Today we share with you the fourth movement of our five-part 1994 tracker music epic of original moody instrumental holiday music, remastered by Melodia in 2014, souped up with tons of period seasonal imagery from textmode and artscene sources in 2015 and … paraded out again in 2016. Enjoy!
Yesterday we re-shared the second installment of the 5-part Bells of Yule epic seasonal holiday tracked music suite made on an Atari ST in 1994, remastered in 2014 and given period visuals from the PC artscene last year. This time around all we have to do is share the links! The music was composed by Admiral Skuttlebutt, remastered by Melodia, and the visuals this time around focus on 25-line ANSI art, largely from Public Domain sources, especially featuring the works of Ebony Eyes.
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
This was the same motivation behind our cooking up these five ten-minute music videos we shared with you this year, an enormous promotional effort (with, I think, lesser primary success) behind spreading the word about old tunes from 1994, but fortunately it was an interesting exercise regardless.
And now we have ten artefacts to use to promote its enjoyment for Christmas 2016! Two more and we can do a genuine “12 Days of Christmas” run-up! (Sit down, Catholics, I know that the 12 Days actually come AFTER.)
So if we’ve worn down your resistance to hearing new things (or, actually, incredibly old things), know that you can enjoy listening to all five movements of the Bells of Yule suite right here!
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Now it is Christmas 2015, and we are following up this Lazarus-like feat from last year by making music videos for each of the five parts, one daily in the run-up to Christmas Day. We have drawn on the rich history of computer art, public domain and underground, to provide a wintery potluck of hundreds of pieces of thematically-appropriate fellow traveler works in a textmode, low-resolution idiom; part 2’s visuals draw specifically on brief, single-screen (or “25-line”) pieces of ANSI art – full attribution of the participating artists (and gosh golly, there sure are a lot of them) can be found at the end of the video. Merry Mist'mas – share and enjoy!
This was engineered to satisfy a demanding criterion from the developers at Imaginary Games, namely that the in-game music be simultaneously happy and sad. Well, can it take turns? This live off-the-floor take of the five musicians huddled around a single microphone is a good shot at the New Orleans Dixieland voodoo concept he had rattling around in his head, but to the good folks at Imaginary Games it was a little bit too much like sitting in a club listening to live music and stroking your chin, and not enough like … holding your mobile device and tapping at a screen. Oh well, as the wide varieties of Hallowe'en costumes testify, there are many paths to gloom!
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I don’t know much about Brad Dunn’s composition practice, but if I had to guess based on my experiences producing concerts for him on prepared guitars a decade ago, my suspicion would be that he experiments to see what works or doesn’t – either way, then does it again, like he means it. Dissonance? Yes, that’s a dissonance – a big, satisfying dissonance. Let’s do it again! What do you mean, you don’t like my new Christmas carol?
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Melodia of Empress Play, on the other hand, has achieved a supreme calculated mastery of genre. I’ll never forget, back in the ‘90s, how an aimless experimentation proceeding at a glacial pace transformed overnight into the fully realized “Spaghetti Western” as soon as it crossed her desk. Her triumph is in sussing out before she gets there just what kind of song a given song is trying to be, and then making it live up to those specific aspirations, hitting the nail on the head squarely and repeatedly. I jokingly describe us as drag factor on, her slumming it by hanging out with this weird group of retro computer art weirdos, but her canny piggybacking of holiday seasonality means that this song, Horror on Channel 3, has been enjoyed an order of magnitude beyond how many times the Mist artpack has been served up.
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Theorica, conversely, explicitly describes his approach as “If sound were colour, I’d be what you’d call a finger painter. I do what feels and sounds right.” And so what if “Dark Charlie” sounds like an uninspired Stephen King bugaboo, the man has his finger on the pulse!
http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=1207596880/size=small/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=0687f5/track=2484575138/transparent=true/
One final grim piece of audio, this is a positively ancient guest poem by performance poet RC Weslowski, pointing at the eternal horror far more frightening than ghosts and werewolves – state militarism, endless war against an endless series of evil axes… in this case, earthworms. It brings to mind how of the two camps name-checked in the opening of Black Sabbath’s sludgy anthem “War Pigs”, “generals gathered in their masses / just like witches at black masses”, it is the generals who are scarier. (Also scary: rhyming “masses” with “masses”.)
Oh yes, and while we’re on the subject of poetry, I forgot our poem of terrifying implications by Prince George’s Jeremy Stewart:
CLOTHES HAIKUToo bad I didn’t think to throw it in while we were showing off all the skeletons! Actually, it’s kind of a perfect lead-in to, again, the crazy ANSI music video Whazzit made for the song Dead Man’s Pants. (Sure, I can keep linking it, but can I just make a post dedicated to it? Darned sure I can! Stay tuned…)
your skin is clothes for
your blood & bones & your clothes
are skin for your skin
Happy New Year’s Eve! We made it through Christmas 2014 serving up literally hundreds of downloads for the re-release of our long-thought-lost December 1994 music disk The Bells of Yule, and as we approach the end of this year’s winter holiday season (12 Days of Christmas nonwithstanding) it’s apropos to draw things to a close with “1995 - A Rave”, a song released the month after (01/95) the original launch of the Bells of Yule music disk – before it was lost.
The song found itself remastered as part of Melodia’s push to release, well, the “Skeletons In My Closet” we already told you about in an earlier post, and as it was used back in 1995 to welcome the arrival of a New Year, we will be using it today for much the same purpose.
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(Pictured: “Sunrise in Cyberspace” by Tzeentch, representing a different kind of new beginning, included in the same archive as the song, MIST0195.ZIP)
The textmode visual artists and the computer musicians didn’t always see eye-to-eye – hey, why is the archive so big, but there are so few pictures inside of it? – but since the very beginning we at Mistigris have been working in tandem with Melodia, gracing us with tunes in honest-to-goodness .MOD format from the deep well of the Digitallusions solo imprint. When the ANSI artscene went belly-up, many of us gave up the ghost and shut down our computer art production, seemingly indefinitely. Not so for Melodia, taking it in stride as an opportunity to develop new skills and appeal to new audiences.
Seemingly non-stop for over 20 years, her musical production has been as unceasing as the dance of the moon and sun overhead, so it comes as no great surprise that we have multiple announcements to share regarding her musical work, past and present: releasing under the banner of Empress Play, Melodia has two collections of music that have recently become available for listeners to enjoy – first, there is the free release Skeletons In My Closet, an anthology of some 38 (!) remastered tracks from the intensely productive period 1994-2000 (including some that long-time Mistigris fans may recognize, such as our highly memorable bombastic application generator soundtrack.)
Additionally, there is Press Play On Tape, released just prior to the unveiling of our 20th anniversary artpack, a more recent revisitation of the retro audio aesthetic emerging from a modern musical sensibility and of course, engineered from the ground up with modern tools rather than the restrictive ones of decades hence. It includes the track Adventures of a Pixel Hero (which we featured in our release) as its opening number, so if you enjoyed that tune here’s an opportunity for you to purchase 15 more in a similar vein.
Furthermore, discussions are underway regarding re-releasing The Bells of Yule, the instantly out-of-print and digitally unavailable anywhere Digitallusions collection of seasonal holiday music centred around a suite of five dark instrumental works. Stay tuned and keep your ears open as December approaches!
