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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.)