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History repeats itself.  Teenagers, enamoured with the multimedia potential of their powerful new home computer, apply themselves to digital creativity, finding a wide audience for their innovations.  But I’m not talking about the PC, MS-DOS based ANSI artscene, rearing up circa 1992, but the community revolving around the Commodore Amiga, a revolutionary machine which just celebrated its 30th anniversary.  (The Amiga itself repeats splashes made by Commodore’s earlier Commodore 64 and even the Apple 2, but those are distant enough second-degree connections that I will choose to overlook in this particular post 8)

In terms of computer art, Amiga users were living in palaces of high art when IBM-bound PC users were huddled in stinking mud huts, unaware that we were as blind and deaf to the nature of computer art as the denizens of Plato’s Cave were to reality itself.  We thought 16 colours in our computer games was hot stuff while we watched special effects produced on Video Toaster-equipped Amigas appear in millions of colours in our favorite TV programs and movies.

Where was the Amiga “scene”?  They had BBSes PD and underground and, sure, even a squished variant of ASCII art, but due to its limited community and showing up at the party a little early, they missed being a major part of the artscene (well, Electronic Arts made it the powerhouse for the 16-bit generation of game developers, knowing that here at last was the power to make games sexy – and for a few years published tools and applications (like Deluxe Paint, source code just liberated) needed to seed the future video game industry.  So they were players in the digital underground in the sense that they were developing the games our couriers were warezing 8)

But don’t let me go on about the visionary Amiga scene at too great length, because (despite my entry at the Amiga Music Preservation site) … I was never part of it.  But these guys were: EuphoniX broke the mold for the 604 music-tracking scene – first in to make a splash, greeted and name-checked by all and sundry who followed… and all using only a masterfully minimal four channels!  Their period of scene activity was so brief (at nearly four years of “active” activity, Mistigris outlasted nearly all – but never had a chance to distinguish itself with a big splash until October 2015 , by which point the competition had really dwindled 8) but their manic method of what could be described as “rapid prototyping” resulted in such a flood of output that their moment on the stage felt like a genuine era.  This fan already took a crack at boosting his teenage obsession – over ten years ago!  (That write-up provided the basis for this collection’s infofile; it has been mildly groomed and updated.)  I won’t put you to sleep by rehashing it yet again.

The collection – as complete an omnibus of the complete tracked works of EuphoniX as is possible, plus a few tracks by satellites of their crew – can be enjoyed in-browser courtesy of pc.textmod.es , as day 9 of Mistigris’ May Music Madness… forensic retrieval of their cassette tapes continues apace, but we’ll simply have to let you know if and when they are successfully recovered, remastered and re-released.  For the time being, we’re all about the .MODs.