SE_D0124/OZ-WALL

 Mistigram: Our airing of dozens of unreleased and forgotten tracker tunes by Onyx has inspired him to start sharing them on his own YouTube channel, in promotion of his books, starting with "WallWalk", as pictured here.  (That one is, incidentally, included in the SE_D0124 music disk, including over 150 of his other songs!  You can download the entire collection at https://mistigris.org/newmedia/SE_D0124.ZIP or, if you like, you can peruse a highlights reel via https://mistfunk.bandcamp.com )

SE_D0124/FRQ-TITS.S3M

 Mistigram: Sorry to mislead everyone -- the song's filename is an acronym for "Trapped in the Subconscious."  This is a Scream Tracker S3M tracker music file composed by Freaq in 1994, played, interpreted and visualised by Eto's SEPLAY MS-DOS executable traditionally bundled with Sonic Equinox releases.  Both the song and the player are included in the new SE_D0124 music disk, rounding up a large quantity of unreleased computer music compositions dating to the mid-'90s.  You can download it via mistigris.org/newmedia or if you prefer you can enjoy curated selections via mistfunk.bandcamp.com

SE_D0124/SE_D0124.NFO

 Mistigram: We gutted a classic SONiC EQUiNOX infofile from the '90s and poured in some new content accounting for the unexpected, table-flipping SE_D0124 music disk of their hours of unheard old music we just released, getting fans up to speed after radio silence since their most recent release back in August of 1997, nearly 27 years ago!  If you like, you can download it via https://mistigris.org/newmedia/ 

... or enjoy a curated sampling of 34 highlights via https://mistfunk.bandcamp.com

SE_D0124/FILE_ID.DIZ

 Mistigram: yesterday we finished what we began nine years ago and released the SE_D0124 music disk, a final collection of nearly two hundred hitherto unreleased module tracker tunes -- over seven hours' worth -- by our colleagues from area code 604's SONiC EQUiNOX crew, primary among them the composer known as Onyx.  You can download it via https://mistigris.org/newmedia/ or enjoy a curated sampling of 34 highlights via https://mistfunk.bandcamp.com

(Now playing: Onyx - Rhodrum, written in 1995.)

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VZ8wNA8_Rc?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]

Aaaand it’s that time of year again: time to dust off the holiday content which, while awesome year-round, is only appropriate in late December. This video combines footage of an early intro made by Dr. CPU in December of 1994 with a hits parade of other seasonal art and writing made by Mistigris members in that month, set to the soundtrack of the first movement of the Bells of Yule music disk, which was also first released in that month. Enjoy!

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6xzW1ZGTsE?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=375]
We vented most of the Canada-specific art from the Mistigris back stacks this time last year, with our parade of all the awesome Mist entries in the Canada-themed (and midget-wrestling-themed) Blender #39 art competition from back in 1997.

This year we found that we had a previously unreleased arrangement of the national anthem gathering dust, “O Canada” put together in Scream Tracker by Onyx of Mist and Sonic Equinox, also from way back in 1997. But because free video sharing arrangements are less suspect than audio sharing ones in 2016, we decided to throw together some quick visuals to accompany the audio.

The ANSI art maple leaf is by Quip, and you may recall it from last year’s roundup; we have lent it some ongoing visual appeal by colour-cycling it with the legendary GLOW3.EXE utility – credited to members of ACiD and iCE, but not conclusively belonging to either. Finally, there is a grand finale poached from a 1995 intro by Melkor.

Now the well is good and truly dry, so I have no idea what we’ll do for Canada Day 2017. Maybe… create new art? (shocked gasp) In the meantime, we’ll continue celebrating nostalgic outmoded notions like MS-DOS, modems and nation-states.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

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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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Mistigris May Music Madness: Day 7 brought us to the final SONiC EQUiNOX music disk release, SE_D0897 – audible and executable in-browser at pc.textmod.es!  With our bloating assistance left to a minimum, it weighs in as a slim volume containing 6 songs by 4 composers (Onyx, Esquire, Freaq, and Quip guesting from Mist), plus a regrettably upskirty picture and a sweet little loader by Melkor… and also the standard application generator and executable infofile (including a text dump of its contents, allowing me to sample more generously here.)

There’s nothing here telegraphing the fact that This Is The End For Sonic Equinox; the releases followed a bit of a boom and bust in regards to how packed their archives were, but even at this slim end of the spectrum they still make a respectable showing.

More telling, perhaps, is that over half of the pack’s contents comes from an individual artist – a sign of personal virtuosity, to be sure, but not necessarily a promising indicator for the team.  Onyx was the one seemingly propping things up with his bottomless creativity, but despite his prolific talents, they didn’t provide a compelling reason for a group to remain assembled around the eternal fountain.  Like Cthulu and Mist, Onyx continued creating at full tilt after Sonic Equinox and, yea, the whole computer artscene dissolved around him, these solo efforts amounting to nothing more than one instrument continuing to sound a note after the orchestra has stopped playing.

Settling down as a family man, he was presented with an ultimatum to focus on a single one of his creative outlets rather than dickering around with this and that, so today though his visual and sonic creations have been shelved, you can catch him self-publishing ebooks.

This, their final infofile, seems unaware of the grand occasion, but here’s what things looked like before the lights went out:

           What’s new in SE land? Well, this being my second time around as
 cheiftan, I still haven’t a clue what’s going on. With summer upon us, I
 find that our _active_ memberlist is a finite thing, so I’m now on the
 lookout for new members. Hey, we all appreciate the help from mist, but SE can’t sustain itself on life support forever.

           Whazzat? Hey! look who’s back! Zinc is in the house! I don’t know
 about the rest of you, but I’m looking forward to some of that trance he’s
 known for.

           Okay, punks, think ya gots talent? Prove it! I told ya I’m looking
 for new members, and YOU might be one of them! Music? Code? VGA? Anything else that would look good in this pack? SE’s goal is to provide a forum for enthusiastic nerds- er, creative people to get their stuff seen. Seen? Seen by WHOM, you might ask? Glad you asked. As well as being able to extend your sig by one affil, you K-radder, you can brag about your nerdsome glory to all your friends! Muhahaha! Who else is watching? Well, for one, Delphic oracle is watching. Ok, you ask, who the heck is DO? DO makes games. DO has just sent out their first game with Spectrum Pacific publishing, and now begins on an even larger project. Of course, while that is still hush-hush, but an eye is always open for someone with the skills and dedication to put some decent work on a large-scale game. What’s needed most right now is VGA, but ANYONE who can make a large enough contribution will be considered.

 In the pack— – -  -   -   -      -              -

  Good vibrations from-
     Esquire
        esq-atmq.xm  -Atomique
     Freaq
        frq-heav.s3m -Find my Heaven
     Onyx
        onx_mars.s3m  -Mars Invades (no inspiration from mars attacks..)
        onx_outl.s3m  -Outlash
        onx_wowi.s3m  -World Wishers
        onx_thrm.s3m  -Therm (imbedded in SE-WAVE.EXE)
        onx-lftl.s3m  -Lullabye for the Lost (playing now, in the exe..)
        onx-blst.pcx  -Generic anime type scene.. classy!

  Vibes imported from Mist-
     Neophyte
        yt-trg18.it   Tradgedy 18.
                      (Neo’s changing his name to Quip! get used to it!)
  Toy!-
     Melkor
        SE-WAVE.EXE, SE-WAVE.TXT, SE.DAT
  The usual-
     ETO
        SEP.BAT, SEPLAY.EXE: Sonic Player
        SE_NFO.EXE: the thing running THIS text thingie!
        SE_APP.EXE, SE_APP.DAT: application generator
     Bits & peices
        FILE_ID.DIZ: thanks to quip!
        SE_NFO.TXT: This text in a file.

 Getting a hold of us— – - —  -    -   -         -                -
  SONIC LINK MEMBERS            NUMBER        SYSOP
     Entrance to Obscurity      604-555-5555  ETO
     Crimson Helm               604-465-4247  Onyx (crippled at 2400!*)
     Daemon’s Gate              604-948-0363  Mavrik
     Fuzzy Doorknob             604-943-4626  Sylphid
     Paradoxious                604-931-6984  Tzykaar
     Dark Domains               604-469-5851  Raven
     DoDEL                      604-299-5191  Etana
     Sonic Equinox Homepage     www.in2nett.com/ETO/SE/index.htm
     Mistigris Homepage         www.geocities.com/Athens/1758/mist.html 
   (*psst! got a 14.4 external?)

This concludes our look into the musicdisk releases of our friends in 604 would-be demogroup SONiC EQUiNOX, but at a new “lost” release every day for a week, the Mistigris May Music Madness was just getting started, with several further releases ahead of music collections which had been genuinely lost and unavailable (and not merely filed away forever in a very dark and dusty corner of the Hornet archive, as with these SE packs.)  Stay tuned for more!

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For Mistigris May Music Madness: Day 6, we re-released the next Sonic Equinox collection, SE_D0597, whose songs can be heard (and whose executables can be run) in-browser at pc.textmod.es!

In addition to musical duties from an extended roster of member composers Esquire, Freaq, Jake Blues and Onyx, this collection also included a slate of songs from Mistigris musicians (Cthulu, Fritz, Crystal Meth, Handiboy, Melodia and Neophyte) venting from their stockpile of tracks accumulated during Blenders and the Mistigris World Tour, making this somewhat of an unofficial World Tour stop during that 1997 spree.  Also it contains a new application generator (your window of opportunity to apply has regretfully likely closed) and Techno Retrace’s swell loader for Daemon’s Gate BBS.  All that PLUS promo art for Super Bubble Mania, the Pang (Buster Brothers) clone by SE’s gamedev spinoff Delphic Oracle.

You can’t tell, but the music-playing exeutable infofile in this collection ends with an interview of group leader Eto by Onyx, but due to the executable’s glitchy behavior it is difficult to steer the scrolling infofile there.

Is it possible we have only one Sonic Equinox musicdisk remaining to cover?  Stay tuned!

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Sorry for drifting off there amidst the Mistigris May Music Madness spree – the release sequence of the revived tracker-music collections was jumbled, and while waiting for them to get sorted out, other hurdles arose in compiling, releasing and hosting the remaining collections (almost all are now free in the wild; they will all get coverage here).

So, where were we?  Sonic Equinox: February 1996, which you can hear through your web browser at the linked hosting at pc.textmod.es.  This was to be the Day 4 release.

As Strongbad would someday say: everybody to the limit.

The infofile will shed some light on the proceedings, but only through some work after the fact – encoded as one of Eto’s exclusive BIN2EXE executables, the only way to get up to speed is to cross your fingers, hold your breath and run it.  Well, here we have spared you the effort.  (This is the last time accessing the info will be so straightforward; future releases saddle the executable with a music soundtrack, which seems to throw a spanner of complexity in the works, but toward the end they also throw us a bone in the form of a transcript.)  The circumstances behind this pack’s creation were apparently relatively uneventful, as told by its words; in this intermediary stage, SE is now not only run by its primary programmer, also the SysOp of its WHQ, but also the public face of the group, penning the infofiles and even packaging the release with what might be termed “programmer art”.

It’s a humble intermediary release; only a fraction of the membership weighs in with contributions, longtime stalwarts Beyond Inertia, Lethal Impact, and perennial fount of creativity Onyx, but the organization regardless continues apace, hinting at projects behind the scenes which may or may not be realized in a public form (SPOILER ALERT: the fishie game never made it).

Gee whiz, that closing line in the infofile has got to be one of the most humble slogans of all time.

Next up – SE_D0896, then we leave Sonic Equinox’s 1996 behind!

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Day 3 of Mistigris Music Madness brings us the second music disk release of our friends in Sonic Equinox, browser-audible at textmod.es (and still no closer to a solution to the SE mysteries posed in the previous post.)

The infofile (see above) might help to shed some light on things: at this point this group is now out of the hands of its mercurial musician and artist founders and under the guidance of a more even keel, programmer (of eg. PabloDraw) Eto – the man who either named himself after his BBS’ initials or came up with a BBS name to match his inscrutable nick.

See also above: ANSI visuals by Questor (Spawn in 1995?  You don’t say!) from the application generator.  In truth, you won’t see any of these visuals over at textmod.es , but sho ‘nuff you will be hearing the songs blasting in stereo* out of your computer speakers, tunes by SE stalwarts Beyond Inertia, Dark Avatar, Lethal Impact, and the one-man wrecking squad (sorry, in the first draft that read “cottage industry”) Onyx.  It doesn’t look like their tunes are part of an internal competition anymore, so maybe that was just a passing fancy.

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Day 2 of our project to remember the disappeared is off to a bumpy start, as I’d anticipated spending six days doling out “lost” music disks by our fellow travellers in 604 would-be demogroup SONiC EQUiNOX only to find them all sitting pretty (if, admittedly, in stark neglect) over at at the Hornet Archive.

Regardless, we got them sent in to textmod.es, so we ought to come up with something to say about them.  The files speak for themselves, to some extent, but context is invaluable.  Not much is on the public record regarding them – let’s see what was written on the topic in the annals of our house organ KiTHE e-mag (typically making use of

Equinox Music Interface Kit (EMIK) by Hexx of Sonic Equinox for music-playing capabilities 8):

* [SE] Sonic Equinox
* Founder: Darkforce and Illusionary Enigma
* Duration: Several months… a few small releases.
CT: A demo group featuring artists from Union, CiA, and iMPERiAL… Has some fabulous musicians, but suffers sloth…we don’t DO much…
Surreal Logic: Err, another musical group that I neglected to point out is SONiC EQUiNOX (love dem funky caps =), which seems to have a LOT of talent, and are releasing a lot of good MODs and S3Ms.

These glib, in-the-moment summaries gloss over some important facts: SONiC EQUiNOX (as SL notes – himself a recent rediscovery, come to think of it – gotta love those small “i”s) actually pre-dates MiSTiGRiS by some months, initially taking as its home base the BBS of Darkforce, “House of Style”, before he changed his mind about demoscene adventurism (and his UNiON affiliation 8) and doubled down on ANSI art domination with Integrity.  It must have been with some desire to get a foot in the SE door that I wrote a lit for House of Style back in the pre-Mist iMPERiAL days: if you want to learn how to make computer music, maybe the thing to do is first figure out where the computer musicians are and hang with them.

It must have succeeded, since I was admitted into the BBS, if not the group: what precisely could a poet do for a demogroup, anyhow?  Pen scrolly bars in iambic pentameter? (Heey… maybe that’s not such a bad idea!) I ended up writing a lyrical motion graphics poetry treatment for Onyx’s song The Tragedy of MacLes (which you may be lucky enough to see reconstructed and presented in MIST1015), but Dr. CPU was never able to do much with it.  I get the feeling that the first year or so of Sonic Equinox was spent basically biting off more than they could chew – I vividly recall plans for a mega loader presentation of Freaq’s module Black Noise, but then by December of 1994 there we were releasing it in The Bells Of Yule, apparently dead in the water over in SE.

the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
near

(Pardon the poetic license; old literary habits die hard.)

This is their first music disk release, dated October of 1995.  That would have synched up with Mist’s first anniversary, and remember – SE predated us!  It takes a special kind of patience to keep a group together for over a year with zero releases, which as I can testify from the Mistigris World Tour… is bad for morale.

Anyhow, I could go on and on (seriously, read any of my infofiles), but I have more forgotten Sonic Equinox releases to discuss and more genuinely lost music to prepare and package for your enjoyment.  (Speaking of infofiles – none here!  So my cobwebby memory really is our best resource for insight into the early days of SE!)

Day 2: SE_D1095.ZIP

(Another strange memory: a vivid recollection that these music collections were distributed intermittently as .ARJ archives rather than .ZIPs, inadvertently discouraging their download and distribution with their arbitrary and mercurial non-standard iconoclasm (or did it milk an extra 5k of compression out of tracked music?).  But somehow, all the existent archives are .ZIPs, so you’ll have to take my word for it.)