We don’t come by this song fairly; though composed by Cthulu (well, arranged by Cthulu – it’s a cover of a song, “Now or Never”, by flyingfish’s band, Perpetual Dream Theory), the founder of Mistigris, it was released in an ACiD artpack – ACiD-100, their final Acquisition, in 2004. Cthulu always aspired to be a computer musician, from the very earliest days even prior to Mist’s founding (hence all of the early music affiliation aspirations for The Screaming Tomato), and after a decade of chipping away at it, he was … really getting somewhere! But in the meantime Mistigris had both arisen and collapsed (it’s hard to believe that there wasn’t always a Mistigris, but anytime before August 1994 and anytime between August 1998 and October 2014 and you were out of luck!) and he was fortunate just to have any old place in which to vent this.
Finding the chiptune aesthetic fascinating from the start, The Pope’s experiments in that direction (A Night With Musidia, DODEL, ETO) compelled him to begin working in that direction also, which informed an early draft of this piece. Still, it was lacking a certain je ne sais quoi. Enter the High Voltage SID collection, the canonical pile of Commodore 64 music. Mining it for outrageous samples from memories of long-forgotten games, he used them to ice the cake and transform the song completely into something almost unrecognizable. Then it disappeared in part of the vast depths of ACiD-100’s multitudes of multitudes, forever to be forgotten until now.
For like Aphex Twin’s 1992 “We Are The Music Makers”, this arrangement also began with a sample of Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka in the 1971 movie, quoting Arthur O'Shaughnessy’s 1873 poem “Ode”. So due to the circumstances of yesterday, it was dusted off and put back on the shelf. We’ve only just made the acquaintance of Steve “Horsenburger” Horsely, but already we were able to capitalize on his extremely punctual minting of teletext gold to find some appropriately suitable visuals to accompany the track with. Thanks to everyone giving this old tune a second lease on life!
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