This weekend, February 20th, 2016, we here at Mistigris are hosting a Tracker Fix challenge (and do please consider joining us!) We did a few of these “back in the day”, but all history regarding the event series is quite nebulous since the actual documents are quite thin on the ground. Computer music is where Mistigris and the 604 probably enjoyed their greatest flourishing, and ironically due to the INSANELY EXPANSIVE file sizes of WHOLE MEGABYTES, theirs are the cases where the files were least likely (regardless of how many BBSes we uploaded them to!) to be mirrored for the enjoyment of posterity. (Also culpable: those ghettoizing demoscene FTP archives which wouldn’t host music from artscene sources due to our tenuous whiff of scurrilous warez connections, and those exclusive artscene FTP archives which wouldn’t host music … at all! Or lit, but that’s a different problem for a later post.) (Mistigris, doomed to straddle numerous worlds, belonging fully to none of them.)
Fortunately, we are (party to) a loquacious primary source with a handful of related files and a long memory. The first Tracker Fix compo took place in the summer of 1996, hosted by The Pope of The Immortal Syndicate at his residence in New Westminster. There, a handful of tiny chiptune samples was presented to us and we took turns at the official compo music station, seeing what we could do with them for a half-hour before saving the results and giving someone else a try. I wasn’t a computer musician but I desperately wanted an “in” into that world, my long music education (since the age of 3!) making me interested in making .MODs since before I ever downloaded TheDraw or tried to make a rhyming poem about a BBS. But before the emergence of obviously dominant tools as standards such as Scream Tracker in 1994, figuring out for yourself what was going on involved a steep learning curve – understanding the relationship between the hex code scrolling down the screen and the sounds coming out of the speakers seemed a kind of arcane magic not dissimilar to looking at the punch holes on a player piano roll and understanding what to expect. (Admittedly, standard sheet music notation is no less arbitrary a convention, but that was the one with which I was familiar – and it was quite removed from anything one would see in a tracker program.) (OK, except for KingMod, a dead end in which I spent more than a little time. But I digress.)
What made the Tracker Fix so central to my personal mythology is that I attended, coming in and sitting down an outsider to the workings of computer music… and I left a champion, somehow achieving first place among several venerated seasoned veterans of the scene. (As it’s not something that’s happened often in my life, it made quite an impression on me, which explains why I’ve hung on to these files long after the archive in which they appeared is nothing but a faint memory.) After that point I could no longer claim to want to become a computer musician, if only I could figure out how it’s done. My cover of plausible deniability was gone. I’d leapt off the cliff and somehow flown! This equalizing compo format – which leveled the playing field in that its main test was of its participants’ ability to improvise, think on their feet and come up with something (anything!) based on what they’d just been served – might well serve as a gateway to further cohorts of computer musicians! Clearly we had to run more of them; as a crucible for forging new computer musicians and planting them firmly on their two feet, it clearly couldn’t be beat.
(But first, I had to clean up and polish my submission for public release, a job I sweated over intensively in some attempt to demonstrate to my new computer music peers that my placement wasn’t just some anomalous statistical fluke.)
It took quite some time to get another Tracker Fix together. All the parties thus gathered at the table, we threw the rubric of The New Media Group over our fractured affiliations and continued forward together with the 604 Music Disk. And then… there was the Mistigris World Tour. (Somewhere in here – March 1997, apparently – it seems we ran a virtual Tracker Fix, let’s call it Tracker Fix 1.5, using a Skaven / Future Crew orchestral sample pack, as evidenced by the sample comments in Freaq’s never-before-heard-publicly Naked and Running.) And then… well, maybe we could do without special projects for a little while, giving us time to get used to releasing artpacks under our own name again for a while. And then… we stopped releasing artpacks altogether. But, and here’s the important bit: we never consciously made a decision to stop making art! And as Mistigris had suddenly, sharply declined, similarly ascendant in regards to my creative productions was the local arts smorgasbord known as The Living Closet.
You think you see where this is going, but it’s not obvious. Poring over DAT tape archives from the the Living Closet presented at Malkin Bowl Aug 22nd, 1998, we hacked up bibs and bobs from performances at that august event (that’s right, it was in August!) and fashioned a collection of unruly, locally-sourced and unique samples with which to populate the long-awaited second coming of the Tracker Fix party. (Very specific memories suggest that samples included a chunk of “Devoted” by Perpetuum and a slice of Glenn Garinther intoning his anthemic refrain “I wish the… I wish the… I wish the world would just f*** off!”) And lo, we packed the living room of my own onetime residence, the TABHouse, down in Strathcona (now apparently a site on the city’s cultural historical register for reasons pertaining more to the landlord than to the tenants), and the entire Trideja crew rolled out in full effect setting up an array of Atari ST hardware out on the carpet, requiring us to downsample our awesome sound bites to something that could be conveyed off of the compo machine via sneakernet. I went on a run for pork steam buns and coconut buns from the nearby New Town bakery in Vancouver’s Chinatown, and much puzzled musical muddling ensued from upwards of a dozen local tracker guests. Highlights included a live tracker performance from Daemon (what’s his name, former co-host of The Sound & The Word at the Misanthropy Gallery with Andrea Papineau, who was friends with Happyfish’s little sister… it was all a muddle in any case 8) by toggling channels on and off to produce varying effects, but far and away the winner was Foolish Bird (soon to be aka Bad Feng Shui, with whom I concoct some confusing happenings at further installments of those self-same Living Closets), whose tortured (and apparently highly memorable) epic “Cat Scratch Magic” just went on and on, of a seemingly impossible duration given the constrained time available to write the piece. I suspect on some level he just painted his channels with broad swathes of effects and loopback points so as to ensure that his composition would continue along in a novel fashion without necessarily having direct input into what those effects would do to whichever channels were still playing when that skip back took place. Wave hands, genius ensues, clockmaker takes a bow.
So as to immortalize the live performance, all compositions were dubbed to audiocassette tape and feverishly delivered to a Living Closet event in progress at that moment at the Press Club (RIP) (which is how we can pin that Tracker Fix’s date to Nov 21st, 1998.) We hustled the tape in to the crowded room just in time for the intermission… but the house PA could play only CDs, not cassette tapes. Oh well. Shortly thereafter I suffered The Great Data Obliteration during a well-intentioned but sadly botched Linux installation, and all of my original copies of the songs went with it. They had never been released in a collection because, well, there were no BBSes remaining to upload them to, and the FTP sites, as noted above, were not welcoming to our material. I even contacted the Living Closet’s MC to see if he had hung on to the cassette tape, but of course he came up blank. This account must remain, then, the only evidence that this hugely successful event ever occurred.
After a big to-do like that, sometime later I attempted to compel lightning to strike the same spot a second time. That’s how things work, right? You try something, you repeat the successes and build them bigger and better. I tried to put quite a bit more promotional oomph behind it, and tapped into some exciting e-mail lists (I have memories of setting up NW-EELS with Foolish Bird, short for NorthWest - Experimental, Electronic Live Sound) … the only thing I was missing was the BBSes, as by this point they had all gone down for the last time. To make a long story short, a grand total of one visitor came by for Tracker Fix 3 sometime in 1999 – a hitherto unknown MIDI musician who I attempted to show the tracking ropes to in my windowless basement room, who very politely excused himself after I was unable to provide compelling answers for “how many other people are you expecting?” (“Oh, it was full up last time!”) and “When are you expecting them to show up?” (“Oh, real soon now I suppose!”). This was … somewhat more successful than other social functions, picnics and readings I attempted to present in this period, a sign from the party gods that I’d well and truly expended my social capital once and for all. (The would-be Tracker Fix 3 was set up with a … unique and distinctive sample pack derived from the set of sounds included with a stock install of the game creation engine Klik ‘n Play.)
At one further point circa 2003 I thought a nice set of Commodore 64 samples I’d mined from the High Voltage SID archive had some good Tracker Fix potential, sound effects I’d lifted from the soundtracks of old games while working on my arrangement of Perpetual Dream Theory’s “Now or Never” that was ultimately released in ACiD-100.ZIP … it was a great sample set (Here it is!), but I knew better than to get my hopes up and call another party. That humiliating lesson stuck with me for … quite some time. But, apparently, I haven’t in fact learned my lesson, since here we are again, only some eighteen years later! My age has basically doubled while I’ve waited to spring another Tracker Fix upon the world. Here we go again!
(Edited to add: the historical record has once again interfered with a neat story. I have found the original samplepack including the C64 samples and it proudly proclaims itself the official samplepack of TrackerFix 7. Also, I have found a couple of songs made by friends, visiting my home, using a hybrid melange of KLF samples from Star Control 2 and sounds recorded from dot matrix printers which historically bred and mutated in my basement, almost certainly at some “Tracker Fix” function. What does this mean: did I fail to learn my lesson and go on to host four more marginal functions? Did I shift over to the wholly virtual format far earlier? Sadly, I didn’t keep very good notes. We may never know for sure. On the bright side, it really doesn’t matter! Clique history: the stakes are incredibly low.)
