Intro
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Mark Sanders (a.k.a. Lord Blanka the Black a.k.a. Slate a.k.a. El Blanco) is an electronic music composer. He was among the first composers to write Amiga style tracked music on IBM Compatible PCs and he belonged to several of the earliest PC demogroups to rise in the U.S.
History
Sanders' history with music goes back to when he was 4 and saw Itzhak Perlman playing the violin. From that point on, he knew he was destined to become a violinist. At 6, his parents enrolled him in a piano school where he was selected to continue on with private lessons. At 9 he joined the local children's orchestra at his school finally getting his dream of playing the violin.
His time with the violin was a long, eventful and ultimately tragic one. While learning and developing his skills as a concert violinist, Sanders became concertmaster of three orchestras (his third and fourth year full symphonics and a selected chamber) and section leader of a fourth (Second violin, Prince William Youth Orchestra). These tenures were dramatic and culminated in 1995 with a tour of the Ural Mountain area in central Russia with a special chamber group and Quebec Province, Canada with a full symphonic. The Canadian tour ended with his orchestra winning a North American international symphonic orchestra competition where his group was the only U.S. based orchestra against a field of Canadian symphonies. He also participated in numerous trios, quartets and quintets and was guest concertmaster with a NYC based youth orchestra.
Despite these successes, his final two years of schooling were met with a great deal of pain. Finally, after 1995 Sanders could no longer play the violin and suffers from chronic neck pain and a mild arthritis to this day.
Fortunately, in his time with the symphonies, another musical interest had grabbed his attention, tracking. Sanders first started on the music scene composing music using an early version of ModEdit around 1992. After meeting with Ryan Cramer of the legendary U.S. demo group Renaissance, he was given an early version of Composer 669 and wrote several trial using this tracker. Later he graduated to the MultiTracker tracker written by Dan "StarScream" Goldstein of Renaissance. For a time, he worked closely with Phil Torelle (Darkwolf) during the period when Gravis Ultra Sound GUS tracking was common. After a short time learning the various aspects of multi-channel tracking, Sanders obtained an early copy of Scream Tracker III from members of Future Crew. It was during this time that he joined Kiwidog and Primal Scream and helped to form the initial trio of the infamous U.S. demo group Terraformer.
While a member of Terraformer, Sanders was his most prolific and produced hundreds of songs for demos (Hotel - Naid '96), intros (various), music disks (4 winds, various), games (an unpublished RPG and an unpublished racing game called Forge optioned by Bethesda Softworks) and solo releases. He grew a cult following over the years and influenced, coached (and was influenced and coached) other well known trackers such as Awesome (who later went on to make the Fast Tracker derivative Skale Tracker), LB, Vit-B, Stein, Coplan (StaticLine) and others. He also participated in numerous compos, placing consistently in the top 20. He won the Naid 96' 3channel chip tune compo with a novel 2-channel chiptune Dual Complex and placed well in the multi-channel compo. He won the '96 U.S. East-Coast Compo Retro (consisting of only U.S. based East Coast demo groups) 1-hour compo with Master of Madness and several other constrained rules compos (GC, chip, etc).
Musical Groups
After NAID '96, he joined Opiate at behest of jmx. The timing for this was poor as Opiate broke up soon after. Terraformer later broke up and he was invited to join another U.S. based demo group called 3 Some by lead coder Kneebiter. He brought along several other members of Terraformer and the two groups merged into 3STF. The merger didn't take and Sanders was quickly picked up by Djzip, headman of Scandinavian music group Kombo in 1999. He was also invited to join the now legendary Chaos Theory music group by headman Stein. His tenures at Kombo and Chaos Theory were productive and further cemented his place among those in tracking history. While members of those groups he submitted songs for both the retro 80's music disk Simulated Decade (Kombo, with co-submitters Wayfinder, Radix, DjZip and Ragoon, Norfair, Hunz, Welti) and the largest music disk ever made "Return to Stage 9" (Chaos Theory with too many co-submitters to list, but includes such other luminaries as Aahz, Darkhalo, Hunz, C.C.Catch, LizardKing, Ryan Cramer, Siren, Skaven, Stein and Tourach). After both those groups broke up in 1998 (Kombo, broke up for a recording contract) and 1999 (Chaos Theory), Coplan invited him to join Audic, his final group. After a year, realizing that he was "used up", Sanders hung up his keyboard and retired from the scene in 2001.
A low point
His time with Chaos Theory was also marked by a low-point in Sanders' scene career. He participated in the legendary Music Contests 3,4 and 5 doing well in MC3 and MC4. However, he was ultimately disqualified in MC5 due to alleged plagarism in MC3. This is a decisions which proved controversial and has garnered many mixed responses. Eventualy the offending song and the original song will be put up so that you can decide.
And presently, the future
Sanders has since moved on to life, family, education and career. However, he never forgot how much the music scene meant to him and how much he got out of it. It pulled him through some tough times, and made the good times sweeter. As a result, he is categorizing, organizing, converting and putting up every scrap of music he can find of his in his archives as a way of giving back to the scene. Future generations may learn something from it, and old-timers may just laugh. One of the guiding principles of this site is, put everything up, warts and all. Sometimes, other people's mistakes are some of the best to learn from.
El Blanco elsewhere
Sites featuring Sanders' workReturn to Stage 9
The Hornet Archive
Mod Archive Artist Page
scene.org
Bind Rebind release
Amiga Music Preservation Profile of El Blanco
Reviews
Review of BlackJack
Review of Blackjack, Maila Ae and From the Root
Review of Emery and Song & Dance
review of Bind Rebind
Review of The Gull
TraxWeekly #54, includes review of Jasmine Tea and Kanamon Worms
Photos of El Blanco at scene events
Picture of Sanders at NAID 96
Picture of Sanders at NAID 96
Picture of Sanders at NAID 96
Miscellanae
Reference of Sanders and Opiate
NAID '96 results including Lord Blanka's placement