This page is her time on the forum. The demos she shared with the producer board between 2003 and 2007, the people she called her closest five, and the way she moved through the room. The full catalog of her recovered tracks lives at the main memorial site.
Vanessa Rose Marcussen Meier was born on August 14, 1987 in California. She grew up in Florida for five years, then moved to Stafford and Fredericksburg, Virginia, where she spent the rest of her childhood. She started composing music at age seven on a small Casio keyboard. By eleven she had given herself a stage name, VTM, and she carried it for the rest of her life.
Her instrument was Fruity Loops, later FL Studio. Her genres were happy hardcore, trance, Eurodance, and an experimental hybrid she and her friend Suzanne would later call techcore as a joke that ended up sticking. Her influences were Italian Eurodance (Dune, Blümchen, BT, Eiffel 65) and the German trance acts she heard on Eurodance radio. By the time she joined BlissCo at sixteen she had already composed more than 200 songs.
She signed up as Vj81487. The 8-14-87 was her birthday. The Vj was a DJ persona she didn't really live, but kept anyway. She uploaded demos to the forum's producer board. She traded MSN names with the regulars. She wrote slow, generous replies in the off-topic. One of the regulars she got close to was Todd, who is writing this.
Her body of work runs to nearly 700 songs in total, finished between roughly 1998 and 2007. Most of it lived on her MySpace for a decade before MySpace's 2018 server purge erased it. vanessathemusician.com is the ongoing recovery, built from copies that friends had kept on burned CDs and hard drives, returned twenty years later. Most of the catalog is still missing — the songs that came back came back one at a time.
Twelve demos Vanessa uploaded to the forum between 2003 and 2007. Press play on any of them. The player will follow you to the rest of the site if you wander off. The audio is hers, streamed from her catalog at vanessathemusician.com.
Small instrumental sketches under Vj81487. Mostly happy hardcore and trance, occasionally a four-on-the-floor experiment, always melodic. She iterated faster than her tools. Many of the tracks above first landed on the producer board.
A handful in the Our Photos thread. Most-recovered is a primary shot from July 2004. Auburn hair, dark background, looking off-camera. Self-portraits taken with her early webcam.
Verses pasted into off-topic threads. Many co-written with John, her primary lyricist on the LiveJournal side. "If You Believe" was their March 2004 entry to the God-song.com / Liberty competition.
Quiet, funny, generous in replies. The kind of person who'd answer a stranger's panicked technical question at 2 AM, then circle back the next day to make sure they got it sorted.
In October 2004 the forum ran a thread where everyone picked their five closest friends from the board. This was Vanessa's answer.
The Best Buds thread was a snapshot of one afternoon in 2004. Plenty of other people kept turning up in her MSN window, on her producer-board replies, and in the trade of demos and burned CDs. Three you'll see across this site:
Asked Vanessa in January 2005 if he could buy a CD of her album. They were going to figure it out on MSN. They traded music for years.
Ran the Maury Lovers crew with Sandra65. Kept up a steady back-and-forth with Vanessa from 2003 onward in the photo threads.
Named her album Vantastic in 2004. The closest thing she had to a chosen brother on the European side of the forum.
Vanessa wrote songs for people to hear. Press play, share a link, keep a copy on your computer the way her friends did twenty years ago — and if you have more of her tracks than what's already on the catalog, please write in.