... or enjoy a curated sampling of 34 highlights via https://mistfunk.bandcamp.com
(Now playing: Onyx - Rhodrum, written in 1995.)
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
Corroded contains nine songs (one of which includes lyrics!) composed in Impulse Tracker – as best as we can tell, all by him – and hopefully this time it doesn’t disappear again! Hats off to |(ing /|rthur – wherever he is – for we’re giving your songs one more trot around the track! (Who knows, there’s a very good chance that they’ll reach a wider audience now than they ever did in 2000!)
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!
Mistigris was extraordinary. I could just end right there and it’d be true, but I have a point to make here, so I’ll continue: we were extraordinary in our commitment to the spectrum of computer arts. Many groups were ANSI or ASCII-only; some also accepted the filesize-thrifty vector art format of RIPscrip. Some took the extraordinary next step of committing to the file-size increase of having a high-resolution art (or “VGA”) division, and few further also folded in bulky tracked computer music. Those who could included programs, but typically that only went as far as an application generator and a file viewer. And then, of course, there was our most unconventional inclusion: lit – which, if we included, meant that we basically had to take in anything that came our way. But let’s back up a few steps here, because it really is tracked music I’m discussing today.
Following a couple of false starts with Ophidiac and TeklordZ, our very first realized Mistigris World Tour stop was in December of 1996 with the long-running B-list group Blade (B-list ha, I recall we described this one-month gestalt as “Blistigris”) – and as a second-stringer, like us, they were forced to take what they could get, making them our only tour companions to enjoy pre-existing lit and music departments we could just slot our releases in those formats into. As the false starts had delayed the start of our tour (originally intended to get underway immediately following our 2nd-anniversary release), Blade inherited quite a backlog of pent-up submissions. Fistful of Steel, our next tour stop in January of ‘97, also was kind enough to accept tracked music in their release. And then, and then, and then… arrangements fell through, and we drifted for three months with no guest outlet for our creations. Keep working on them, I cried, I’ll find a worthy home for them! And I did: the tour ended with two great appearances in two great artgroups, Fire and Dark. (The Blender competition was at this moment also a welcome release valve as well as a font of inspiration.)
But Fire did not want to bloat their pack’s filesize with tracked music, which was at this point a painful pent-up burden, and we weren’t in a position to dictate terms to them. So, as you saw, some were shunted aside to a Sonic Equinox release; the rest were earmarked for the upcoming Dark pack. FIRE0497 launched with our “everything else”, and we were intriguingly integrating with Dark when the news dropped: Fire was going to use our music, a month following our tourstop with them, to help flesh out the inaugural release of their new, long-planned music division, “Radiance”. And yea, there a truly shizoid collection was unleashed. On the one hand, you had three months’ of Mistigris musician compositions – “art for art’s sake”, as it were (especially Jake Blues’ epic unparalleled >10-minute Akira-taiko tribute Neo Tokyo Dawning), but still basically scene music by creators for whom music was their primary outlet. And then, there in the other corner, was a deliberately abrasive collection of music tracks predominantly by creative types best known as ANSI artists. In fact, I don’t know if any of them ever released tracker music in the artscene ever again following this lopsided debut – promotional art (pictured here) and fruitless labour on music-playing executables to the contrary, this remained Radiance’s only release. Fire’s side provided what could be considered compelling compositions – bolder, more iconoclastic ones than we dished up – but unlike the rest of the tour-stops, this is one occasion where the different groups’ contributions would probably have been better received independent from each other.
Dark was genuinely disappointed at the lost opportunity to showcase Neo Tokyo Rising, but probably sighed in relief at dodging the bullet of being confronted with having to deal with the sum of a season’s worth of Mistigris songs and not just the two we’d come up with in the meantime. And that is the story of how Mistigris released music in three different collections in the month of May 1997 – none of them Mist packs!
For the eighth day of Mistigris May Music Madness, I dug up this collection – because, in accordance with the old “too artscene for the demoscene archives, too demoscene for the artscene archives”, the collection had fallen between the cracks and disappeared from the historical record. I no longer had the archive, but I had managed to hang on to the individual tracks (tracker wisdom: don’t throw out that song! I might be able to use its samples sometime!) which, through the magic of analysing file timestamps, I managed to isolate. I feared I’d have to reconstruct its vital packaging, the infofile and FILE_ID.DIZ, but after some prodding, Nail of Fire delivered a (corrupted) copy of the original disk from the filebase of his decomissioned BBS. Between the two of us, we managed to Frankenstein the original archive back together, for better (additional context from an Ay Lektriq interview in the infofile) or worse (the original FILE_ID.DIZ, repeating the worst part of the Fire tour pack). For the first time in years, you can once again enjoy the sounds of RAD_DSK1 (well, maybe not the Fire stuff – you can experience those fauvist sounds 8) in-browser over at pc.textmod.es
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!
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!
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.
May Day, May Day!
… - - - …
S O S
Save Our Songs
There’s the idea that once you release your work out into the online world, it stays there in some way, shape or form. The existence of archives dedicated to preserving computer artwork furthers this notion, though sadly a lot slips between the cracks. Specifically, computer music most often got overlooked.
In October of 1997, we released a three-part celebration of our creative achievements, split (for various reasons) into three disks: disk A, the lowrez art; disk B, the hirez art; and disk C, the music. Disks A and B made it into posterity; disk C only survived as a corrupt fragment someone aborted while uploading to an FTP site… until now.
During the leadup to our 20-year reunion pack MIST1014, Platinum and Beatle helped to apply modern data recovery tools to the corrupted specimen of MIST3YRC.ZIP which had become the sole remaining representative of the release, allowing successful extraction of a pathetic 5 songs of its intended 23. We’re thrilled to put the full music disk back into circulation, allowing all the songs to be heard in their entirety for possibly the first time since their host BBSes went down for the count circa 1998.
It can be downloaded with all its files (and a substantially updated infofile) at bit.ly/mist3yrc , but more excitingly we are proud to announce its exclusive hosting at pc.textmod.es , where the songs can be heard playing right through your web browser, functionality not currently offered at any of the other artscene archive websites. (There’s another exciting trick in the eaves, but we’ll start with that one.)
But this is just the start. For the first ten days (at least!) of May 2015, May Mistigris Music Madness will be in effect: we will be re-releasing “lost” collections of computer music daily, most of which never made it out of the circle of area code 604’s tracker-music BBSes, and none of which anybody has been able to listen to in this century. Some of them will be past Mistgris productions, but we will also be offering up substantial quantities of recently-recovered music from fellow traveller groups and artists whose names you may have seen guesting or being greeted in our infofiles: we always stood in solidarity with our area code, and ensuring that their creations gain representation in the wider historical record is one way of furthering this.
Day 1: MIST3YRC.ZIP, reconstructed.
In December of 1994, Mistigris released a holiday-themed music disk, entitled “The Bells of Yule”, built around a five-movement epic instrumental suite from our friends at Digitallusions. Though widely circulated locally on BBSes, it never made the leap to the internet, and when the final local boards went kaput circa ‘98, it appeared to be withdrawn from circulation… forever?
But this group of songs was much too special to lose: Cthulu kept his copy of it. (Cthulu keeps as much as humanly possible.) And now, two decades later, the disk emerges upon the Yuletide stage once again, 4-channel .MOD tracks remastered as MP3s, bolstered by fellow traveller holiday songs from the Mistigris glory days in the late ’90s and newer, thematically resonant tunes from Empress Play, which Digitallusions has gradually evolved into. The 2014 collection boasts over double the songs of the 1994 one, has sprawled from an hour to 105 minutes, and as for its filesize… woah, Nelly! The 186 meg archive is over a hundred times as big as the original release, which was in its time considered too large to mirror widely. (Have you ever circulated an mp3 on a floppy diskette? Cthulu has… but I digress.)
You can find the complete archive here (two days later: due to higher demand than anticipated, we hit a bandwidth limit, but the music disk is now mirrored at http://pixelwitches.com/MISTYULE.ZIP, http://bbs.ninja/pub/original/pack/2014/mistyule.zip , and http://bigbox.chattaway.com/temp/MISTYULE.ZIP), with supporting music from Melodia, Onyx, Freaq and Cthulu, or click below to enjoy the heart of the work, the updated 2014 remastered version of the original 5-part suite that got the whole (snow)ball rolling.
[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="300" iframe="true" /]
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!
