Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 31, 2016 at 1:54pm UTC

19 years ago to the month Dead Soul drew us this clean experimental newschool ASCII art Mist logo. It’s simple, but there’s surprisingly a lot going on beneath the surface.

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 31, 2016 at 1:54pm UTC

[audio https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/280534877/stream?client_id=3cQaPshpEeLqMsNFAUw1Q?plead=please-dont-download-this-or-our-lawyers-wont-let-us-host-audio]

We don’t come by this song fairly; though composed by Cthulu (well, arranged by Cthulu – it’s a cover of a song, “Now or Never”, by flyingfish’s band, Perpetual Dream Theory), the founder of Mistigris, it was released in an ACiD artpack – ACiD-100, their final Acquisition, in 2004. Cthulu always aspired to be a computer musician, from the very earliest days even prior to Mist’s founding (hence all of the early music affiliation aspirations for The Screaming Tomato), and after a decade of chipping away at it, he was … really getting somewhere! But in the meantime Mistigris had both arisen and collapsed (it’s hard to believe that there wasn’t always a Mistigris, but anytime before August 1994 and anytime between August 1998 and October 2014 and you were out of luck!) and he was fortunate just to have any old place in which to vent this.

Finding the chiptune aesthetic fascinating from the start, The Pope’s experiments in that direction (A Night With Musidia, DODEL, ETO) compelled him to begin working in that direction also, which informed an early draft of this piece. Still, it was lacking a certain je ne sais quoi. Enter the High Voltage SID collection, the canonical pile of Commodore 64 music. Mining it for outrageous samples from memories of long-forgotten games, he used them to ice the cake and transform the song completely into something almost unrecognizable. Then it disappeared in part of the vast depths of ACiD-100’s multitudes of multitudes, forever to be forgotten until now.

For like Aphex Twin’s 1992 “We Are The Music Makers”, this arrangement also began with a sample of Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka in the 1971 movie, quoting Arthur O'Shaughnessy’s 1873 poem “Ode”. So due to the circumstances of yesterday, it was dusted off and put back on the shelf. We’ve only just made the acquaintance of Steve “Horsenburger” Horsely, but already we were able to capitalize on his extremely punctual minting of teletext gold to find some appropriately suitable visuals to accompany the track with. Thanks to everyone giving this old tune a second lease on life!

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 30, 2016 at 2:04pm UTC

Today on Mistigram, this piece of ANSI art by the unique Rash, first released in our March 1998 artpack. Elsewhere I described it as a Mist promo but actually it was an ad for the BBS “The Living End”. Rash brought with him an almost cubist sensibility to the ANSI medium that I’ve never seen before or since – I wish we could look him up and interview him, but with no idea what his real name is, that becomes nigh impossible!

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 30, 2016 at 2:04pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 29, 2016 at 2:03pm UTC

Today on Mistigram, the sad story (expounded upon at great length on Instagram) of this lovely little piece of surreal Amiga hirez drawn by Sentience sometime in the mid-‘90s and then reserved for use as cover art for a printed collection of Mistigris literature that was never to be. The hand-tree, the land-shark, the restful penguin… probably all reaching a wider audience today than in the previous 20 years combined. Thank god for the long tail!

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 29, 2016 at 2:03pm UTC

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 28, 2016 at 3:24pm UTC

Today on Mistigram, this swell Mistigris ANSI art logo drawn by Grymmjack of Polyester, released in their artpack in February 1999. In its original setting, it congratulated us on our 4th birthday, which is ironic since that birthday would have been quite a bit earlier, in October of 1998… and we had dropped out of releasing artpacks two months prior to that, bogged down in the impossible M-9808 website/artpack.

We did eventually discover this strange artefact and put it to good use in our infofile for the MIST1014 20th anniversary reunion / revival artpack. Better late than never!

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 28, 2016 at 3:24pm UTC

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Today on Mistigram, Illarterate drew us this lovely garish teletext cake for our 21st birthday marked by the MIST1015 artpack. To celebrate the occasion I posed in a goofy selfie blowing out the candles with his VR girl enjoying the scene through augmented reality. (Truthfully, though I’ve always been a fan of angry fruit salad, I don’t know if my stomach is strong enough for teletext cake.)

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 26, 2016 at 2:00pm UTC

Today on Mistigram, a beautiful piece of ANSI art drawn for our use by Kyo in 1998 and never exposed to the light of day until 2015, being sunk with the doomed Mist-killing “lost pack” of M-9808.

Instagram photo by Cthulu • Aug 26, 2016 at 2:00pm UTC