In December of 1994, Mistigris released a holiday-themed music disk, entitled “The Bells of Yule”, built around a five-movement epic instrumental suite from our friends at Digitallusions.  Though widely circulated locally on BBSes, it never made the leap to the internet, and when the final local boards went kaput circa ‘98, it appeared to be withdrawn from circulation… forever?

But this group of songs was much too special to lose: Cthulu kept his copy of it.  (Cthulu keeps as much as humanly possible.)  And now, two decades later, the disk emerges upon the Yuletide stage once again, 4-channel .MOD tracks remastered as MP3s, bolstered by fellow traveller holiday songs from the Mistigris glory days in the late ’90s and newer, thematically resonant tunes from Empress Play, which Digitallusions has gradually evolved into.  The 2014 collection boasts over double the songs of the 1994 one, has sprawled from an hour to 105 minutes, and as for its filesize… woah, Nelly!  The 186 meg archive is over a hundred times as big as the original release, which was in its time considered too large to mirror widely.  (Have you ever circulated an mp3 on a floppy diskette?  Cthulu has… but I digress.)

You can find the complete archive here (two days later: due to higher demand than anticipated, we hit a bandwidth limit, but the music disk is now mirrored at http://pixelwitches.com/MISTYULE.ZIP, http://bbs.ninja/pub/original/pack/2014/mistyule.zip , and http://bigbox.chattaway.com/temp/MISTYULE.ZIP), with supporting music from Melodia, Onyx, Freaq and Cthulu, or click below to enjoy the heart of the work, the updated 2014 remastered version of the original 5-part suite that got the whole (snow)ball rolling.

[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/177307886" params="auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="100%" height="300" iframe="true" /]