CTHULU/BITCOUVER24

 Mistigram: our previously scheduled return to CJSF's Bitcouver broadcast, after seven years away, was postponed due to weather last week, and we're taking another crack at it tonight.  Join Cthulu (who also drew this quick and dirty #ANSIart logo for our hosts) as he curates a selection of tracker tunes from area code 604 going back 30 years, in support of the SE_D0124 music disk we released earlier this year.  You can listen live tonight from 8-10 PST over the radio airwaves or via the CJSF radio station's website at http://www.cjsf.ca:8443/listen-hq

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/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=zS0g7nEUdV0?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]

Is it possible that we somehow failed to tell you about our major Christmas 2016 project? It is possible – the smashing of my main computer’s screen interfered both in the commission of the project and the promotion of it. Well, season’s belated greetings, folks – it’s an outtake from Melodia’s “1999” music disk, a remix of Enya singing “Silent Night”, complete with an array of vintage and contemporary retrocomputing holiday imagery from Horsenburger’s teletext advent calendar, @C64_endings’ winterized screenshots of classic Commodore 64 games, imagery from Apple ][ demos run through Melodia’s Octalyzer, a few tidbits from the STatariART crew… plus even a couple of seasonal pieces by Mistigris regulars! Don’t worry if you didn’t get a chance to see this in time this year, we’ll certainly be parading it out again next December!

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

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

Today we share with you the fourth movement of our five-part 1994 tracker music epic of original moody instrumental holiday music, remastered by Melodia in 2014, souped up with tons of period seasonal imagery from textmode and artscene sources in 2015 and … paraded out again in 2016. Enjoy!

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

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9NRRadx-zY?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]

Yesterday we re-shared the second installment of the 5-part Bells of Yule epic seasonal holiday tracked music suite made on an Atari ST in 1994, remastered in 2014 and given period visuals from the PC artscene last year. This time around all we have to do is share the links! The music was composed by Admiral Skuttlebutt, remastered by Melodia, and the visuals this time around focus on 25-line ANSI art, largely from Public Domain sources, especially featuring the works of Ebony Eyes.

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

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Last night our community radio colleagues at the long-running Art of Beatz radio program closing the daily broadcast schedule at CFRO Co-Op Community Radio (100.5 fm in Vancouver BC) were kind enough to have us on their show to present a curated hourlong tour through the rich history of the .MOD tracking and computer music tradition of area code 604, by way of promoting the imminent MIST1116 artpack battering down the gates.

Tonight on Art Of Beatz Radio: Mistigris and Chad Munson
Hour 1: Mistigris
Tuck in your Tamagotchi and crack open a frosty bottle of J0lt cola, for everything old is new again: this week we’re celebrating a local tradition of 2 and a half decades of computer music out of area code 604 with Cthulu of the computer art collective MiSTiGRiS (est. 1994), who will be representing a golden thread of chiptunes and musictrackers from the LSDJ of today all the way back to the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST. Sine waves, static channels, and samples – oh my!

You can hear the whole hourlong broadcast as a digital audio stream or, if you already know the history and don’t want me blabbering on top of all the songs, I’ve prepared a download of “just the tunes”. And here’s the playlist!

Freddy43 / Mistigris - Trackerfix song, 2016
Lofryr - 5th Dimension, Apr 1993
AcidFrog - Drowning In Your Love, Aug 1995
Admiral Skuttlebutt / Digitallusions remixed by Marauder / Euphonix - Rave 95
Esquire - C02, Oct 1997
Jazz / Euphonix remixed by Sidewinder - Night of the Living Hoovers, 1995
The Pope / The Immortal Syndicate - Christe 1, Apr 1996
Fingers / Euphonix - Otesnpyneneidells, Sept 1994
Unicode / Mistigris - Remember, Oct 2015
Ill-esha - Line by line, Oct 2015
Haquisaq / Mistigris - Night Shift, 2001
Cthulu / Mistigris - pure white light, 1999
Anton Van Oosbree - Aerodynamic (Daft Punk), 2016
Obsidian Zero / Sonic Equinox - Good Night, 1998

Instagram video by Cthulu • Oct 5, 2016 at 3:15pm UTC

Just yesterday we wrote up Reanimator’s 604 Music Disk Mistigris logo on Mistigram, and already he’s been revived from digital embers and is celebrating the good old days with this slideshow music video celebrating one of his Mist Classic songs from MIST0195, his tracker music cover of the soundtrack to Activision’s Aliens game for the C64. Not bad!

In 1994 I moved to vancouver for college and joined a small demo group that made mods and s3m’s.

I decided to recreate my favourite themesong from my favourite video game of all time. Aliens for the c64.

I lost the file.

I found it last night after 15 years while surfing the internetz.

An ode to LV-426!

Please Enjoy

…

God, I feel freekin old

Instagram video by Cthulu • Oct 5, 2016 at 3:15pm UTC

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

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

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

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

[audio http://mistbackup.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/walker.mp3]

Last weekend I travelled through New York City for a wedding, a location I have only ventured through three times – on average, once every 12 years. So I have no roots in the city, little history, and despite having been there, virtually everything I “know” about it has been sucked up in childhood through pop culture such as Ghostbusters, The Critic, or The Muppets Take Manhattan. But I thought that the occasion would make for a fun opportunity to look at an old creative work we re-released last year, set in New York. The work is the song WALKER.MOD, titled “Stroll Thru New York” by Darren Grant of EuphoniX, first released on the last day of February 1993. (Where historical computer art is concerned, the easily-embeddable, instantly experienced visual artworks get the lion’s share of the social media love, and even Mistigris’ little-loved “lit” – easy to paste and explain – gets more airtime than our extensive and formidable music back stacks, so I’d like to try placing a stronger emphasis on vintage tracker music… because there’s a ton of it, and much of it is truly awesome!)

If Jovian and Tom were the core of EuphoniX, Jason and Darren were always its outliers – JaZz on the experimental, bruitist side, Darren on the sentimental, traditionalist side. That means that this tune is accessible, if extraordinary in the annals of computer music. Described internally as “humorous new age theme music”, it was released only a week after the composer’s similarly left-field Mystic Valour (also described as “new age” – a phrase that keeps being seen in the EuphoniX catalogue, but conspicuously only when applied to Darren’s songs.) You might get the feeling from JaZz’s anarchic tracks that he was throwing everything at the wall and seeing what stuck, but with Darren’s songs you can always be assured that they are precisely what they are intended to be, so any speed bumps listeners encounter will not be ones of composition or production, but rather mismatches of musical taste.

The instrument name messages don’t reveal much beyond the song’s release date, and pressing the onetime composer for further remarks two decades down the line didn’t result in much more: “Oh haha.. hmm not much. Mostly I raided other sample sets and played around. :) super cheese”.

As he sowed, so too do we reap: “super cheese” is the order of the day. The two minute and twenty-five second long song begins at a dawdling pace, like a record (let’s get you in the ‘80s mood here right off the bat) starting up midway through a song before the turntable reaches its cruising speed. The overall theme here is one of intrepid success to those who dare: in my mind’s eye, the opening of the song shows a businessman in a tailored suit emerging from a taxicab with his briefcase, quickly getting his bearings before power-walking – unhurried, but confident and in command – toward his destination: wealth and high finance. Within five seconds the song has achieved the pace it will enjoy for the rest of its duration, and its main theme rings out with a certain air of inevitability – as though somehow, the whole system of Wall Street was rigged. (But rigged in the businessman’s favour! No sour grapes in this song!)

As if to hammer itself home, it plays a neat trick with with the synth-horn lead line, at intervals re-triggering at phrase’s end the same sample at the same pitch with a louder intensity, like some record-setting Kenny G trick of circular breathing. This is all punctuated by a kickin’ slap bass line in the lower register, perhaps some inheritor of the New York sophistication of similarly New-York-set Seinfeld, launched in 1989.

There’s nothing particularly Big Apple about this song, which I like to think has its counterpart in Jovian’s Thursday Night in the City following in September of that year, a much more urban piece of work. For years, the image that comes to mind when I think of WALKER.MOD is actually the introduction to the short-lived cartoon Beverly Hills Teens, hitting the wrong coast but both fundamentally evoking a kind of fantasy of upper-class '80s white privilege where the future’s so bright, I gotta wear new wave sunglasses and a neon surf unitard.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zu2eawfTiCM&w=420&h=315]

One minute in, the song dramatically slows down through an agonizing series of tempo gear shifts. Seventeen seconds later, our businessman finds that he has power-walked into the wrong side of the tracks – I believe in the '80s, The Bronx was the borough with that dangerous reputation. (Then again, as The Warriors demonstrated, even Central Park in the heart of Manhattan could be no cakewalk if you have the wrong enemies.) Whether Wall Street Kid is in any actual mortal peril or not is – as in The Bonfire of the Vanities – entirely beside the point, as from the sound of things he clearly sees himself at the mercy of a ruthless biker gang, one of whose members is likely spinning a chain menacingly. (No hint of “urban” music here, his boogeymen are plainly no b-boys.) But shortly thereafter, he hops a retaining wall or ducks out from under the right tunnel and emerges (at 1:34) into full sunshine in the business district again, with a transition back to the main theme as seamless as the departure from it was contrived. The anthem trumpets once more, then echoes its own return some 50 seconds later, and it wraps before risking overstaying its welcome.

In essence, this song is the sound of a bolt of totally awesome fabric my wife picked up at an estate sale last weekend.

We hit you with its history, we held the contest, we let things simmer for a while, and finally… we can share the results with you!

Presenting, for the first time anywhere in the existing digital record, the outcome of a Tracker Fix computer music compo! This one is (at press time) the most recent, held February 20-21, 2016, and represents the only complete account of any Tracker Fix activity, previously known only to posterity in fragments and references from the late ‘90s. The event was envisioned as unfolding across two phases – an initial “rapid prototyping” phase and then a later “improve, expand & polish” phase – and scoring was going to be calculated as a function of improvement from the first phase to the second. But none of the initial song-sketches ever came back with improved versions, so the compo is not scored. As a bonus, in addition to the initial set of song-sketches, there are a couple of late “non-competing” songs that were sent in outside of the compo’s official times, as well as the initial track from MIST1015 by Claire Roberts that provided the offbeat belly-dancing sampleset we had to work with. (The samplepack is included with the archive, in case you feel, well after the fact, that you’d like to take a crack at them also.)

Participating composers ultimately included DraXx, Simon, Evgthug1, Cthulu, Nobilu, Freddy43, and bryface. Share & enjoy!

Tracker Fix 2016 samplepack

It’s made of all the bits and bobs that went into Claire Roberts’ “It’s Like A Collage” from MIST1015.ZIP … and if you find those really impossible to work with, a Plan B sample collection is available made from dismembered sound effects from classic C64 games.

Good luck working with them and please try to get something back in to me by the end of the weekend – cthulu at tabnet dot ca. Cheers!

Tracker Fix 2016 samplepack

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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.)

[wpvideo byLvT4xX]

The MIST2000 Treasure Hunt: Puzzle #4, explained!

OK, when you last saw us, unpacking this complex of computer stumpers, back on November 7th, we’d just unpacked the ANSI art black-on-black problem (with help from TheDraw fonts) and had been sent to puzzle number 4 by way of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, curiously: bit.ly/SopochtdasSchicksalandiePforte. And you were pointed to a .ZIP archive (a current compression standard at last, thank god!) FANTASTIC.ZIP (Fantastic Four, you dig?) which you then cracked open, only to be posed with this:

A password? No previous prompts provided me with any kind of password! This is unfair! But here’s a hint: the encrypted file’s name is “Horse Feathers”? Now, what comes up if you Google “Horse Feathers + password”? This isn’t rocket science, it was even the name of a movie. In fact, it’s the name of a trope: The Password Is Always Swordfish.

Maybe it would have been more fair to make it one of the classic overused passwords, like “password” or “God”. If I were to do this again, I probably would have styled the ANSI art clue as a fake BBS ad and listed this password as a New User Password. If I were to do this again… I’d be certifiably bonkers.

So you start playing the song, and you hear the creepy mantra repeated endlessly with an old interesting-failure word-by-word speech synthesis experiment: This is a red herring.

A “red herring”, for non-native English speakers, is a metaphor for a dead end of sorts – a distraction from an alternate fruitful avenue. And this song is full of them: open the file up in a tracker program and analyse the samples included in the song. One of them contains backmasked vocals – Satanic messages? No: sadly, an apology for being another red herring. One contains the old tracker trick of including a text file as a sample, and that text file will tell you everything you might have ever wanted to know about the etymology of the phrase “red herring”. A message in morse code? Sure. What you get when you decode the message? You can probably guess the species and colour of the fish. We even include one sample of noise that reveals a picture of a fish when run through a spectroscope… all different paths that lead to the same, unuseful, lack of progress. So how do we progress? What here is not a red herring?

In the first of my “no-puzzle puzzles” all you have to do here is play through the whole song, in its entirety, from within a tracker program that displays the names of the samples currently triggered. After listening to a great deal (well, a minute and 57 seconds) of creepy uselessnes, near the end of the playback, you will see a message silently display on the screen, assembled letter-by-letter, inspired by our longago insertion of ASCII stickmen dancing the YMCA in a tracked rendition of that Village People song for a Blender competition. And that message will tell you where to go. (And… where to go next, for puzzle number 5, is: bit.ly/fifthBeatle … maybe you can solve it before I get around to spoiling the puzzle, though for my sake I sure hope you don’t as I’ve really got to start dashing these off if I want to get MIST2000 into the public’s hands before New Year!)

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9kjKwrUTqc?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]
So while we came to the conclusion of our “original” re-heated Christmas content on Christmas Eve, we still have our spree of similar proportions from last year. We dug up a pile of seasonal loaders, lits and works of ANSI art from our own ‘90s artpacks in chronological order, but the secret was that it was all in the service of drawing more attention to the re-release of the never-heard-much-in-its-original-format music disk The Bells Of Yule, which finally in 2014 found the audience it so richly deserved.

This was the same motivation behind our cooking up these five ten-minute music videos we shared with you this year, an enormous promotional effort (with, I think, lesser primary success) behind spreading the word about old tunes from 1994, but fortunately it was an interesting exercise regardless.

And now we have ten artefacts to use to promote its enjoyment for Christmas 2016! Two more and we can do a genuine “12 Days of Christmas” run-up! (Sit down, Catholics, I know that the 12 Days actually come AFTER.)

So if we’ve worn down your resistance to hearing new things (or, actually, incredibly old things), know that you can enjoy listening to all five movements of the Bells of Yule suite right here!

[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="450" iframe="true" /]

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

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p-D0j-awns?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]

On Sunday, you saw part 1; yesterday, you saw part 2… today, we bring you part 3 of the 5-part Bells of Yule holiday suite of period (1994) computer music, illustrated with fellow traveler pieces of textmode artwork from the Public Domain and the underground. Today’s video especially places an emphasis on a handful of animated ANSI art screens – or ANSImations. Stay tuned for the final two videos as we continue marching along on our Christmas countdown! Merry Mist'mas – share and enjoy!

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

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9NRRadx-zY?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]
You probably got the general idea from yesterday’s posting of the first of our five holiday music videos, but if you missed it and don’t feel like following that link, in a nutshell: in December 1994, we released “the Bells of Yule”, a music disk featuring a central 5-part suite of seasonal .MOD music composed on an Atari ST. It was sent to all of the BBSes, and when they dried up, it disappeared, seemingly forever… but in 2014, Cthulu made his personal copy available to the composer, who had since lost the originals, and in a remastered form, they were sent out back into the world once again, greatly fortified with other holiday computer compositions.

Now it is Christmas 2015, and we are following up this Lazarus-like feat from last year by making music videos for each of the five parts, one daily in the run-up to Christmas Day. We have drawn on the rich history of computer art, public domain and underground, to provide a wintery potluck of hundreds of pieces of thematically-appropriate fellow traveler works in a textmode, low-resolution idiom; part 2’s visuals draw specifically on brief, single-screen (or “25-line”) pieces of ANSI art – full attribution of the participating artists (and gosh golly, there sure are a lot of them) can be found at the end of the video. Merry Mist'mas – share and enjoy!

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

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One of a handful of loose ends left adrift in the confusing tail end of our May Mistigris Music Madness spree, composer King Arthur (or |(ing /|rthur as he styled himself – that should be a pointy bracket, not a paren, but HTML – or, briefly, Black Rain) had a music disk, “Corroded”, that has since been lost – and which we are in a position to throw back into circulation. Joining our ranks as part of the first incarnation of Fire, when they merged into Mistigris in Feb-March 1995, while all their visual artists quickly wriggled their way out of our roster this lone music tracker remained, drifting away in the middle of things during the great BBS decline and then finding his way back to us by the end – and beyond, putting together and releasing this music disk in May of 2000, after we ourselves had, if not exactly closed up shop, at least … given up hope.

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!)

Introducing the fabulous MIST2000.ZIP treasure hunt!

All right, you miserable wretches! I’ve been unleashing mounds of collections of lost, previously-unreleased, and downright new computer art from the underground PC art scene for the past year! I’ve been exhausting long-fermenting stockpiles of the stuff, discharging it all out into the uncaring air of history, and I’m through! By which I mean… we have one final collection of classics for you to enjoy, MIST2000.ZIP (subsequently referred to as M2K for brevity’s sake), a digest of materials optimistically collected ~1997-2001 for eventual artpack release before I’d come to the conclusion that my artgroup Mistigris had really and truly died for the forseeable future. (Happily proven kind of wrong: like Banishment in Master of Magic, you can come back – but you have to wait a heck of a lot of turns to do so.)

But unlike all of those prior offerings from the vault, I’m not going to deliver it to your front door on a silver platter. I made this whole process too easy, pathetically offering the unplucked flower of our youth up with no shred of coyness, tainted with the whiff of desperation surrounding something well past its prime. And why, after all, debase yourself by accepting what was so needily proffered? It’s not last call, and you have no obligation to take our art home with you just because it wants to live on your hard drive!

Now, as Louis C.K. says, everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy. But think back to the artscene’s eyeblink in the limelight of technological relevance. In order to procure an artpack, there were so many steps you had to undertake: first you needed a computer (expensive and far from ubiquitous) and a modem, and some understanding of what the latter could be used for; you needed an ANSI-supporting terminal program you had to figure out how to use without tapping into any kind of online assistance, and BBS phone numbers, enough of them that you could slip through the surface layer of Public Domain systems to some underground boards; you needed to obtain access to said underground boards by gleaning enough elite insight from bubbles up to the PD sphere to pass review by the new user application committee. Then when you called back, you had to wait in line for the busy signal to resolve. Finally you reconnected, and found you needed to build up your file points by sending in something that you had that they wanted and didn’t have yet, a catch-22 if ever there was one. After several uploads, you finally accrued enough file points to download your desired artpack – but the board hung up on you for running out of your daily allotment of time! You called back the next day and found that you didn’t actually have enough daily minutes needed to download the file, so you banked that day’s remaining allotment and called back on day THREE, at which point you withdrew the extra minutes and successfully initiated the download at 1200 baud – which tied up your computer and your phone line for one hour and 82 seconds. By some stroke of luck your mom didn’t pick up the phone extension for the whole hour, and at the end you had an archive on your 40 meg hard drive ready to be cracked open. Well, first you had to delete some files to make room for the archive to be uncompressed… then you had to wait for them to decompress… and there, finally you had the files there on your hard drive, ready to enjoy. Only – you didn’t have enough RAM to load ANSI.SYS in your overloaded CONFIG.SYS file, so you couldn’t view the files from the MS-DOS prompt, and you needed to wait until the next day to download an ANSI viewer from the BBS. And then you managed to do so, and then you basked in the warm glow of getting to enjoy subjecting yourself to advertisements for long distance bulletin boards you could never afford to be able to call, even if the ads didn’t blank out their actual phone numbers. Hopefully you enjoyed the art, because you weren’t getting those file points back, or that time, or your ephemeral youth…

THIS SYSTEM WAS, QUITE FRANKLY, INSANE. (It brings to mind my high school valedictorian’s observation that between your mother’s lifetime egg production and your father’s lifetime sperm production, simply by being conceived by a combination of those particular two gametes you had beat odds of two hundred trillion one hundred billion to one.) But by making itself impossible, it compelled us to up our game, to better ourselves and harden ourselves to handle the impossible as just another everyday curve ball to be hit out of the park. We would do three impossible things before breakfast and then queue a batch of four more to process automatically while we were at school! We became efficiency ninja, and like perpetuators of cruel hazing practices, carried on the elite practices because we believed that it really separated the wheat from the chaff – and if nothing else, it guaranteed that everyone in the artscene that you interacted with felt keenly passionately about being there… because it had taken so many steps to get there, and they’d be damned if they didn’t get some return on their investment. Everything gained by working under such conditions felt more rewarding as if earned through hard work, because it was hard work… unpaid work that no one asked to be done, but labour nonetheless that required a rare specialist skillset, focus and dedication.

Today, by contrast, we invite you to click a link for instant gratification – and you may or may not be arsed to lift that proverbial finger.

So maybe it turns out that people are more interested in something that they have to sweat a little over in order to obtain. It just so happens that I’ve had a bug in my ear to creatively add inefficiency to a simple process for quite a while – predating my involvement in the artscene, I sketched out plans for a PD BBS treasure hunt, inspired by Kit Williams’ 1979 puzzle-book Masquerade, by way of Bamber Gascoigne’s account of the mania in the 1983 book “Quest for the Golden Hare”. I thought it would be a good premise for a “grand tour” through the BBS scene, encouraging people to visit specialist boards beyond their particular online community and comfort zone, but when the SysOps balked at coughing up $5 a piece for a $100 grand prize to the winner in exchange for a failsafe plan for the free traffic guaranteed a mandatory stop along the route, my aspiration stalled and I resolved to find less elaborate ways to express myself.

Ever since then this idea has rattled around in my head as the good idea that “got away”, a funny bone tickled when I encountered David Münnich’s 2004 NotPron, Aaron Reed’s 2009 blueful, and Ernest Cline’s 2011 book READY PLAYER ONE. I don’t have many treasures to give away – no golden hares, not even a $100 pot… but I do have this amazing time capsule what is M2K, so why not make you more interested in it by being a tease and throttling your access to it a little bit for a little while?

So there we go, that’s all the setup. How do you play this contest? What is the structure of the puzzle? I’m not going to spill it all here at this moment in time, but I will assert that to overcome the gauntlet you will need to demonstrate a handy mastery of oldschool artscene lore across all its mediums – challenges that might take a guru 5 minutes (like Myst, if you know what you’re doing), or a luser … forever! Because we feel passionately about supporting the economy of the beleagured country of Libya, all puzzles take the form of a redirected (or perhaps I should say usefully obfuscated) bit.ly URL leading to the next step of the puzzle, where the case-sensitive (and no spaces or punctuation marks) answer “YourCodeHere” to a given puzzle would fit in the form http://bit.ly/YourCodeHere . Every few days, we will be rolling back and “spoiling” early puzzles in the sequence to enable stymied truthseekers to proceed further in our nefarious chain of stumpers. And by the end of the month the M2K pack will be released to the public directly; this is your chance to enjoy nearly a month of exclusive access to our archive in exchange for your ineffable eliteness.

If you feel that there has been a malfunction or that a puzzle piece is not working fairly, as it should be intended to, please don’t hesitate to contact us (@mistfunk, cthulu at tabnet dot ca) to bring the matter to our attention. It should work, but it is not inconceivable that something we didn’t think of might be temporarily getting in the way.

On that optimistic note – you can find the first clue over here. Happy hunting!

GOT STUCK? Read through and skip directly to the second puzzle!

STILL STUCK ON THE SECOND PUZZLE? Follow up here and proceed to the third!

Alternately, forget the third puzzle, we spoiled that one for your convenience as well!

QUITE SOME TIME LATER, WE SPOILED THE FOURTH PUZZLE as well, allowing latecomers to this game to breeze through the gentler second half of our insidious riddle-clues.

Also, in short order, the fifth puzzle also was spoiled.

In keeping with the theme of the week, we went on to spoil the sixth puzzle the following day, though really, there was hardly any puzzling there to do.

Much the same could be said for the seventh puzzle.

And then there was the eighth, and finally, the ninth and final puzzle, all spoiled for your entertainment and edification. Now you can just go forth and enjoy the MIST2000.ZIP artpack without any interference.