The band's own accounts agree on the place and the year: Gothenburg, 1997, and the cousins Alexander Carlborg and Andreas Wennersköld. They differ on the season. The biography the band wrote in June 2000 says the "amateur basement project" was founded in the second half of 1997, as Alexander also remembers it; the press kit of 2003 and the website of 2005 say early 1997. [1, 2, 3, 4]
Andreas, WennE, had made techno of his own since he was 15, in tracker programs such as Fasttracker on an Atari 1040. Alexander, DjC, composed simple MIDI tracks in his bedroom, and when WennE, "who by then was a tracker boy came for a visit the whole project started to grow". [1, 2]
The first work, Alexander wrote in 2003, was "Another Beat", made "with an old 386 DX 40Mhz, 4 MB RAM and a Soundblaster AWE32 soundcard". The 2000 biography is blunter about the machine: "a crap computer (PC 386, 40 MHz, it sucked even back then…), a midi keyboard and the famous pink noise generating, Soundblaster AWE 32". The sequencer was Commodore's Audio. [1, 2, 3]
What money there was went into gear: a Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold with 12 MB for samples, then the first real synthesizer, a Yamaha CS1x. Reading up on it, the two found the CS1x Archive on the web and mailed it their own tracks: "the first step towards the WWW was taken". A Roland MC-303, a Pentium at 166 MHz and an Alesis Quadrasynth followed, all of it paid for by Alexander. [1]
Having learnt Steinberg's Cubase Audio VST, they sent out their first demo. On 18 October 1998 they signed with Frontline Music Publishing, which took the rights to "Fragment of Time" and "Virtual Love". The same week the band published two pieces written for PK2oons, a freeware game by Third Eye Entertainment. [1, 2]