How things can work out the way you didn't plan to.

30/12/'94 8 o'clock in the evening. We were coming back from The Party 94. While we were eating somewhere on the road in Germany, we came up with the idea to create a flemish 'group', We were : Hal9OOO , Binary Slave (both SPA/SPC), HC, Tasmaniac (both Hypernova) X-Bow (Traxx), and me Sleeping Dog/The Natives.
We planned to make a group called ? that would be a group which contained Traxx, Hypernova, SPA/SPC, Digital House and The Natives. The original idea was to continue making productions as we were used to do e.g. Hypernova could release a demo called yzx and publish it under the label, that would be like 'Hypernova Presents a ? product called yzx'. The Intention was to make the Belgian scene better known to the rest of the world and to meet eachother a bit more than once in 6 months on a party.

We decided to talk about it with the rest of our groups at home. So we did. Some of us had some exams coming up so we waited till after the exams for the first meeting between the different groups. TT(Traxx) made some arrangments and we had our first meeting in Aalst, in the famous Traxx crew bar called Cafe 'Bizarre''s attick. Almost all groups showed up except for Digital House. We took 2 hours for finding a name. Pure was chosen out of names as M(usic) A(nd) G(raphics) I(n) A(rt) , ISO 252, etc We decided to make co”rdinators for each division of the group. Tasmaniac became Coding Co”rdinator (CoCo), Blue Adonis : Music Co”rdinator (I think also Blaze Runner got this function, I'm not sure anymore) , HC & Model3OOO Gfx Co”rdinators, if I'm not mistaken Hydran was chosen for Rendering Co”rdinator and I was chozen as Network/Internet Co”rdinator. Some people also thought about Tragedy (Amiga) joining us but nothing on that matter was arranged. We also did a long talk about a party we might start to organise but I don't think I'm in the right position to tell the world what happened to it. We also decided to set up a mail network between Neo Tokoy, House Adonis, The SoundCave, Coreland and The Velvet Demosite so that we could communicate faster with eachoter. The Velvet Demosite was chosen to be RC 'cause some people already called it for GSN/DGi etc. As the net was up and running the next morning we started to organise things.

A whole discussion came up on how to release things. Some people thought it was the best to continue the same way we were doing and release all separately our demo/intro/music with a big label Pure on it. Others thought the releases were ought to be verified before releasing it, this would mean that there would be some kind of a quality label. The third possibility was to let all the former groups disappear and make one big group. No more The Natives, Hypernova, Traxx, Spa/Spc, Digital House.

That week I met Blaze Runner on Irc (Blr on #coders and #trax) he told me Spa/Spc was making some arangments with Seyda / Realms. I didn't know anything about it, we decided to check it out with Binary Slave and Hall themselves. At the Meeting'95 we did so.. they stated to me that there were just some good contacts and that Realms was going to give them some gfx for their upcoming production. Everything sounded allright for me. Since nothing was decided yet officially about the way of releasing stuf we released our 3 productions at The Meeting'95 as a Pure production by The Natives. I thought that if we won the compo the quality label woudn't have been any problem at al.

The next pure meeting was held in sunny Knokke and the Spa/Spc problem showed up again. Tasmaniac told he was going to phone Binary Slave and let him decide in or out... one week later he had the answer Spa/Spc was out. We had some long discussions about nothing. Purple Zebra and Uncle Bob spent their time making up a new chart 'Den Diksten Nek van Pure' which was gloriously won by Blue Adonis, Tasmaniac coming second and me in third place. Meanwhile another important subject came up. Are we going to dump the old names or not. There came a voting. Afterwards I realised we voted completely the wrong way : there were about 6 ppl from Hypernova 3 from the Natives, 10 from Traxx and only 1 from Digital House (Hi MeAgain.. how are you doing ??) everybody had a vote.. we should have voted one vote / group. Anyway... the majority of traxx and hypernova was in favour of letting their old names fal. Purple Zebra and I discussed about the subject with the rest that we didn't really like it but if it was the majority we would follow. So we had a party, celebrating the death of Hypernova, Traxx, Digital House and The Natives. Meanwhile I told Tasmaniac it thought there were going to be problems from both Digital House side and our side. As we came home the troubles began. 2 of our other coders and our main musician didn't agree on the subject ... we decided to turn back the clock. Neither did the Digital House crew. Pointer made his statement loud and clear in the statement We've never officially told we're in so we are not! That was 5 minus 2 to go. We (The Natives) decided to set up a poll in our own group. It was rather clear fast enough. From the 9 people that voted only 2 were in favour of leaving the old name. Those 2 were Uncle Bob and Balex-T from the former Zion crew whom had recently joined us.
It was rather obvious that we left Pure. (yes I'll get back on the reasons soon...) I told Uncle Bob and Balex-T they were free to join pure if they wanted to but they chose to stay with us. (Probably geographical reasons made them make that decision also)

I've been asked a thousand times why we left Pure. Here comes the final and last explanation.
The main reason is that eventually Pure didn't became what it was started for. Pure had become a new demogroup and not an institution to make the flemisch scene grow toghether. We (The Natives) had no intention at all leaving our goold old roots 'cause we were doing fine as we were. We had fun, did some releases when we liked to do it and had our friends all over the scene. We simply felt no need to leave that situation and join another group. Second reason is that we think pure was too big.. we were like 10 coders 25 musicians, 5 gfx artists and some other people in it. This meant that all the work would have been double or even tripple. The co”rdinator would have said draw a tree .. we would have had 5 trees and only the best would have been used. In the end it probably would have been a group of 5-8 people working their butts of and the rest doing nothing. Our coders and artist want their work being published good or no good. Third one, was that i felt there was no good communication in despite of the network. The net was in my opinion a bunch of shitty area's telling we were doing nothing serious... there were about one or 2 area's that really had something interresting in it. The main communication was still the voice calls between the different sysops. I also felt that in the net only the sysops were active... and no other people.

Maybe we left to early, maybe not... we think we can better do what we want the way it is now..

Afterall I think it's funny how of the original founders of the group only 3 are left in the group... We were clearly not the only group that had different toughts than Pure.

Finally I want to state clearly that we have no troubles / hard feelings / personal problems / etc .. towards the people in Pure, we wish them good luck in all their future activities and we hope to have some good times with them also. We also hope they're not angry with us for leaving their group, afterall not that much happened in those 2 months except that we learned to know eachother a bit better. And was that afteral not one of the orignal ideas ??

Sleeping Dog/ The Natives