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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.)

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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.

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Late in its run, Cthulu – Mistigris’ primary functionary – took over the administration of the Blender IRC competition, in which computer artists put their talents to the test to see what they could up with drawing inspiration from spontaneous shared prompts.  While we were dark horses elsewhere in the artscene, due to its lack of ANSI-art-primacy we found ourselves excelling in the Blender compos, and released two artpacks consisting exclusively of our great contest entries, several of which were award-winning.

The contests in the series that Cthulu attended to were never released for sixteen years, awaiting a final ruling on scoring and adjudication for previous contests… ruling that never came.  As part of his General Computer Art Amnesty of 2014-2015, on March 16th of this year Cthulu finally discharged the proceeds from these 13 Blender competitions into the wild, an unruly omnibus of very strange vintage computer artwork on bizarre themes, including works by Mistigris artists not previously viewable anywhere, which can be enjoyed as BLNDR048-060.ZIP here or in a web gallery at sixteencolors.net, which is just wrapping up its own Blender-inspired competition tournament among Blocktronics ANSI artists.

That’s not the big news, though: the thing making this tangential artpack release newsworthy here is that this Saturday, April 11th, Cthulu and longtime Blender admin Warpus of Lazarus will be running one final Blender compo for old time’s sakes, based out of #blender on the EFNet IRC.  You can find more complete directions here.  Join us, won’t you?

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Once again demonstrating the curious resilience that has served them so well, veteran computer art collective MiSTiGRiS has today (April 1, 2015) released perhaps their most popular and well-received artpack collection yet, containing a rich and varied assortment of visual, literary and conceptual art pranks in the ANSI, ASCII, high-resolution and even literary mediums.  Even the infofile is a masterful text!  (Also, there is one unexceptional piece of music.)

To anyone who was part of the underground computer artscene of the ‘90s, this rich love letter will be instantly recognizable for what it is: a little nostalgia covers a plethora of sins.  And to anyone else… let this muddy the waters a little.

Its unparalleled contents can be enjoyed via the web gallery at sixteencolors.net or, if you prefer, transferred directly to your hard drive for local enjoyment.

Today, Happyfish – again of Mistigris (after a detour to Hallucigenia and many, many years off for good behavior) – found out how her Mist-representing contribution to the ANSI art competition at the NVScene 2015 demoparty in San Jose, California placed, in the presence of God and RaDMaN (supposing the two don’t cancel each other out.)  It’s the first time we’ve fielded an entry at a demoparty in … quite some time … and it’s a peculiar, polarized time to be competing in that particular category.

The demo folks who thought that making fireworks by speaking directly to their CPU in 640 bytes of assembler was an excellent passtime in 1995 have only honed their already-narrow focus in the interim, optimising their algorithms down to 16 bytes and throwing in phong shading!  Their concern has matured from vintage to classic.  The ranks of the textmode enthusiasts, on the other hand, have withered and been almost totally dispersed since the glory days of textmode being the natural environment of the dominant operating stystem (or the desktop computer being the dominant computing device, for that matter!) and the only ones left standing are basically cast-iron titans of visual art who could take an atomic bomb hit and still come out the other end of the mushroom cloud crafting heartbreaking pixelated portraiture with no equal across the entire history of the artform.  At the 2014 instalment of the long-running Evoke German demoparty, Blocktronics – basically the Serpentor of the ANSI scene, constituted of the DNA of all its cruellest despots – released the WTF4 megajoint, a 4636-line (!) ANSI created as a collaboration between 24 artists from 10 different countries, scrolling as tall as a 7-story house.

Happyfish, conversely, picked up an unfinished work-in-progress from 1998 and polished it off in an afternoon for kicks after 17 years of getting rusty.  But maybe Blocktronics would still be recovering from St. Patrick’s overindulgence and wouldn’t bring their A-game to the competition?  It was anyone’s guess.  Happyfish took the ANSI gold at Crash 1997, as the only serious entrant.  Here, six of the eight contenders are unfeeling Blocktronics ANSIbots, more machine than men, guaranteed statistically to dominate no less than 72% of the competition by weight.  Cut them, and they bleed a stream of red F10 characters at a steady rate.

…

It was a foregone conclusion: her nostalgic piece (even by 1998 standards!) placed last, but only by a margin of four votes.  In a field such as this, it was an honour simply to be a contender!  The top three places were all roundly well-earned, and as for the remainder, it was simply down to a matter of taste.  If you like, you can ruin your appetite on the whole sumptuous menu, or if you can find it in you to contain yourself, wait for Happyfish’s plucky-yet-underperforming contest entry (we just show its FILE_ID.DIZ, silly!) to appear in our second annual revival collection in October of 2015… but there is much to release and much to analyse here before then!

(Coming “soon”: an overview of historical Mistigris demoparty performance.)

           Here’s a post for St. Patrick’s Day.  There can’t be much explicitly Irish-themed ANSI artwork out there, but this must be the strangest item atop that small pile.  It’s an early work (from MIST0195, our 4th artpack) from Nitnatsnoc, SysOp of our WHQ The Screaming Tomato BBS (an eventual post subject of its own, in progress), who got Cthulu into the local small-press minicomics of eg. Ian Boothby (and moving on himself, so we could never discuss them!) and whose sister serendipitously ended up being a comics professional (creating Yokaiden and putting in some art duties on The Simpsons Comics.)

           Nitty (the full handle, an inversion of “Constantin” from a French Immersion social studies word-jumble, was such a mouthful of apparent gibberish that a cutesy shorthand was inevitable) was a scene outsider, always his own agent even when holding membership in (reverse chronology) Avenge, ACiD, Integrity, Mistigris, or the local no-pack-released Sensation.  He wouldn’t do anything merely because it was popular (well, I can’t really account for his interest in the Image comics of the early ‘90s) and while able to play well with others, always acted with independent motivations.

           From time to time, this led to some peculiar choices for the subject matter of his visual art creations.  This one speaks for itself: Lucky, perennially hounded leprechaun mascot of Lucky Charms cereal, in vampire form, intoning the unforgettable caption: “Just try an’ bite me ya wee bastards!”  It’s an odd piece: every element of it is serviceable – a decent font, a well-proportioned freehand embellishment of an established character – but at the same time everything is a bit “off”: where’s the background?  Why no flat ‘toon” shading for a context clearly calling for it?  The transitions from header to pic to font are a bit abrupt… the BBS advertised was by now an also-ran (run by the onetime Op of my first warez board, the 9th Plane of Hell, who rebranded himself “Nosferatu” – who pranked me at the end of my very first “meet people from modem-land” adventure by dropping me off at a SkyTrain station which was not yet in operation – who jumped into the artscene affiliated with PAiN, putting prefab fonts on scans from White Wolf RPG illustrations… but I digress) and, of course… what’s with that picture?  

           We may never really know for sure.

          (Edited to add: the first half of the header text is worth repeating, and may be displayed too tiny to be easily readable:

“Helter (the sysop of Salem’s Lot) claims that this pic should have been drawn for his board.  Apparently, Salem’s Lot is a book about green vampires attacking a town.  Plus, he’s Irish.  Well, he wanted me to mention that.”

Anne Rice was really a ‘90s thing, wasn’t it? Also, for an obsessive Queen fan, that’s a hilarious typo at the end of the header.)