Is it possible that we somehow failed to tell you about our major Christmas 2016 project? It is possible – the smashing of my main computer’s screen interfered both in the commission of the project and the promotion of it. Well, season’s belated greetings, folks – it’s an outtake from Melodia’s “1999” music disk, a remix of Enya singing “Silent Night”, complete with an array of vintage and contemporary retrocomputing holiday imagery from Horsenburger’s teletext advent calendar, @C64_endings’ winterized screenshots of classic Commodore 64 games, imagery from Apple ][ demos run through Melodia’s Octalyzer, a few tidbits from the STatariART crew… plus even a couple of seasonal pieces by Mistigris regulars! Don’t worry if you didn’t get a chance to see this in time this year, we’ll certainly be parading it out again next December!
Friday, January 6, 2017
Thursday, December 29, 2016
Five years in the making, and yet hastily thrown together over the past couple of days, it’s a fresh Horsenburger teletext portrait of the late George Michael given some proud rainbow colour-cycling in the background and paired with a 2011 chiptune cover of “Last Christmas” by bryface. Together, they’re better! All that plus a parting blow from Melodia, an unused b-side from MIST0416, interpreting an early ‘80s cultural phenomenon as it might have been experienced on an early '80s home microcomputer. Everyone out there, take care of each other – if we can just make it a few days further, we can escape the curse of 2016! (And meet: the curse of 2017.)
Thursday, December 22, 2016
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!
Wednesday, December 21, 2016
Today we share part 3 (of 5) of 1994’s Bells of Yule suite of seasonal tracker music, from Admiral Skuttlebutt’s Atari ST to your ears! Remastered by Melodia in 2014, we put together a slideshow of plundered textmode visuals to accompany its ~10-minute runtime – this movement has a focus on period Public Domain ANSImation clips. Merry Mist'mas!
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.
Tuesday, October 11, 2016
Always with a few projects underway, and seemingly at odds after the recent release of the 1999 music disk, creative dynamo Melodia (one of our oldest-school members) has recently relocated from Australia back to home sweet home – the environs of Victoria, BC – and taken up a new business: proprietor of a vintage video games and computing shop, PALEOTRONIC at #3-829 Goldstream Avenue in Langford. It hit the ground running and is already a going concern – I don’t know if there was an opening party, but you can celebrate on Hallowe'en with a party they’re throwing. To any of our friends passing through the vicinity of Vancouver Island, it must be considered a mandatory stop! I for one can’t wait to swap some floppies, discs and carts!
For further details, please consult its Facebook page.
Wednesday, September 21, 2016
Vancouver was on the ground floor of the electronic future – not merely serving as homebase to Neuromancer author William Gibson, not just ground zero for Canada’s first video game successes (the Sidney Development Corporation with Evolution and B.C. - Quest for Tire), not merely possessed of the longest-lasting and most populous dial-up BBS scene in the world (to say nothing of its pivotal role, albeit an accidental one, in phreaking in the early ‘70s), not just coincidentally the spawning ground of Gravis, Mainframe Entertainment Inc. (of “Money for Nothing” and ReBoot fame) and Distinctive Software (later to flourish as EA Sports) … and it’s been if anything over-represented by performance, conceptual and electronic arts through such hubs as the Western Front, Video In, and the Edgewise Electrolit Centre … so why, in the 34 years since the Commodore 64 hit the stores, has it never enjoyed much in terms of a live experimental electronic performance scene?
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)
Monday, September 19, 2016
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
//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Saturday, December 26, 2015
So while we came to the conclusion of our “original” re-heated Christmas content on Christmas Eve, we still have our spree of similar proportions from last year. We dug up a pile of seasonal loaders, lits and works of ANSI art from our own ‘90s artpacks in chronological order, but the secret was that it was all in the service of drawing more attention to the re-release of the never-heard-much-in-its-original-format music disk The Bells Of Yule, which finally in 2014 found the audience it so richly deserved.
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!
[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/177307886" params="auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="100%" height="450" iframe="true" /]
Wednesday, November 4, 2015
Really, lost in the “should we wait until after Remembrance Day to start hyping Christmas?” debate is whether Hallowe'en should be allowed to drag on. Me, I come down firmly in the extended Hallowe'en camp. And now, my final post on the seasonal and spooky contents of our new Oct 31st-released artpack MIST1015! We open with the only track that wasn’t also mirrored elsewhere, Cthulu’s unused (but don’t worry, they used his other tunes) overture for the gothic (and itself very Hallowe'eny) mobile collectible card game Afterland (available for free now in the Google Play and iOS App Stores!), performed by his “jug band of the damned” (eek!) The Creaking Planks.
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!
[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/49591292" params="auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="100%" height="300" iframe="true" /]
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?
[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/227614719" params="auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="100%" height="300" iframe="true" /]
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.
[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/211276792" params="auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="100%" height="300" iframe="true" /]
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
Thursday, January 1, 2015
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!
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
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.
[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/152160455" params="color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false" width="100%" height="166" iframe="true" /]
(Pictured: “Sunrise in Cyberspace” by Tzeentch, representing a different kind of new beginning, included in the same archive as the song, MIST0195.ZIP)
Tuesday, November 11, 2014
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!