection and LAN environment is a good starting point for a successful LAN party"

Today, Magnar resides in the south side of Sweden, together with his wife Anna and his two lovely kids, Melody and Amadeus. They are the exclusive users of their father's old C64 and A1200 computers, and use them mostly to play retro games. Magnar also likes to work out regularly, by swimming in his neighbourhood SPA pool or by doing aerobic or
muscle exercises.

In his full-time position of Service Delivery Manager, he is responsible for projects, finances and production teams at WM Data, a subsidiary of LogicaCMG, one of Sweden's leading IT consultancy companies based in Stockholm. The company is active in the Nordic countries and has around 9000 employees, with main areas of interest in commerce and logistics, banking, finance and insurance, telecommunications and medicine and health care. Magnar admits that the demoscene activities in his teen years had a positive impact on his career. "English language skills and the overall understanding of how hardware and software work together, are important in the  tasks I perform. It is also nice to throw out a question to old scene friends and get helpful feedback when you don't have a straight answer yourself"

In 2007 Magnar come across many of his old scene friends whilst browsing through Facebook. "It was really nice to get to know what happened to old friends, read about their new projects and jobs, see pictures of their homes and family, seeing them all grown up with kids and wife, loosing hair and getting bald. Old acquaintances and dear friends suddenly reappeared, and one thing led to another" Magnar found himself onto bitfellas.org, and many sceners started to contact him about his old Amiga modules and even offering him to compose new music for upcoming demos. "It feels good to be part of the scene community again, and it also seems like a lot of other old sceners are having the same experience and coming back. As a hype, it might very well soon die out again. But it is great to catch up and remember the old days! I am amazed by some of the personal developments I've experienced in old scene friends that have renewed their contact and presented their recent work, like the latest productions from Gloom and Amusic. I also enjoy seeing old friends like Jogeir Liljedahl releasing his second CD and that Bjorn Lynne and Oistein Eide are still very actively making music."

Ditching his old scene name of Lizard, Magnar opted to use his real name from now on. "I think Lizard was a nice pseudonym, but I personally cannot relate to it anymore for the new music I do outside the scene. My goals have also shifted towards more commercial music, and I believe that Magnar has a better commercial value than Lizard". Indeed there have been numerous other Lizards in the demo scene across the years, even other musical king of lizards! Right now Magnar is an active member of Scoopex, working on different projects. He is still semi-active (as he himself put it) in TBL, with no production involvement,
just on a social level.

When thinking back to the Amiga days, Magnar says that he does not miss the times of the 4 channel trackers. "I never liked to have such limitations on older computers, as it affected my possibility to be creative". When he is asked about the new skool scene of today, Magnar makes a funny face and exclaims, "Suddenly I feel very old!"

Magnar says that today he is mostly inspired by songs with great arrangements and overall sound. "I never listen to the lyrics in music. My focus is always on the instruments and how they are performed. Whenever people ask me to play a song on the piano, I am always frustrated about not being able to sing the lyrics, but my brain just totally lacks the interest in catching up and storing that information". Since he is always on the go, he rarely has time to even think about motivation or inspiration. "I need to get the composing done whenever I have a few hours off from my kids, wife, work, fixing things around the house, travelling or social parties. My songs are therefore always composed after midnight. Night hours are the only time I find quiet enough to actually get motivated to compose without interruptions. I can find inspiration from watching movies or listening to songs on the radio or even surfing the web. But usually my song ideas build up from singing in the shower or sitting at the piano and playing something at random. When I get a song idea in my head, I use my mobile phone voice-recorder function to record the basic structure of it before I forget. I then sit at the piano doing a live record stamping my feet and clapping my hands for percussion effects! I must look a bit weird sometimes! I find that the best way is to first start off by doing a recording of my live performances on synths/guitars, and then add more and more sounds and effects afterwards. I very seldom build up a song structure only by using the computer, unless I am travelling and only have my laptop at hand"











He also uses Sony Soundforge as a sample editor. "It is a lot easier with today's software to control everything through your progress with a new production. You can apply track effects with automation directly in a controlled environment, in your virtual mixer. Most of these features used to be achieved by routing signals using aux sends from big physical mixers to different hardware boxes. It was just more work with cabling before, and much more messy. Today, it is very easy to get a straight result right away, and you can basically mix and master everything while actually building the song. Before you needed to rent a big sound studio to be able to make professional mixing and mastering. Before, I was a lot younger with less money. I didn't have the possibility to purchase all the necessary gear to produce great songs. Today, most options are virtualized through software, and many of these plug-ins are even available as freeware software" 

Magnar's ambition is to compile a CD album. His next milestone is that of delivering a lasting impression to listeners all over the globe. "I am composing the tracks, and when I feel satisfied, I aim to release that to the general public", he says.

Magnar also says that as long as other sceners want to cooperate with him, to make new productions, he will be involved in the demoscene for as long as even 10 (or more) years in the future! 

by Mop (Alcatraz)