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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

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Oct 4, 2016 at 2:02pm UTC

Today on Mistigram, Reanimator’s bit of then-gobsmacking Photoshop wizardry (and oh, the thematic resonance – look at the way the logo is emerging from the mist!) represented Mistigris in our little-seen 1996 604 Music Disk, presented by the New Media Group at the NAiD 1996 demoparty in Montreal (and then lost to the ages until we exhumed it in May 2015!)

Reanimator emerged from a multimedia school context rubbing shoulders with Onyx and Silent Knight, and I will never forget a meeting with him at his Chinatown apartment, sharing a wall with The World’s Skinniest Building, to discuss The Next Step for Mistigris. (Forget the next step: this second act will have been, I’m sure, far more interesting.) By way of illustrating the new potential, he described taking a photo of an angry male model, replacing the eyes with fire, and giving the illusion of having branded the word “Mistigris” into his forehead with red-hot metal. Well yes, that’s one direction we could explore…

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Oct 4, 2016 at 2:02pm UTC

We hit you with its history, we held the contest, we let things simmer for a while, and finally… we can share the results with you!

Presenting, for the first time anywhere in the existing digital record, the outcome of a Tracker Fix computer music compo! This one is (at press time) the most recent, held February 20-21, 2016, and represents the only complete account of any Tracker Fix activity, previously known only to posterity in fragments and references from the late ‘90s. The event was envisioned as unfolding across two phases – an initial “rapid prototyping” phase and then a later “improve, expand & polish” phase – and scoring was going to be calculated as a function of improvement from the first phase to the second. But none of the initial song-sketches ever came back with improved versions, so the compo is not scored. As a bonus, in addition to the initial set of song-sketches, there are a couple of late “non-competing” songs that were sent in outside of the compo’s official times, as well as the initial track from MIST1015 by Claire Roberts that provided the offbeat belly-dancing sampleset we had to work with. (The samplepack is included with the archive, in case you feel, well after the fact, that you’d like to take a crack at them also.)

Participating composers ultimately included DraXx, Simon, Evgthug1, Cthulu, Nobilu, Freddy43, and bryface. Share & enjoy!