Back to the MIST1015 hit parade! This head-scratcher seemed to resonate with some current events, and even has a current payoff, so read on. Chasing my crazy art preoccupation following the collapse and seeming extinction of the computer artscene, I ended up in late 2003 taking on administration of a local art gallery, “The Butchershop Floor”, as part of a collective of 20. (Any artscene veteran should have had red flags go up seeing an organization so top-heavy with senior staff.) One of the 20 was my talented high school classmate Ehren Salazar, and some months into the ‘Shop’s tenuous existence (still hanging in today in a sense, transformed into home base for an improv theatre troupe) he vouched for admission of one of his polymath friends, Justin Adam, aka Birdband, one of those “pro athletes gives it all up to make art” cases like Dan Bern. For a time BB was my go-to for instant sonic wallpaper with a performative presence, as evidenced by this excerpt from a 2006 press release I wrote for the Perpetual Motion Roadshow (spun into motion by Jim Munroe – remember him?):

Primary Toquefest engineer BIRDBAND (Vancouver, birdband.org) opens, taking you on a terrifying journey through an electric guitar effect pedal vortex. birdband is a musical mule: a cross between sample-based and improvisational music. With the use of unaffected guitar, a vocal mic and a sampler; compositions are conceived in a live setting and once performed, exist as they are.

Realizing, as the MIST1015 submission countdown ticked on, that I might not be seeing repeat appearances from seemingly revived Mistigris alumni who contributed to MIST1014, I began looking up old cronies from that long period between when Mistigris went to sleep and when, Rip Van Winkle-like, it woke back up. So I hit up BirdBand – now Moon McMullen – with the call for submissions.

Moon McMullen> any format?

Cthulu> Unless you come up with something truly exotic, I should be fine. Contributions on 8-track tape or in the form of a foil hologram may be difficult for me to work with.

That was my first warning! Then, some time later…

MM> good morning! to give you an idea of what i am submitting, it is going to be music. i have a tonne, although i am likely going to submit something i made entirely on my phone. the presentation, i will also consider. the media will likely not be a file, but an object. that is all i can tell you right now!

CT> You have my attention!

Where is he going with this? I stewed a while longer, then…

MM> i have a project that i want to submit. i am able to send an image and concept statement, the actual object to follow. how are you presenting the work and when?

CT> Digital representations of all submissions are planned to go out publicly online tomorrow night
Playing up a conceptual angle that is sometimes lacking, I may need to represent the object’s mere potential now, and later document my interaction with it in some kind of digital video clip

MM> oh man!!!
let me think about how i want to present it

OK, this is building to something… and none too soon!

CT> The collection goes out tonight, so I can’t make any guarantees after about 8 pm PST. The image and concept statement would be a great start, then there’s a second act when we get to explore the actual object.

MM> ok. 8pm PST?
i can get you an image and concept statement. don’t want to cause any stress, but this idea hit me early week and i am really bent on it.
the object is a big part of it, but the image and statement describes it

And then, against all odds, the submission arrived at the last minute!

CT> … that is really something!

MM> Thanks! I hope it isn’t too far off the manifest although, certainly digital inspired art and an important project I have been waiting to launch. Seems appropriate since we did some of my first shows together. Let me know your thoughts on the actual object… Happy Halloween!

CT> it takes all kinds, something that throws us for a loop like this keeps us on our toes. this is the era of instant gratification, what’s with this suspense? It’s… deeply intriguing!

It’s impossible to know (at least, not without directly interrogating the creator, but why spoil the ambiguity? If his plan was to poach the concept all along, then why wait so long to implement the cloning?) to what extent this unprecedented artpack curiosity (artpacks always were stuffed with ads, mostly art advertising BBSes – but never before ads advertising the art itself!) was inspired by the Wu-Tang Clan’s recent recording Once Upon A Time in Shaolin, of which a single copy was made, for the private enjoyment of a single buyer. (You probably know of it due to the revelation of that buyer, hedge fund manager and waste of skin Martin Shkreli – the man responsible for inflating the price of Daraprim by 5500% – and the fictitious clause in the sale contract entitling actor Bill Murray to attemp a heist to recover the album.) Both collections of music exist as solitary objects, impossible to access through a service or backdoor – hard to imagine in this new world of streams and torrents (and simultaneously strangely resonant of the earliest days of the recording industry, where a performance in a music studio would be captured by as many recording machines as could be arrayed around the performer, and then the next dozen records would capture the following take. But I digress.)

Did the iPhone get bought by a pharmaceutical magnate? What did the price breakdown look like? Were the tunes any good? Is Steve Martin allowed to mount an extraction mission to retrieve it? Could Siri be logically duped into to sharing its contents with another listener? These and many other questions bedevil us, but not having touched the phone and not having heard the music, we can only speculate in long-form on our blog.

But there is something you can listen to! Moon McMullen (or is it birdband now? It is, because it was…) recently commemmorated an anniversary by granting a pardon to a creative prisoner and letting it go free. Here’s the story:

I want to share a story, my Vancouver friends might remember, I used to perform under the moniker birdband, since they called me bird - it also represented the numbered band they would wrap around the bird’s wrist.

The whole idea was no plan, no repeats. It was my guitar, line out straight into an old Sony stereo receiver and into my PC. i was using a Boss RC-20, my ex had bought for me a couple years earlier.

One night, shortly after the new year, exactly 10 years ago (nearly to the minute) in Vancouver, i was mucking around. I caught a flow, and continued to follow it. It was one of those unconscious moments, and the song just sort of took shape right there. it had a nice arc, and when i was done i stood there silent. i wished i had captured it… I went over to my PC to record the next idea, and saw the timeline needle moving. It was recording! I quickly stopped it so i could save - and the program crashed. NO! i couldn’t believe it. i restarted my machine, and gave it one final try - dug into the temp files, and there it was. a 60mb file. i copied it over. I had saved it. I named it Recover, well because of the file recovery, also because I was at one of the low points in my life, after a breakup. i was attacked and chased back to my house, 5 nights earlier on New Year’s Eve… and this was the moment when I decided to bounce back…

Nice to listen back to this and see where I have come. It is raw and old, although still has an impact with me. Have a listen, if you’ve got 5 minutes to spare.

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(Portrait by Ehren Salazar. We’ll see if I can’t get something by him into MIST1016.)