Time flies while you’re attending to other matters… but for another couple of hours at least, this piece of holiday-themed ANSI art still applies, if not necessarily in time zones where it applies.We can’t legitimately lay claim to this one on hardly any basis: it was released by Coluche, who was never a Mistigris member, in the July 1994 in the penultimate artpack release of our predecessor group iMPERiAL, itself a temporary merger between the area code 604-based “New Wave Artists” and the Québec-based “GRIP/AD” (Graphic Revolution In Progress / Art Division).  (You can probably guess which camp this work’s artist, SysOp of Rash Reflections BBS, belonged to.) 

What role he played in GRIP was unclear; he was the programmer of the group’s “IMPview” application, and doesn’t appear to have returned in GRIP’s subsequent return to the scene in 1995.There was really no reason for groups in Vancouver and Québec to find common ground and work together; long distance charges being what they were, we could have sought sister cities anywhere there were phone lines attached to computers.  Nonetheless, as with iMPERiAL, Mistigris echoed its predecessor and also maintained a virtual office dans la belle province for most of its existence, drawing on the labours of a small cadre of artists sending in submissions through The Extremist’s board City iZ Burning.  It sure endows one with a cosmopolitan feeling!

Cthulu finally made it out east in 2002, and wouldn’t you know it, he landed in Montréal on St. Jean-Baptiste day, a holiday unknown outside the province… during the World Cup, concurrently with the Fringe Festival and the Jazz Festival and a blistering heat wave.  There he concluded that there was so much going on in that city, it must have been no coincidence that the big BBS scene in Québec had been around Québec City rather than Montréal for the same reason that the artscene had never been dominated by New York City crews: there was so much going on there that people were too busy living their lives in thriving cultural hubs to waste the pricey opportunity to play intangible games with invisible strangers on the other side of the planet.  They don’t draw logocollies in Montréal, they paint graffiti murals.

In conclusion: bonne saint-jean!

[audio https://popplers5.bandcamp.com/download/track?enc=mp3-128&fsig=f63280667af1a3eb0d6a4bc33a73a99a&id=1472204663&nl=1&stream=1&ts=1484032585.0?plead=please-dont-download-this-or-our-lawyers-wont-let-us-host-audio]
http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/size=medium/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=0687f5/notracklist=true/transparent=true/album=1226652941/

We are in the awkward position of having a great deal to discuss (the May Music Madness spree?  It resulted in the discharge from solitary confinement of hundreds of music tracks.  Also: the “lost” unreleased Mist artpack/website M-9808 was finally released) but circumstances have caught up with us, our mouthpiece on the verge of adding a second child to his household.

So we’ll just hit on a timely current event: when discussing the activities of Mistigris alumni still active and making art out in the world, Melodia has soaked up all of the sun – but another one of our musicians, bryface, has also quietly been racking up accolades for his acclaimed chiptune work on Game Boys and the like.

In November of last year, he won kfaraday’s S3XMODIT Mania! compo on battleofthebits.org, consistently advancing to progressive rounds with his tracks making use of samplepacks provided, until after six rounds he was the last man standing.  So there’s one news item.

2014 also saw him complete the WeeklyBeats challenge, producing a new song every week for an entire year, leading to a body of work consisting of over 50 songs for that year.  You can hear them over here.  So, that’s something.

bryface isn’t just a studio creation, however, but he travels the world in pursuit of his chip brethren and seeks out opportunities to coax sawtooth waves from primitive hardware in front of live audiences.  This Saturday night, June 20 2015, for those privileged enough to have a chance to catch him in New York City… he’ll be performing on a bill with Mega Ran + K-Murdock, Danimal Cannon and brentalfloss, an I/O Chip Music presentation.  8 pm at The Studio at Webster Hall.  Further details here, ticket pre-sales over here.  Mistfunk 2015 represent!

Three news items for a single Mister!  Sorry it took so long – in a just world, we would have covered these stories much sooner.

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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.