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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!
