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!
Not long after the call for submissions opened for MIST1015, it became clear that most of the former Mistigrivians who had emerged from their long slumber for MIST1014 had, upon seeing their gloriously 16-coloured shadow, been scared back underground and would not be joining us for another kick at the can. No problem, I thought, I’ve moved through plenty of creative circles in the meantime and maybe I can tap some of them! My first stop after the Mistigris train ground to a halt was The Living Closet and my inquiries to the former principal players of that (similarly long-defunct) concern resulted in some interest – most of which didn’t pan out (observation: present company excepted, people with children seem to be less vulnerable to the predation of nostalgia on their scanty free time). But one person – Claire Roberts – expressed interest which bore through all the way to a work submitted (and released) in MIST1015 at the eleventh hour.
Back in the ol’ LC days, she was a fire-breathing, belly-dancing painter, and in the meantime she had burgeoned her creative skillset (I know: painting, belly dancing, fire-breathing – you thought she already had all bases covered!) in all directions simultaneously, especially in our traditional field of computer arts during a long stint at local code shop Relic Entertainment. (Isn’t that always the way? First you stop releasing computer art, then everyone you’ve ever met becomes a computer artist. Fortunately for us I got back on the wagon.) Additionally, she had ascended through the ranks of an entirely different underground art community, one based out of the Black Rock Desert for a few days every year.
Claire had never been part of the artscene back in the day, but something about the call for submissions piqued her and she diligently boned up on all the treasures of our past, watching hours of demos and reflecting to herself how easy those neat-o effects would be to achieve using her workplace toolchain (which would, doubtlessly, find it easier to crunch those particular numbers being hundreds or thousands of times more powerful than the machines the demos were made to run on 8) She lined up an old computer nerd friend (we can be handy to have around, especially when you need a stereo system hooked up) to collaborate with her on a musical experiment, but he didn’t end up being available in time. The reason, however, that I am profiling Claire here today is not because she let that obstacle stop her, but instead she boldly went forth without her seasoned collaborator to create something in a wholly new-to-her idiom without any help or past experience: bringing art forth through sheer force of will alone – sheer force of will and Audacity. (That’s Audacity with a capital A.)
We released her musical piece, “It’s Like A Collage”, in MIST1015, and in homage to the gutsiness of its circumstances (Claire is gutsy: after I proposed to Mistigris’ collected music department that we put together an album for FAWM, we have nothing and she has made big inroads into one of her own), we have made its constituent recordings (assorted vocal noises and sounds from the kinds of musical toys you might find in your belly-dancing gig bag) the grist for our imminent Tracker Fix mill. She didn’t know what she was doing, but came up with something anyway; surely those of you who do know what you’re doing, given the same materials, can do no less!
(And in a neat case of synchronicity, just as her turn to be profiled was coming up in the queue here, a free mobile game she was working on was released to the public – you can find out more information about it here: The Fourth Phase, the snowboarding movie, the game.)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.)
Well, I stand corrected. Not one month after I speculated that a piece from a Mistigris artpack had appeared as the Sixteen Colours ANSI of the Day for perhaps the last time ever, and here we are again with one of our historical pieces endowed with the honour (the day after, what’s more, one of my post-Mist lits washed up in another AOTD by The Green Hornet of Dark!)
Misfit couldn’t adequately explain what he was doing rooting around in Mistigris artpacks from 1996 looking for ANSIs Of The Day, as that was all around a bit of a rough period for us – still recovering from our depredation by Integrity, not yet drunk on our infusion of Krap’s members. But if you had to pick one piece from this artpack, this was definitely the one to pick.
Mage (MZ-, because Mavrik had taken MA-) was on top of his game here (it’s not even the first time he’s represented Mist in the AOTD), having graduated from Mistigris, sharpened his talents in Integrity, and gotten them certified in ACiD (which Int merged into) before bizarrely circling around back home to toss us the occasional solid gold bone for reasons known only to himself.
He doesn’t know quite remember who the subject of the piece is – doubtless some instantly forgettable Image Comics goon, if noseless faces and fists larger than heads are anything to go by – but he is on the record as directly deriving inspiration from a piece also by him in an Integrity pack a year earlier; in both cases hands figure prominently, but the difference a year makes! “I liked drawing hands (and still do!), but wasn’t happy with much else in that first pic - the face, the background, the hair.”
Because I’m a poet, I would have waited until the middle of March to make an ad for the BBS “Ides of March” as my selection for the ANSI Of The Day, but we’ll take what we can get. Stay tuned for more elucidation into our affairs past, present and future!
But I digress. Amending errant characters and uncooperative pixels is easy. Remodeling rooms and rolling back landscaping, that’s a mega project! Back up the truck and roll out the bulldozers! Back when cooking up MIST1014, I was struck by the notion of inserting Mistigris, Forrest Gump-style, into the history of the underground computer artscene – by which I mean slipping in references to us in classic video games. (This is an idea that hasn’t reached the end of the road yet; only this particular path has proven to be a cul-de-sac 8) In one case of my attempts to celebrate us through virtual land art (my own Spiral Jetty), I availed myself of a homebrew Java app (Super_Mario_Bros_Game_&_Builder.jar) that could be used, more or less, to generate custom levels for Super Mario Bros. So there we go – a hill here, a pipe there, a couple of platforms… et voila, Mario physically traversing a hostile environment spelling out our name in iconic, monumental form: MISTIGRIS, too big to ignore, hooked up directly to a mainline of nostalgia.
There were issues: the video lacked sound, and the cuts were a little too quick (gameplay videos spliced together because the level I had designed was simply too difficult for me to consistently play through successfully. Just couldn’t resist inserting that Hammer Brother!) Melody thought I was nuts when I asked for any fontists to comment on my kerning. And of course I had a lot on my plate, arraying my options before me while putting together our first artpack in 16 years and weighing over what to include and what to leave out. (The agony of senior staff: leaving yourself on the cutting room floor!) This particular work was, at that moment in time, merely half-baked (intended as one segment of a larger montage), so it was left on the back burner… where in short order it timed out, instantly expiring with its cloud-walking reference to MIST 2014 just as surely as if Mario’s timer had ticked down to zero.
There’s one more problem, however. In 2014 making a custom Super Mario Bros. level was a neat trick, possible only through the application of a somewhat obscure tool unknown to most. Sure, I probably could have gone into the guts of the data and re-generated the level, now reading MIST 2015, but it would not longer be a neat, “how did he do that?” trick, thanks to the release of a piece of software that singlehandedly doubled the number of WiiUs in circulation. I speak, of course, of … (here, I’ll let Reset Survivor of Blocktronics announce it:) SUPER MARIO MAKER!
Even if my level looked as good as the ones that program generated (which, ahem, it does not), now rather than being an intriguing and unique singular work of art, it was a mere grain of sand on a very large beach – one in which it compared quite unfavourably to many of the other, adjacent grains. I sweated over my user-unfriendly tools to come up with a passable proof-of-concept, and the marketplace of ideas (yes, DIY Mario levels… a great concept whose time has surely come!) overran me like an inventor who’d come up with an improvement on telegraph wires but didn’t present it to the patent office until the telephone system was already in place. (I do feel like this sometimes when I uncover a bug in SAUCE implementation while cramming metadata into files using Spoon.) Bryface recently participated in a Global Game Jam and even he got in on the act:
And so all I can do with this piece is dissect and analyse its circumstances, mourning my own perfectionist streak perhaps and presenting a stark warning to, y'know, gather those rosebuds while ye may. If there’s one lesson Mistigris has taught me since 1998, it’s “Don’t release tomorrow what you could release today!”
I first met Jenny Ritter in the waning days of her first Hungry Young Folk Music Superband, The Gruff – and if they were winding up, you sure couldn’t tell it from the audience! But All Good Things… and so after being toasted at festivals from coast to coast she found herself in the unenviable position of being a starving artist in our expensive little town by the sea. Singer-songwriters (however virtuous) don’t pull the same fees as bands do, so she aired out another aspect of her creative polymath portfolio, and supplemented her coffeeshop tips by puting her graphic design chops on the market, for people who needed handmade art for their wedding invitations or tattoo designs. (In truth the pencils had never been put away, as she’d always been working on gig posters and album covers the whole time – but this side of her creative practice took on perhaps a greater prominence.)
I’ve always been a big booster of the idea of the creative milieu – being part of a community of similar-minded creators who do related work. I found mine on bulletin board systems and IRC chat; she found hers among family and friends at square dances, coffeeshop open mics, jamming in green rooms and in ferry line-ups. Perhaps in some things, the old-fashioned ways are best: her coterie of Canadian alt-folk nobility include David Newberry, Fish & Bird, and Corbin Murdoch & the Nautical Miles (and, er, I sat in with her on a single occasion 8) – while the vast majority of my computer art colleagues I’ve never yet met face-to-face after over 20 years! (TABNet was a very face-to-face crew; Mistigris, even among the locals, not so much so.)
Jenny has wound up in the uncomfortable niche of marginal success like nobility without title or land; while undeniably hugely talented, after decades of steady building her creative endeavours aren’t yet sufficient for her to be a household name or lucrative enough for her to entertain the bourgeois fantasy of owning a house and raising a family (but forgive me projecting my aspirations on her: she cries all the way to Sweden. This profile isn’t a tragedy: she is consolidating and building her musical empire, but despite her formidable forces, it sure is taking a while. Nonetheless, she never stops chipping away at it!) This week her band opened for Lucinda Williams at a show in Scotland to rave reviews (the event that reminded me that it was time to profile her here: she still has a few remaining UK gigs, foreign readers!), but when she comes home it’s going to be another stint of getting the bills paid and scheming the next big tour. (Fortunately, she’s struck upon an ingenius formula for paying said bills: directing a choir of feckless youth singing their hearts out with arrangements of modern indie pop hits. Here you can catch an early clip of her Kingsgate Chorus playing at the defunct venue The Prophouse at a show with my jug band of the damned, about which you’ll be hearing more soon.)
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJNAiZkp9rs&w=560&h=315]
When pressed to submit some works for MIST1015 Jenny was very gracious and sent me more pieces than I actually used; they were all lovely but despite my “in 2015 ALL art is computer art” sloganeering it was becoming increasingly clear that her very traditional art style was markedly dissonant from the growing mounds of computer art I was accumulating; I picked a couple of favorites but any more would have been jarring. Here however they only have to harmonize with the context of her other works, so I intended to air the pieces I left out – but then looked up other art by her, liked it more, and ran those instead. (Ain’t I a stinker!)
Without curating a theme specially intended to accommodate this lovely stuff, I don’t know if you’ll be seeing more of her work in regular Mistigris artpacks, as though I love it dearly, its lovingly stylized details of the natural world stick out as a bit of a mismatch for this virtual world of chunky pixels and chromed Platonic solids, and had I not actively solicited it, the seeds of her art would never have found purchase in the soil of computer art. Until I figure out how to make the two different voices sing together in harmony, a tricky and improbable melding of old and new like Moby’s “Play”, do go forth, and enjoy her art independent of a context of us! I wholeheartedly endorse her music – her second-most-recent album, Bright Mainland, has provided a constant driving soundtrack of rootsy Americana since its release that, like Amelia Curran’s War Brides, has been found to never get stale.
https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=2703376824/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=0687f5/tracklist=false/artwork=small/transparent=true/
I first met Otium Man, aka Fille, back during my artscene European vacation of 1999 – a pilgrimage to Assembly in Finland arriving and departing via Amsterdam – when my travel companion God Among Lice (formerly of Fire) just HAD to attend the Pukkelpop festival in Belgium (so as to get a chance to see DJ Shadow, among many, many others.) I ended up surprising and delighting a couple dozen friends with his PJ Harvey ASCII t-shirts I brought back, extended as a deposit against unclaimed future computer art favours. (Heads up: in the final reckoning of things, all favours will be called in!) Otium Man and God Among Lice knew of each other due to shared affiliation with the largely Russian group HRG (Hellraiser Group), with Otium co-founding (with Iron Lung) its “Galza” ASCII division, which straggled on to 2005 (#20) and then arose from the ashes (#21) in 2011 largely as a solo project. (I might have done that with Mistigris also, but I didn’t because: no one would have cared. Sad but true.)
Demonstrating a remarkable largesse and openmindedness, Otium roped me in (twist my arm!) to contributing some poetry (sorry, “lits”) to the surprisingly political Galza 22 in early 2014, my first flicker of ‘scene activity in probably well over a decade (but just look what his re-awakened momentum has wrought!), and by October of that year I had tapped him for a guest appearance in our own revival artpack MIST1014.
Some time later, in 2015, he released Galza 23 (“Propaganda”) to the artscene, a stupendous collection of simulated PETSCII (the text mode of Commodore microcomputers) portraits of Communist icons… to some mild acclaim from the artscene and snooty disdain from Commodore enthusiasts, evincing an “if you can’t take us at our most computationally gutless, you don’t deserve us at our most richly textmoded” attitude.
Shortly thereafter, we “included” some works of his in MIST1015 in a medium for which he is not as well known in the artscene: panoramic photography. The framework required to display them in-browser refused to play nice when dealing with local files, so as with a few other filesize-heavy works, we represented a nicely-curated retrotechy selection of his photos as browser-redirecting HTML files, sending local viewers to remote locations (sorry, offline viewers!)
Judging from the traffic figures for the externally-hosted videos (barring Whazzit’s wildly popular ANSI movie of Dead Man’s Pants), we can only imagine that virtually no one got a chance to enjoy those photos, so this write-up is one more opportunity for us to urge you to check them out. The still slices illustrating the post are just the tip of the iceberg, static frames of moving, breathing panoramic vistas.
Then after we lured Nail out of retirement (first with BLENDER 2015, then MIST1015), he got on board to put some actual vintage C64 scene experience to use and spearhead a re-release (and draw that title screen pictured above) of Galza 23 in a form that would execute and display on actual Commodore 64 hardware, in which version it found itself celebrated and embraced by the same community who had spurned it when it was simply still images for display on modern machines. Packaging and presentation: turns out it’s surprisingly important! You can take it for a spin yourself (on your own vintage Commodore hardware, or VICE for the rest of us) if you like!
And that brings us up to speed with the history of Otium, his chance intersections with Mist and his ongoing related (computer) art projects. Stay tuned for more profiles!
