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Last night our community radio colleagues at the long-running Art of Beatz radio program closing the daily broadcast schedule at CFRO Co-Op Community Radio (100.5 fm in Vancouver BC) were kind enough to have us on their show to present a curated hourlong tour through the rich history of the .MOD tracking and computer music tradition of area code 604, by way of promoting the imminent MIST1116 artpack battering down the gates.

Tonight on Art Of Beatz Radio: Mistigris and Chad Munson
Hour 1: Mistigris
Tuck in your Tamagotchi and crack open a frosty bottle of J0lt cola, for everything old is new again: this week we’re celebrating a local tradition of 2 and a half decades of computer music out of area code 604 with Cthulu of the computer art collective MiSTiGRiS (est. 1994), who will be representing a golden thread of chiptunes and musictrackers from the LSDJ of today all the way back to the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST. Sine waves, static channels, and samples – oh my!

You can hear the whole hourlong broadcast as a digital audio stream or, if you already know the history and don’t want me blabbering on top of all the songs, I’ve prepared a download of “just the tunes”. And here’s the playlist!

Freddy43 / Mistigris - Trackerfix song, 2016
Lofryr - 5th Dimension, Apr 1993
AcidFrog - Drowning In Your Love, Aug 1995
Admiral Skuttlebutt / Digitallusions remixed by Marauder / Euphonix - Rave 95
Esquire - C02, Oct 1997
Jazz / Euphonix remixed by Sidewinder - Night of the Living Hoovers, 1995
The Pope / The Immortal Syndicate - Christe 1, Apr 1996
Fingers / Euphonix - Otesnpyneneidells, Sept 1994
Unicode / Mistigris - Remember, Oct 2015
Ill-esha - Line by line, Oct 2015
Haquisaq / Mistigris - Night Shift, 2001
Cthulu / Mistigris - pure white light, 1999
Anton Van Oosbree - Aerodynamic (Daft Punk), 2016
Obsidian Zero / Sonic Equinox - Good Night, 1998

[audio http://mistbackup.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/walker.mp3]

Last weekend I travelled through New York City for a wedding, a location I have only ventured through three times – on average, once every 12 years. So I have no roots in the city, little history, and despite having been there, virtually everything I “know” about it has been sucked up in childhood through pop culture such as Ghostbusters, The Critic, or The Muppets Take Manhattan. But I thought that the occasion would make for a fun opportunity to look at an old creative work we re-released last year, set in New York. The work is the song WALKER.MOD, titled “Stroll Thru New York” by Darren Grant of EuphoniX, first released on the last day of February 1993. (Where historical computer art is concerned, the easily-embeddable, instantly experienced visual artworks get the lion’s share of the social media love, and even Mistigris’ little-loved “lit” – easy to paste and explain – gets more airtime than our extensive and formidable music back stacks, so I’d like to try placing a stronger emphasis on vintage tracker music… because there’s a ton of it, and much of it is truly awesome!)

If Jovian and Tom were the core of EuphoniX, Jason and Darren were always its outliers – JaZz on the experimental, bruitist side, Darren on the sentimental, traditionalist side. That means that this tune is accessible, if extraordinary in the annals of computer music. Described internally as “humorous new age theme music”, it was released only a week after the composer’s similarly left-field Mystic Valour (also described as “new age” – a phrase that keeps being seen in the EuphoniX catalogue, but conspicuously only when applied to Darren’s songs.) You might get the feeling from JaZz’s anarchic tracks that he was throwing everything at the wall and seeing what stuck, but with Darren’s songs you can always be assured that they are precisely what they are intended to be, so any speed bumps listeners encounter will not be ones of composition or production, but rather mismatches of musical taste.

The instrument name messages don’t reveal much beyond the song’s release date, and pressing the onetime composer for further remarks two decades down the line didn’t result in much more: “Oh haha.. hmm not much. Mostly I raided other sample sets and played around. :) super cheese”.

As he sowed, so too do we reap: “super cheese” is the order of the day. The two minute and twenty-five second long song begins at a dawdling pace, like a record (let’s get you in the ‘80s mood here right off the bat) starting up midway through a song before the turntable reaches its cruising speed. The overall theme here is one of intrepid success to those who dare: in my mind’s eye, the opening of the song shows a businessman in a tailored suit emerging from a taxicab with his briefcase, quickly getting his bearings before power-walking – unhurried, but confident and in command – toward his destination: wealth and high finance. Within five seconds the song has achieved the pace it will enjoy for the rest of its duration, and its main theme rings out with a certain air of inevitability – as though somehow, the whole system of Wall Street was rigged. (But rigged in the businessman’s favour! No sour grapes in this song!)

As if to hammer itself home, it plays a neat trick with with the synth-horn lead line, at intervals re-triggering at phrase’s end the same sample at the same pitch with a louder intensity, like some record-setting Kenny G trick of circular breathing. This is all punctuated by a kickin’ slap bass line in the lower register, perhaps some inheritor of the New York sophistication of similarly New-York-set Seinfeld, launched in 1989.

There’s nothing particularly Big Apple about this song, which I like to think has its counterpart in Jovian’s Thursday Night in the City following in September of that year, a much more urban piece of work. For years, the image that comes to mind when I think of WALKER.MOD is actually the introduction to the short-lived cartoon Beverly Hills Teens, hitting the wrong coast but both fundamentally evoking a kind of fantasy of upper-class '80s white privilege where the future’s so bright, I gotta wear new wave sunglasses and a neon surf unitard.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zu2eawfTiCM&w=420&h=315]

One minute in, the song dramatically slows down through an agonizing series of tempo gear shifts. Seventeen seconds later, our businessman finds that he has power-walked into the wrong side of the tracks – I believe in the '80s, The Bronx was the borough with that dangerous reputation. (Then again, as The Warriors demonstrated, even Central Park in the heart of Manhattan could be no cakewalk if you have the wrong enemies.) Whether Wall Street Kid is in any actual mortal peril or not is – as in The Bonfire of the Vanities – entirely beside the point, as from the sound of things he clearly sees himself at the mercy of a ruthless biker gang, one of whose members is likely spinning a chain menacingly. (No hint of “urban” music here, his boogeymen are plainly no b-boys.) But shortly thereafter, he hops a retaining wall or ducks out from under the right tunnel and emerges (at 1:34) into full sunshine in the business district again, with a transition back to the main theme as seamless as the departure from it was contrived. The anthem trumpets once more, then echoes its own return some 50 seconds later, and it wraps before risking overstaying its welcome.

In essence, this song is the sound of a bolt of totally awesome fabric my wife picked up at an estate sale last weekend.

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Here it is, the big project this music-releasing spree was supposed to lead up to.  Its position as the zenith was jumbled up a bit as we found more Sonic Equinox artefacts than we expected to still be in existence, and it jumps the gun on a few crews we have yet to introduce you to here, retroactively.  But it was a big release for the big round number 10 on the tenth day of Mistigris May Music Madness and Mayhem.  We couldn’t get all the parties in area code 604’s artscene / music tracking / demoscene community to join forces into one megagroup, but we were at least able to lure most of them (Happy Fetus Records, as usual, marched to the beat of their own drum machine) under a single umbrella for a major project that would see The Pope of Mistigris and the Immortal Syndicate travelling to a rare North American demoparty, NAiD ‘96 in Montreal (“East of Vancouver”), and “presenting” this collection to represent our teeming yet otherwise-unrepresented area code (and, heck, the whole West Coast) as peers.  (There was no competition for music disks, nor any mechanism for noncompeting materials to be presented at the party, so this gesture was pretty nominal… and as for the reception, not mirrored with official demoparty archives of competing entries, it slipped into the pool like an elegant Olympic diver making nary a splash, disappearing from view immediately and, if not for May Music Madness, forever.)

The groups present and accounted for here are: Mistigris, Sonic Equinox (who we covered here at some great length), EuphoniX (whom you may recall from our last post), The Immortal Syndicate (who we’ll be discussing shortly), Digitronic (do keep posted for their delayed but regardless upcoming retrospective under the Trideja banner), Digitallusions (no retrospective forthwith, but still with us in the form of Empress Play) and Radiance (…just basically undocumented anywhere and likely to remain that way.)  The collective umbrella flag we all marched under was “New Media Productions”, a scene-politics-free zone that was also the official presentor of our Tracker Fix parties (wherein computer musicians would attend a party and take turns composing (including my very first track!) under a time limit using a common sample set – all lost forever, alas!) and this was its big huzzah.  Getting the groups all officially involved was the major coup, but as most of their musicians were affiliated under multiple “labels”, each group maintains a pretty meagre presence musically.  This could have just been a Mistigris music disk, but the idea of being part of a flourishing ecosystem is a compelling one, and we hoped that by blowing a spark into the notion, it would come to life and become… more true.  But things don’t always work out the way you want, and instead, this contains the very last song ever released by Admiral Skuttlebutt of Digitallusions, both undergoing some radical and extensive rebranding, and two of the very final tracks released by EuphoniX… Digitronic changed its name midway, and I think that Radiance was already defunct by the time we shipped the disk in May of 1996.

But all things change, and you can’t fight it; what we can do is appreciate the disk for what it is and what’s in it, which is… a pile of great music from the 604 (nearly all of it entirely unavailable in any form until now), some sweet group logos, a then-mind-blowing realtime 3D interface, and the personal touch I simply couldn’t ship it without: the world’s first (? and only?) multiple-personality-disordered scrolly bar (pictured), shouting itself down in what must be construed to be a brief and strange piece of theatre.

Eto of Sonic Equinox did all the heavy lifting for this project, not only programming and implementing the music-playing routines, visualizer effects and 3D interface, but also providing 3D-modelled logos, artwork and textures needed to make the octagon (each face represented one participating group, plus one to exit) really roll.  I was kindly solicited input for the look and flow of the disk, providing a list of painfully poor selections given their actual roles, then the final product dropped with all of my suggestions mixed up and undone, reflecting the realities of how long the program took to prepare itself, loading and pre-calculating.  I wanted to open with a ripping thrash number, tearing the listeners a new one with our eXtReMe attitude and dropping into the action posthaste, but setting that tone would get us nowhere fast, as the program was going to take the time it was going to take to get ready, and an motivational high-BPM soundtrack wasn’t going to change that.  The song shuffle was ultimately a much better fit than anything I came up with: the accompaniment for the closing credits, especially, is an incredible fit.

When the autumn came around and high school was back in session, I packed the music disk along to our computer lab on a deck of floppy diskettes and installed it on all the PCs in order to, er, double or triple the number of people who got a chance to enjoy the blasted thing.  My poor impostor-syndrome teacher raised his eyebrows and mosied along, leaving unsaid that the project represented a high water mark light years beyond anything he could teach or indeed code himself.  My apparent fluency with “multimedia” (yeah, yawn, I just run a computer art group online, no biggie) resulted in a couple of weeks being reappropriated from the curriculum calendar for me to teach the class how to use Scream Tracker 3, once I had satisfied the teacher’s concern that it was unpirated freeware… I figured there was a chance (hey, a CS presentation about our BBS The Screaming Tomato drew Happyfish out of the woodwork!) I might be able to make a couple of new Mistigris fans (or to train new members from the ground up) from the student body… but no dice.

Zero for two, then; the BBS scene withered away and all known copies of the 604 music disk dried up.  Eto and I both suffered hard drive crashes and lost our copies, and for years it only existed in frustrating vivid memories I would have of my wasted youth and its projects that, at the time, seemed to perhaps be leading somewhere.  But in the wake of the re-gathering of the old crew for MIST1014 and a complete accounting of what releases we had made and what had been lost, Eto located a copy he’d given out long, long ago to demonstrate a programming trick he’d used – and now, it has been put back into circulation and can live again, Lazarus-like, until all memory of all scenes collapse into entropy in the heat death of the universe.

Until then, it’s a good selection of good songs, an interesting program, and a great document of a moment in time at a locus in cyberspace that could otherwise never be proven to have existed.  If it was released today, we would have had to name it The 604/778/236/(672) Music Disk and, well, that’s just not as catchy.

Oh yes – the obligatory reminder that you can hear its many songs and (to some extent) even run its remarkable executable in-browser over at pc.textmod.es!

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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.

Happy New Year’s Day!  This illustration is a cheap trick, I confess – I reversed the direction and palette of Tzeentch’s “Sunrise in Cyberspace” used to illustrate the previous post’s remastered recording of “1995: A Rave”, to illustrate that song’s January 1995 remix by Marauder of EuphoniX, taking the huge leap from Atari ST to Amiga!  (Us MS-DOS listeners could only stroke our chins and scratch our heads.)  The remix has also been 2014-remastered by Melodia, the original composer of the original version of the song, formerly of Mistigris and Digitallusions and now releasing music under the Empress Play imprint.

[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/183951581" params="auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="100%" height="450" iframe="true" /]

As with the previous song, please allow me to reiterate – these are remastered re-releases of New Year’s-themed electronic music we initially released in the MIST0195.ZIP artpack archive back in January of 1995. And with this, our spree of holiday-themed re-releases necessarily must draw to a close for a time. We have more data archaeology to conduct, and vast realms of unreleased, unseen and unheard computer art of the 1990s to package, present and release in 2015. Who knows – we just might even make some new computer art, too!