unwashedmass:

“Remember, remember, the fifth of November…”

http://pc.textmod.es/pack/galza-22/us-masks.ans

The chain runs, somewhat tenuously I suppose, from Guy Fawkes through Alan Moore’s comic V for Vendetta to its later film adaptation and from there to use of the masks by members of Anonymous, first seen in these parts protesting outside the Church of Scientology.

Then one further link, my old Belgian friend Filip De Haes illustrating some current-events subjects in his uncoloured textmode computer art style circa February 2014. Hearkening to my traditional role as poet of the computer art scene, he asked for some words with which to frame the illustrations, so during silent 2 am coffee breaks in the basement of the sleeping Lion’s Gate Hospital, I free-associated some lines vaguely engaging the themes the pictures evoked.

There is more of our collaboration at http://pc.textmod.es/pack/galza-22 , and he has a fascinating new collection together of Soviet characters rendered in Commodore 64 PETSCII, viewable at http://pc.textmod.es/pack/galza-23

In early 2014, the first Mistigris lit released since 2000 – and the beginning of all the momentum 2014 would see carried through into 2015 to get the artscene wheels in Cthulu’s brain spinning again.

[audio https://www.tumblr.com/audio_file/mistfunk/132543740677/tumblr_nxauw41anw1u1gsjq?plead=please-dont-download-this-or-our-lawyers-wont-let-us-host-audio]
Really, lost in the “should we wait until after Remembrance Day to start hyping Christmas?” debate is whether Hallowe'en should be allowed to drag on. Me, I come down firmly in the extended Hallowe'en camp. And now, my final post on the seasonal and spooky contents of our new Oct 31st-released artpack MIST1015! We open with the only track that wasn’t also mirrored elsewhere, Cthulu’s unused (but don’t worry, they used his other tunes) overture for the gothic (and itself very Hallowe'eny) mobile collectible card game Afterland (available for free now in the Google Play and iOS App Stores!), performed by his “jug band of the damned” (eek!) The Creaking Planks.

This was engineered to satisfy a demanding criterion from the developers at Imaginary Games, namely that the in-game music be simultaneously happy and sad. Well, can it take turns? This live off-the-floor take of the five musicians huddled around a single microphone is a good shot at the New Orleans Dixieland voodoo concept he had rattling around in his head, but to the good folks at Imaginary Games it was a little bit too much like sitting in a club listening to live music and stroking your chin, and not enough like … holding your mobile device and tapping at a screen. Oh well, as the wide varieties of Hallowe'en costumes testify, there are many paths to gloom!

[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/49591292" params="auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="100%" height="300" iframe="true" /]

I don’t know much about Brad Dunn’s composition practice, but if I had to guess based on my experiences producing concerts for him on prepared guitars a decade ago, my suspicion would be that he experiments to see what works or doesn’t – either way, then does it again, like he means it. Dissonance? Yes, that’s a dissonance – a big, satisfying dissonance. Let’s do it again! What do you mean, you don’t like my new Christmas carol?

[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/227614719" params="auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="100%" height="300" iframe="true" /]

Melodia of Empress Play, on the other hand, has achieved a supreme calculated mastery of genre. I’ll never forget, back in the ‘90s, how an aimless experimentation proceeding at a glacial pace transformed overnight into the fully realized “Spaghetti Western” as soon as it crossed her desk. Her triumph is in sussing out before she gets there just what kind of song a given song is trying to be, and then making it live up to those specific aspirations, hitting the nail on the head squarely and repeatedly. I jokingly describe us as drag factor on, her slumming it by hanging out with this weird group of retro computer art weirdos, but her canny piggybacking of holiday seasonality means that this song, Horror on Channel 3, has been enjoyed an order of magnitude beyond how many times the Mist artpack has been served up.

[soundcloud url="https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/211276792" params="auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true" width="100%" height="300" iframe="true" /]

Theorica, conversely, explicitly describes his approach as “If sound were colour, I’d be what you’d call a finger painter. I do what feels and sounds right.” And so what if “Dark Charlie” sounds like an uninspired Stephen King bugaboo, the man has his finger on the pulse!

http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=1207596880/size=small/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=0687f5/track=2484575138/transparent=true/

One final grim piece of audio, this is a positively ancient guest poem by performance poet RC Weslowski, pointing at the eternal horror far more frightening than ghosts and werewolves – state militarism, endless war against an endless series of evil axes… in this case, earthworms. It brings to mind how of the two camps name-checked in the opening of Black Sabbath’s sludgy anthem “War Pigs”, “generals gathered in their masses / just like witches at black masses”, it is the generals who are scarier. (Also scary: rhyming “masses” with “masses”.)

Oh yes, and while we’re on the subject of poetry, I forgot our poem of terrifying implications by Prince George’s Jeremy Stewart:

CLOTHES HAIKU
your skin is clothes for
your blood & bones & your clothes
are skin for your skin

Too bad I didn’t think to throw it in while we were showing off all the skeletons! Actually, it’s kind of a perfect lead-in to, again, the crazy ANSI music video Whazzit made for the song Dead Man’s Pants. (Sure, I can keep linking it, but can I just make a post dedicated to it? Darned sure I can! Stay tuned…)

[gallery]
What do you mean Hallowe'en is over? I’m not done sharing the spooky, monstrous computer artwork from the MIST1014 artpack we just released! Admit it, you still have a Jack ‘o Lantern on your front steps, so you should still be of a mind to appreciate our final lingering hauntings. (And then there’s Whazzit’s amazing accordion-playing ANSI skeleton animation, I can’t even fit that in here – but it’s starkly chilling, in a profoundly ridiculous way!)

We open with Sara Ciantar’s “Red Sky At Morning”, the traditional omen of foreboding to oceanbound sailors. I really appreciated her pixelart aesthetic, and only moreso when it was revealed that she had merely taken a photograph through a screen door. To its right, a piece of PETSCII – the textmode of the Commodore 64 – by its rock star artist Raquel Meyers. (It has a name, but I have tentatively given it a new one: “Dead Kids of Instagram.”) Do look up Raquel, as she is curently crowdfunding to support similar work on a similar theme – textmode illustrations of the stories of H.P. Lovecraft.

Next is a mean little skull logo by Nail that you might have missed in the artpack proper, hiding out at the bottom as the footer illustration to the pack’s infofile.

On the following line is Freelance Pete’s detailed take on the nuclear family’s suburban fantasy, followed by another early-'90s Amiga pixelart piece from the portfolio of $too.

Onward, we get two paintings, the first by Mythical Man – which seems ominous but not too grim until you look a little more carefully at the running man burning in the background – the other “Heart Goes Here” by Jenn Ashton. All the skulls nonwithstanding, this painting demonstrates that there’s nothing necessarily creepy about mere bones… after all, as the pithy quote has it: “You’re a ghost driving a meat coated skeleton made from stardust, what do you have to be scared of?”

This (small-e) eerie gallery ends with the fabulous header to our memberlist, a networked PabloDraw ANSI art session jointly drawn by numerous contributors, notably the logo by the bothersomely talented enzO of Blocktronics (not just a fabulous letter M, also note the spooky skulls beneath it – sorry, Jenn, maybe the skull is just the scariest bone in the body), followed by a menacing Frankenstein’s monster sketched out by Sudden Death, with contributions from Whazzit and Sephiroth.

OK, that’s almost it for the spooky stuff – next time I’ll see if I can’t squeeze in some spooky tunes and make Tumblr sing!

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qz98KGIKc8?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=500&h=281]

blocktronics:

ANSi art based animation by Whazzit with music by Rowan Lipkovits.

You saw it first in MIST1015!

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

lordnkon:

Get the fabulous Mistigris 21st anniversary artpack:  http://bit.ly/mist1015   or catch the teaser at https://youtu.be/dlC1B9jCjOU !

Complete with guest typewriter art by the talented lordnkon!

[gallery]

Hallowe'en is here again and we are dressed up as … ourselves, 20 years ago. (Are any costumes possibly scarier than our own adolescences?) I know that trends and fashions are supposed to go in 20-year cycles – is 2015 the new 1995? (Microsoft probably hopes so.)

But I digress. You can find our new, 21st anniversary artpack MIST1015.ZIP at our new website at mistigris.org, or download it wholesale at bit.ly/mist1015, or view and hear (much of) it through your web browser at pc.textmod.es/pack/mist1015.

It’s a massive undertaking, containing over 100 files submitted by over 50 artists (including over an hour and a half of music!), representing works created from the late ‘80s to … late last night.

There’s no official theme (if “computer art” is a theme in 2015, it’s one so broad as to be unuseful), but due to the timing of our release, it naturally happened that a certain quantity of spooky, Hallowe'eny art accumulated in our incoming directory. We actually debated just releasing it as a separate Hallowe'en pack, but twice as many packs == twice as much administrative work, so to avoid killing our senior staff (what would be a more fitting Devil’s Night twist?) we opted to lump it all in as a sub-theme within the greater pack.

There’s lots to enjoy here – and even tomorrow, when the Christmas decorations come out, there will still be lots of non-Hallowe'eny material in there for you to continue enjoying. (And how does that joke go? “Why do programmers confuse Halloween and Christmas? Because 25 DEC == 31 OCT!”)

But in the meantime… Boo!

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Posted works: witchy animated .GIF by Janos Horak, Shift JIS by Kalcha, Amiga pixelart by $too, ANSI spider by Vordreque, ballerina spider by Theresa Oborn, Skullflower by Phatal, Zombies, Run! ANSI by Happyfish, DJ of the Dead by Vordreque, ASCII by ldb.

BONUS: appearing in the artpack, though not with this track – electronic music master Ill-Esha has made a sinister electro rearrangement of Danny Elfman’s thme music to Beetlejuice, which you can enjoy at http://subdotmission.com/sub-freebies

[gallery]

blocktronics:

Belgian artist Otium ( @filipdehaes ) presents Galza-23 with a mesmerizing collection of b&w portraits in the petscii format (oldschool commodore platform 8-bit graphics).

Check Galza-23 full album for more artworks: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10153254874005954.1073741830.41789370953&type=3

Follow Galza on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/galzasciiart