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
