Destro drew a couple of variations on this two-tone Mistigris ANSI art logo, tinted to reflect the palette of the given scroller it would be placed as a header atop. This particular version was originally released in January of 1996.
Today on Mistigram, as counterpoint to our earlier RIPscrip vector image of Sam Kieth’s Image Comics antihero The Maxx… an entirely different RIPscrip vector image of the same character by a different artist, this one drawn by Kestrel (better known for his ANSI art, but – this was no stumbling first try!) and released in our June 1996 artpack. Now the only question is what is the “ETHiC” that it is promoting?
Today on Mistigram, an ANSI art Mist logo by Quip that stood patiently on the sidelines for years and years until finally seeing the day of light along with a great deal of shelved art in the MIST2000 collection released in early 2016.
Today on Mistigram, a December 1994 ANSI art Mistigris recruitment promo by The Extremist, an homage to his compatriot Eerie and his legendary “Join Relic, Fucker!” campaign.
Today on Mistigram, another all-time contender for the “smallest complete Mistigris logo in textmode” award. This one was drawn by flash-in-the-pan Cue for Aggression and was released in our August 1995 artpack.
Today on Mistigram, we feature another historical piece of colourful newschool ASCII art by crowd favorite Weird, who beefs up her creative letterforms with some sassy smiley faces. It is admittedly an odd place to break the word “Mistigris” in two, but where would be less odd? This piece was first released in our July 1997 artpack.
Today on Mistigram, a cartoonish mad scientist from the desk of Quip, who drew this ANSI art not-a-Mist-promo (actually it advertises the BBS Geeksta’s Paradise, but the logo at the bottom got cut off). It was first released in January of 1998, but later saw thematic re-use in the photo announcement (99 weeks ago!) of our 2014 revival, along with: the unique Mistigris coffee mug Etana made me for a turn-of-the-century birthday party, the volume of Poetry Comics, the physical-ANSI-art Duplo, and the USB floppy disc drive containing a copy of the limited-edition 10th-anniversary TABdisks from way back in 2003.
Today on Mistigram, this ANSI art Mist logo appeared atop a far more substantial and impressive piece by Diamond Traveler, our area code 418 ace in the hole, never known to have appeared in any others group’s artpacks. (Due to Instagram’s square aspect ratio demands, we only offer you this peek into the window at present.)
Especially seen at higher resolutions, this particular logo is resonant with the imagery of metal band logos, to which we say…
m/ m/
Another piece of très ‘90s vga (hirez / high resolution) artwork by syncr0w (who I just found, will keep you posted with developments) entitled “Psychosis”, released in our 3rd anniversary artpack in October of 1997. Not only does it contain two Mist logos, but I’m also a big fan of all the 1s and 0s. Do you think they spell out a secret message?
Nettwerk in its earliest days (heh, somewhere there is a chat log of an online meet 'n greet by Sarah Mclachlan at the Nettwerk BBS in which she greets TABNet!) enjoyed the scantiest of scenes around Skinny Puppy and Front Line Assembly, and sure, we hosted a couple of instalments of the “New Media” demoparty in the early '90s, and okay, we got raves filling our warehouses same as everyone else did, but basically… none of it ever amounted to much of anything! Ben Potts won a Gravis Ultrasound and a few rooms full of people danced while out of their gourds, but in the end things looked pretty similar to how they looked at the beginning.
So here we are in the 21st century and finally at long last those of us not living in New York, Berlin or Tokyo are beginning to have some options presented to us for public enjoyment of music that emerges from a SID chip or comes out of a Game Boy’s beige housing. Mistigris alumnus bryface has been travelling the world as opportunity allows for the past few years, witnessing, networking with and learning from chiptune events and organizations all over the place, and I guess he’s reached the point where he’s concluded it might be nice to be able to enjoy a show without having to get on an airplane. I don’t know if there is or is not any formal relationship organizing as high up as the Northwest Chiptuning Facebook group but for a hyper-local focus we can now look to the Vancouver Chipmusic Society to dish us all up a healthy serving of square, sine, and sawtooth waves (a static channel is extra, though.) (Do you think that they are an actually-registered society in accordance with the Societies Act of BC, with rules about membership and annual general meetings? We felt crazy when we registered our accordion community, which has to be at least as niche as chiptunes, but it was an essential step on the way to being able to tap into grant funding to support our activities. They can get away without registering for two or three years as long as they keep good financial records. But I digress!)
The Vancouver Chipmusic Society’s flagship event will be dropping on the 604 next Monday night, September 26th, at the Fox Cabaret, with doors at 7:30 pm and bleeps and bloops until … late. (Its calendar says midnight. Then an hour is reserved for FidoNet traffic, right?) You can find out all about the event, Øverfløw #000: Vancouver Chipmusic Showcase, over on Facebook. The featured live performers include Norrin_Radd, meckz, Fastbom, and that bryface character, plus Melodia (who just this week released a music disk of an hour and a half of .XMs thought lost forever in 1999!) and uɴɪᴄ⊙ᴅΞ (among others) will be audible as part of the open mic portion of the evening. (This means that at least three of the performers at the night have appeared in past Mistigris artpacks… we’ll simply have to get to work chipping away at the others so we can improve that ratio 8)
If you’d like more information and find my account of things a little too insider baseball, bryface did an interview on the subject for Roundhouse Radio and you can get another take on it over there. And now, I’ll turn it over to their potted press release!
LIVE CHIP MUSIC | OPEN MIC | LIVE VISUALS | RAFFLES | MORE
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
ADMISSION
$12 online va EventBrite
http://overflow000.eventbrite.com/
$15 at the door
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Introducing Vancouver's very own chiptune event series! Enjoy a night of live electronic musicians pushing the limitations of old gaming platforms' sound chips to create fresh music in a diverse range of styles - electro, pop, drum n' bass, metal, jazz, funk and everything in between.
Experience the raw, crunchy waveforms of the NES/Famicom, Game Boy, Amiga .MODs, Commodore 64 SID tunes, and 16-bit SNES/Genesis-era samples pumping full-blast through the Fox Cabaret's pristine sound system. Prepare to have your expectations shattered repeatedly as these artists use and abuse these vintage platforms and formats in unexpected and forward-thinking ways.
This special first installment of the show specifically highlights our locally-based talent - a killer lineup internationally recognized for their individual dedication to the craft of chip music and the low-bit arts. Join us in the celebration of new life given to vintage systems - this is definitely a night for tech/synthesis/gaming enthusiasts alike.
// MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 26th, 2016
// DOORS OPEN 7:30pm | MUSIC STARTS 8:00pm
// $12 ONLINE/EARLY-BIRD | $15 AT THE DOOR | 19+
/// MUSIC
> NORRIN_RADD (Vancouver, BC)
> 16-bit soundscapes + Retro City Rampage OST mayhem
> MECKZ (Victoria, BC)
> insane progjazzclassical NES/famitracker mastery
> FASTBOM (Stockholm, Sweden)
> demoscene/cracktro-style Game Boy / C64 anthems
> BRYFACE (Vancouver, BC)
> eclectic + progressive Game Boy electrofunkbreaks
/// VISUALS: alterus (Victoria, BC)
Today on Mistigram, this chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table – sorry, of fellow traveler computer artgroups Mistigris, Twilight and iCE, all of whose artists made contributions to this larger BBS ad for Clockwork London that you simply can’t see here in a single Instagram window. Most of it was drawn by the elegantly effortless Kitiara, shedding ANSI art like ripe fruit from a tree, but the thing tying it together was ths logo up top by our man Quip.
Juuuust below where this excerpt cuts off, you maybe could originally find a rhyming lit jointly written on the subject by myself and Lady Blue, a conspicuous omission from our reunited crew of the presentday. While I’m airing everyone else’s embarrassing juvenilia, it’s only fair that some of the dirt I dig up is my own:
Along the spreading fog banks
down beside the River Thames
stands a model of precision
no one questions or condemns.
Amid the gargoyles' grimaces
its face shines in the night;
Precise reliability
among a pie of spite.
Undaunted by reality;
not marred by trivial need.
Relentless in its purpose -
never sows a barren seed.
A beacon of eternity,
stalwart against the dark
in accuracy paragon -
it's always on the mark.
The cycles of the city
match this undisputed rhythm.
Its movements push the hands' extremes
but never come to schism.
It counts a beat unstoppable;
its cant can't be undone.
The tattoo is the pulse of life,
from the heart of Clockwork London.
The evocative caption: “circles - the ascent to power, the rise of the people.” What does it all mean? Go figure.
On again-off again Mistigris house composer Melodia, today of Empress Play, composed a ton of .XMs in FastTracker 2 circa 1999, many of them dabbling in the use of aggressive electric guitar riffs recorded by a friend, and the whole slate of songs – nearly two dozen of them, over an hour and half’s worth – was lost in one fatal hard drive crash around the turn of the century, seemingly forever.
However, the story doesn’t end there: while moving house this year, a data CD backup of the files came to light. Given this rare second chance, we opted to put the files, rudely displaced some 17 years into the future, into circulation as quickly as we could. In addition to the electric guitar, you can look forward to such late-‘90s phenomena as remixes of Enya and Fatboy Slim. (No, not at the same time.)
The attached video is a music video Melodia made for one of the songs, The Hangman’s Hoedown, arranged from clips from the 1976 spaghetti western Diamente Lobo. For the rest of them, you can download the entire collection directly or if you prefer, you can stream the songs individually from textmod.es. Enjoy!
Today Mistigris released “1999”, a musicdisk of lost songs by @empressplay from that year. https://t.co/jV7i8J00Wa pic.twitter.com/9mHKnmNIuh
— Mistigris (@mistfunk) September 19, 2016
Today on Mistigram: a newschool ASCII art logo by Dead Soul excerpted from a larger piece, released in our Mistigris World Tour stop with Dark Illustrated in May 1997. (phew!)
Today on Mistigram, an ANSI art Mist logo by Elysius, used in our August 1995 infofile. Short and sweet – just the facts, ma'am!
Today on Mistigram, this Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, trapped in the sewer behind a luminescent trail of mutagen ooze – all rendered in ANSI art by Pure Voltage, released in our May 1998 artpack. PV didn’t create a /lot/ of ANSI art, but there was always something interesting going on in his pieces.
Today on Mistigram, this utterly unique ANSI art Mist logo drawn by guest Spear for our May 1998 artpack. Part graffiti, part circuit diagram – I’d never seen anything like it before or since!
Point Grinch at a new creative tool and he rushed to go give it a whirl. If no Picasso, he was nonetheless a polymath of computer art. Here he was giving RIPscrip vector art a whirl, yielding a recognizable (if stylized) rendition of Sam Kieth’s Image Comics antihero The Maxx, from our July 1997 Mistigris artpack. (I love the way the letters are throbbing with muscles just as much as the hero is!)
Today on Mistigram, another contender for “smallest textmode Mist logo ever drawn”, this one used as a header by the legendary ANSI artist Eerie in a piece released in our very first artpack way back in October of 1994. Artists of a more diminuitive calibre might labour beneath the misapprehension that the top and bottom curves of an S are supposed to join in the middle, but a visionary such as Eerie is only too happy to disabuse them of such provincial notions.
Today on Mistigram, we have this piece of newschool ASCII art by Crystal Meth, a dark horse Mist member who always flew under the radar despite an appetite for learning through experimentation, now hopelessly lost forever. This work is exceptional by 2016 standards, but was just another grain of sand on the beach in 1997 – the piece was released in (perhaps our best artpack of the classic era?) our Mistigris World Tour joint release with Fire in April of 1997.
Today on Mistigram, we featured this (excerpted) piece of ANSI art by Jughead (a name we’ve heard lots of lately!) from the Mistigris World Tourstop with Dark Illustrated in May of 1997. The piece was just touched-up enough by Samurai of Dark to make it a joint production, but we take all the credit for it and consequently claim bragging rights with the giant logo on top – it’s not a Mist promo, this portion just gives that false impression.
Today on Mistigram, we celebrate this cursive ANSI art Mistigris logo generously drawn for us by Mattmatthew when he set up this very Mistfunk Tumblr site on our behalf (go on, look up at the header) on the occasion of reviving for our 20th anniversary in October of 2014 and … having things to say about it. With a beautiful letterhead like this at the top of your page, you’re almost protected from writing anything barbaric. (Almost!)
Today on Mistigram, we have an ANSI art Mist logo by Jughead, who celebrated our 2nd anniversary 21 years ago! I joke that if we were just to clone the numeral “2”, we could be ready for our upcoming 22nd anniversary!
When I courted Illarterate to make a submission to last year’s Mistigris artpack, I just expected to unlock permission to reprint classics from his back catalogue. Instead, he asked me what kinds of subjects characterised ANSI art – and suggested that he would attempt to transpose them across textmode mediums to teletext. I told him, well, superheroes, especially form Image Comics, and toon subjects such as Calvin & Hobbes and Animaniacs. And, well, here is what we got!
The fun piece was destined to be a central showpiece in M-9808, our August artpack-as-website – a rising ANSI talent in an era of textmode decimation… as long as we could hang on to one active ANSI artist (our “blade of grass” to hold on to) we could maintain our connection to our BBS, MS-DOS traditional foundations from which to move forward. But making things work as a website was a stiffer challenge than anticipated… putting things in a precise position on the screen in both major browsers – Netscape AND Internet Explorer! Manually generating thumbnails… making sure that links weren’t in mixed case… trying to arrange for tracker music playback in-browser… re-colouring ASCII art with HTML colours to appear natively in-browser… integrate the works with profiles of their artists, folding in interviews and contact information. In short, there was a great deal of additional work associated with making a webpage of the artpack above and beyond the baseline work (already no cakewalk) of simply putting together an artpack to begin with.
Because we knew we were only going to get one shot at clearing this gap, we delayed the pack’s release (a not uncommon practice in all points of our classic history up to 1998, a year of unprecedented monthly releases), because to be taken as a credible move forward, it had to be done right. And, you know, if additional submissions came through during this lengthy process, it would only serve to make the final product all the more appealing! Of course, it was more work – new submissions needed to be SAUCEd first, then they needed bitmaps and thumbnails generated to represent them… then space needed to be made in the appropriate, alphabetical, location in the HTML tables to accommodate their inclusion. Now, note the artist’s participation in the ANSI and HTML versions of the memberlist and infofile! Phew! A lot of work, but worth it!
But the reverse is not applicable. Things dragged on so long that skeptical artists (come on, the Mistigris World Tour was a much more unlikely venture than this bold step forward!) began withdrawing their submissions and releasing them elsewhere. Now all those steps still needed to be taken, but in reverse, and what do you get at the other end but … a diminished collection. “Nice framework! Pity about the lack of worthwhile content!”
Sad to say, this piece was withdrawn – growing impatient with delays (and the outside appearance that we had died – with the collapse of the BBSes, our cross-country communications were sparse, dependent on accidental meetings on IRC), Dionyzos released it in the 7th Irato artpack, stuffed with worthwhile works by his Quebec-based compatriots. Its loss hit us hard – not just the hit to the overall artpack, with the rug pulled out from its barely-there textmode art faction, and not just the hassle of removing the piece from the website-artpack superstructure, but the morale-draining symbolic value of a Mistigris promotional piece being withdrawn from a Mistigris artpack. If we couldn’t even keep the support of our cheerleaders, what hope did we have among the great indifferent masses? You can call it the straw that broke the camel’s back, the wind taken out of our sails… crushed by a sense of defeat, we put the artpack on hiatus, where it remained until 2015, when (in the aftermath of our 2014 20th-anniversary reunion artpack) we were moved to call a general amnesty on computer art prisoners who hadn’t seen the light of day in 15 years and air our stockpiles of unreleased, never-seen computer art (in M-9808 and MIST2000.) Then, recovered from our emo teenage bout of angst, we reclaimed the piece and used it in the artpack’s infofile. Nice, huh?
Today on Mistigram, Amiga whiz Sentience upscaled the ANSI art Mistigris cat mascot and logo drawn by Etana for our 2nd anniversary in 1996… reproducing it as if drawn in a higher resolution (did someone say hirez?) sometime later. This went on the shelf for, if memory serves correct, a T-shirt design. There on the shelf it remained until it finally came out for inclusion in the MIST2000 collection of loose ends released to the public in early 2016. It’s not a bad likeness! Pity about the punctuality, though…
So, who wants a Mistigris t-shirt?
This hot pink-and-purple foggy ANSI art Mist logo was drawn by Mr. Wrong for release in a Blocktronics artpack in 2015, and then used by us in our MIST1015 infofiles. Many thanks!
I try to mix up our Mistigram features by genre, artist and age, but once in a while our manual algorithm seizes and we end up with this situation, two pieces from the same artpack two days in a rown. Go figure. So here we are, with another piece from our Mistigris World Tour stint with Fistful of Steel in January of 1997. It’s a twirly, whirly Mist logo (I know, that “T” is something else, isn’t it?) drawn in RIPscrip vector graphics by Neophyte, midway along his quest from Solar Menace to Quip (… and beyond.)
The Mistigris World Tour was scheduled to begin just after our third anniversary in October of 1996, but as decribed in Wikipedia, we had a hard time of things when groups we’d made plans to jointly release with had an unfortunate tendency to up and die just before we joined forces. First it was Ophidiac, then TeklordZ… we just managed to squeak in a combination artpack with Blade at the end of the year, and then continued into 1997 with Fistful of Steel in January, which is where this positively shattered ANSI art logo by Jughead appeared. (This in some way accounts for discrepancy between the date shown on the logo and the release date of the artpack containing it; the art was always phresh, if not necessarily fresh 8)
Some artists we only have an excuse to discuss once a year, in the wake of their making an annual appearance, like Punxsutawney Phil, in an artpack… then retreating back into obscurity. Others have a stable of projects they grind away on over the year, churning out projects and milestones on a regular basis like miniature computer art factories.
So, here we have VileR, who has featured in these pages before. Being a connoisseur of vintage technology, he recognized that a very significant milestone was coming up on the calendar – the 35th anniversary of the launch of the IBM PC, the contender that elevated home computing beyond the hobbyist miasma of the late ‘70s when the market was caught in three-way gridlock between the Commodore PET, the Apple II, and Tandy’s TRS-80.
Something important was folded in to the release of the IBC PC. In PC-DOS, one of its three options of included operating systems (supposing you eschewed CPM-86 or UCSD D-PASCAL), it included a BASIC language interpreter with some sample programs. There was a company specialising in home implementations of BASIC in those days: Microsoft. One of the sample programs included was a little driving game called DONKEY.BAS, written by a nobody named William Gates III. It could be characterised as … crude but effective. It boasted functional graphics, but let’s be fair here: what it really needed were textmode graphics. (I’m not sure that its graphics aren’t simply remapped text characters, but let’s not split hairs here.)(VileR responds: “I can say that Donkey’s original graphics aren’t remapped text chars after all… but that *does* touch on another idea I had…”)
VileR saw what needed to be done to mark this occasion: clone the historic (yet largely unknown) game, in the textmode it always so richly deserved, as a PC Booter (the delivery mechanism of nearly all original PC games), re-implemented in 512 bytes. And here you have it. All in a day’s work! Hats off to VileR and his Sorry Ass!
Everybody loves Weird! I don’t know that we have too much more of her work coming up before we transition out of the world of Mistigris promo art, so here is one of her all-time great Mistigris promos – not just typography (which, let’s be fair, I’m sure she could bang out all day long) but also a charming newschool ASCII art illustration and catchy slogan (a distant reference to E.T. and his penchant for Reece’s Pieces?)
I happen to know that he has just installed a copy of PabloDraw in order to make a tech demonstration to his office, so if ever he has been in danger of backsliding into the shadowy lifestyle of the practitioner of the digital underground arts, it is now.
