About me

The history of the "NEmonitor" project dates back to the distant and dashing 90s, when personal computers began to appear in the apartments of ordinary citizens. It was then that Victor Demin, a simple teenager from Moscow, accidentally got into electronic music.

Internet was rather absent in those years, as it was extremely expensive and contained very little information in Russian - hence the lack of music in general. And now add the fact that the music channel "MTV Russia" started broadcasting in Moscow only in the fall of 1998.

Victor was quite musical from childhood, as his father played drums and trumpet, and at home, "Queen" and "Deep Purple" were often played from a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Add to that three years of music school on accordion and here we have a child with a fairly good ear.

The first personal computer came not from Victor, but from his friend and neighbor Boris, whom Victor visited almost every evening. At first, of course, there were games, then "picking" in the code of games, and then, thanks to his friend and now famous photographer "Rust2D", came music. "Autrchre" and "Aphex Twin" were the fathers of the "IDM" genre. It was so unusual music for those years that Victor fell in love with this music forever. Every sound was alien, the rhythm was unusual and complex, in the end it was unpredictable music, where you couldn't say exactly "now it's going to be a chorus and now it's going to be a solo". It had no boundaries and no rules! Considering the scarcity of such music in the country, Victor soon felt that the ranks of ordinary listeners were too small - he wanted to create.

Today we have thousands of programs for creating quality music, but what was it in those times, when even "Windows 95" was something expensive and incomprehensible, and there was no place to "Google"? The only thing I managed to find out about was the program "Impulse Tracker" and get it together with a small collection of "one shot" samples. It wasn't easy to master it - lack of information forced to understand everything by himself, but Victor coped and in 1997 recorded his first album "Test Of Pen" under the name "Shtift". As Victor explained - a shtift is designed to hold parts together in a fixed position. That's exactly what he was doing - trying to stitch different genres together. He was going like an uncontrollable locomotive and couldn't stop - music was created on everything that was available. In 1998, the two-disc "Elementary school" was released, which was written on the "Play Station" game console.

And then PC programs began to appear on the market. There were more and more of them, and I wanted to feel them all. That's what Victor did until 2009. It was in this year that the album "Iron ideas" was released, which was completely written on Korg ESX iron sampler. By the way, the album "Iron ideas" became the sixth of those released by different labels and the nineteenth(!) in the musician's discography. The publishers were Vorbic (England), Pulsations For You, Req Recordings and Homework (Russia).

In 2022 Victor starts learning "Ableton LIve", completely changes his approach to track creation, changes the name of the project to "NEmonitor" and starts to closely study generative music. At the end of august 2023, the debut album of the new project appeared on all platforms of the world. The release was named "Generative Show". To date, Victor is preparing for the publication of the second album, which should be released in the spring of 2024. In addition, a music video was shot, which is now in the editing stage. As Victor himself admits, his dream is to create a smartphone application that will endlessly generate high-quality IDM music in real time, so that you can listen to a "new album" at any time, rather than re-listening to the great, but worn-out hits of the fathers of IDM.