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Day 3 of Mistigris Music Madness brings us the second music disk release of our friends in Sonic Equinox, browser-audible at textmod.es (and still no closer to a solution to the SE mysteries posed in the previous post.)

The infofile (see above) might help to shed some light on things: at this point this group is now out of the hands of its mercurial musician and artist founders and under the guidance of a more even keel, programmer (of eg. PabloDraw) Eto – the man who either named himself after his BBS’ initials or came up with a BBS name to match his inscrutable nick.

See also above: ANSI visuals by Questor (Spawn in 1995?  You don’t say!) from the application generator.  In truth, you won’t see any of these visuals over at textmod.es , but sho ‘nuff you will be hearing the songs blasting in stereo* out of your computer speakers, tunes by SE stalwarts Beyond Inertia, Dark Avatar, Lethal Impact, and the one-man wrecking squad (sorry, in the first draft that read “cottage industry”) Onyx.  It doesn’t look like their tunes are part of an internal competition anymore, so maybe that was just a passing fancy.

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Day 2 of our project to remember the disappeared is off to a bumpy start, as I’d anticipated spending six days doling out “lost” music disks by our fellow travellers in 604 would-be demogroup SONiC EQUiNOX only to find them all sitting pretty (if, admittedly, in stark neglect) over at at the Hornet Archive.

Regardless, we got them sent in to textmod.es, so we ought to come up with something to say about them.  The files speak for themselves, to some extent, but context is invaluable.  Not much is on the public record regarding them – let’s see what was written on the topic in the annals of our house organ KiTHE e-mag (typically making use of

Equinox Music Interface Kit (EMIK) by Hexx of Sonic Equinox for music-playing capabilities 8):

* [SE] Sonic Equinox
* Founder: Darkforce and Illusionary Enigma
* Duration: Several months… a few small releases.
CT: A demo group featuring artists from Union, CiA, and iMPERiAL… Has some fabulous musicians, but suffers sloth…we don’t DO much…
Surreal Logic: Err, another musical group that I neglected to point out is SONiC EQUiNOX (love dem funky caps =), which seems to have a LOT of talent, and are releasing a lot of good MODs and S3Ms.

These glib, in-the-moment summaries gloss over some important facts: SONiC EQUiNOX (as SL notes – himself a recent rediscovery, come to think of it – gotta love those small “i”s) actually pre-dates MiSTiGRiS by some months, initially taking as its home base the BBS of Darkforce, “House of Style”, before he changed his mind about demoscene adventurism (and his UNiON affiliation 8) and doubled down on ANSI art domination with Integrity.  It must have been with some desire to get a foot in the SE door that I wrote a lit for House of Style back in the pre-Mist iMPERiAL days: if you want to learn how to make computer music, maybe the thing to do is first figure out where the computer musicians are and hang with them.

It must have succeeded, since I was admitted into the BBS, if not the group: what precisely could a poet do for a demogroup, anyhow?  Pen scrolly bars in iambic pentameter? (Heey… maybe that’s not such a bad idea!) I ended up writing a lyrical motion graphics poetry treatment for Onyx’s song The Tragedy of MacLes (which you may be lucky enough to see reconstructed and presented in MIST1015), but Dr. CPU was never able to do much with it.  I get the feeling that the first year or so of Sonic Equinox was spent basically biting off more than they could chew – I vividly recall plans for a mega loader presentation of Freaq’s module Black Noise, but then by December of 1994 there we were releasing it in The Bells Of Yule, apparently dead in the water over in SE.

the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
near

(Pardon the poetic license; old literary habits die hard.)

This is their first music disk release, dated October of 1995.  That would have synched up with Mist’s first anniversary, and remember – SE predated us!  It takes a special kind of patience to keep a group together for over a year with zero releases, which as I can testify from the Mistigris World Tour… is bad for morale.

Anyhow, I could go on and on (seriously, read any of my infofiles), but I have more forgotten Sonic Equinox releases to discuss and more genuinely lost music to prepare and package for your enjoyment.  (Speaking of infofiles – none here!  So my cobwebby memory really is our best resource for insight into the early days of SE!)

Day 2: SE_D1095.ZIP

(Another strange memory: a vivid recollection that these music collections were distributed intermittently as .ARJ archives rather than .ZIPs, inadvertently discouraging their download and distribution with their arbitrary and mercurial non-standard iconoclasm (or did it milk an extra 5k of compression out of tracked music?).  But somehow, all the existent archives are .ZIPs, so you’ll have to take my word for it.)

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May Day, May Day!

…   - - -   … 

S O S

Save Our Songs

There’s the idea that once you release your work out into the online world, it stays there in some way, shape or form.  The existence of archives dedicated to preserving computer artwork furthers this notion, though sadly a lot slips between the cracks.  Specifically, computer music most often got overlooked.

In October of 1997, we released a three-part celebration of our creative achievements, split (for various reasons) into three disks: disk A, the lowrez art; disk B, the hirez art; and disk C, the music.  Disks A and B made it into posterity; disk C only survived as a corrupt fragment someone aborted while uploading to an FTP site… until now.

During the leadup to our 20-year reunion pack MIST1014, Platinum and Beatle helped to apply modern data recovery tools to the corrupted specimen of MIST3YRC.ZIP which had become the sole remaining representative of the release, allowing successful extraction of a pathetic 5 songs of its intended 23.  We’re thrilled to put the full music disk back into circulation, allowing all the songs to be heard in their entirety for possibly the first time since their host BBSes went down for the count circa 1998.

It can be downloaded with all its files (and a substantially updated infofile) at bit.ly/mist3yrc , but more excitingly we are proud to announce its exclusive hosting at pc.textmod.es , where the songs can be heard playing right through your web browser, functionality not currently offered at any of the other artscene archive websites.  (There’s another exciting trick in the eaves, but we’ll start with that one.)

But this is just the start.  For the first ten days (at least!) of May 2015, May Mistigris Music Madness will be in effect: we will be re-releasing “lost” collections of computer music daily, most of which never made it out of the circle of area code 604’s tracker-music BBSes, and none of which anybody has been able to listen to in this century.  Some of them will be past Mistgris productions, but we will also be offering up substantial quantities of recently-recovered music from fellow traveller groups and artists whose names you may have seen guesting or being greeted in our infofiles: we always stood in solidarity with our area code, and ensuring that their creations gain representation in the wider historical record is one way of furthering this.

Day 1: MIST3YRC.ZIP, reconstructed.