*** syncr0w has changed the topic on channel mist to welcome to a realm of
sight and sound of such fury that is beyond experience.. ***
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S O S
Save Our Songs
The ANSI artscene had a problem with tracked music: a file-size problem.
MODs, S3Ms, XMs, ITs -- they were big. Not MP3 big, but look: the original
saved-as-ANSI infofile for this music disk weighed in at 15k, while its very
smallest song was over five times larger at 81k though chiptunes could be
quite a bit smaller, there was no upper limit -- the bigggest song here is
1153k, weighing in as a disk all on its own! Every additional megabyte of
size added ten minutes to download time even at 14.4k, so to pay for itself a
meg-sized song had to yield at least 10 minutes of listening enjoyment. An
enormous file size resulted in an effect similar to sticker shock -- people
would ask themselves if a pack could really be enjoyable enough to justify the
time-investment spent downloading it from a BBS... and only somewhere where
transfer ratios were strictly enforced could time spent UPLOADING the giant
files be justified. If you didnt have skin in the game, forget it. Even if
you did, that was dirty work for a groups courier or senior staff.
The sprawling bloat wasnt just unpopular externally, however: group members
also preferred slim artpacks, to facilitate quickly and easily enjoying the
textmode fruit of their peers labour, and increase the chance their efforts
would be seen due to above-mentioned factors. They lobbied and we listened:
they wanted artpacks split up, with the weighty filler of tracked music and
high resolution graphics shunted aside to supplemental archives -- October
artpack, disk 2, disk 3. They would happily have thrown the small-but-
prolific lit poems under the train also, but had to think a little harder
to come up with a rationale justifying it, as this wasnt really a one-size-
fits-all objection.
And because groups affiliated with the ANSI artscene were tainted with the
stink of the BBS underground and its warez doodz, the hypocritical demoscene
music archives didnt want to host these songs, because their C64 and Amiga
cracking backgrounds were somehow more distinguished. Its a tale as old as
time: old crooks dont want new crooks to jeopardize the racket and upset the
status quo.
And the artists themselves upgraded their systems and failed to keep copies
of their work, which only represented finite hours of their limited lives
spent honing a craft they valued. Its a theme Ive harped on repeatedly, so
I wont drag it through the mud again: its perhaps extraordinary to expect
an artist to hang on to their work over a 20-year period, but many of these
artists didnt even have copies TWO years later. Granted, in the wake of the
changeover from MS-DOS to Windows 95, there was a lot of hardware turnover
and hanging on to old data for which there may not have even been any apps to
access! may have seemed a quixotic indulgence at best. But in the end we
shall see who is the most quixotic! Sancho, pass me my lance, please.
As a consequence: all known and extant copies of this archive obtainable
anywhere online derive from a single incomplete upload, terminally corrupted,
allowing extraction of only a non-representative 5 songs CT-M!.IT,
ESQ-CO2.XM, GB-BONK.IT, GR-BEAST.XM, and GR-CT-IN.S3M out of the full
archives initial 23. Adding insult to injury, the scrambled, garbled,
corrupted archive still hung on to virtually all of its data, meaning that you
still had to download the bytes that made up 23 songs in order to enjoy 5.
Thats quite a drag factor!
But in the year 2015, we have better data restoration techniques than were
available circa 2002, when RaDMaN informed me that all his copies of this disk
were bogus and might I have a clean master? Even I, in despair, did not, a
regret informing my latter-day archival mania: never again will I be caught
unawares!
So without further ado, for the first time outside BBS distribution in the 604
area code since its release in October of 1997, it is our pleasure to share
with you the complete version of MIST3YRC.ZIP.
BUT WAIT, THERES MORE!
We were making music by the bucketload in our area code, but due to factors
mentioned above and ... gravity, for lack of a better term, much of it never
escaped the event horizon of our area code boundaries. Then the catastrophes,
the diasporas, the complete social and technological overturning of the
context in which the work was produced, and much of it -- the vast majority of
it -- was lost forever.
But some of us hung on to as much of it as we could. As part of the General
Old Computer Art Amnesty Ive been practicing, Ive been venting 90s computer
art no longer or indeed, never publicly accessible, some of which I find I
have ended up the sole remaining custodian of... and Im giving it all away,
to be taken up and hoisted by a dozen dozen little mirrors, each more
formidable than the greatest 90s resources of the entire artscene. It wanted
to be out there in the computer art biosphere, frolicking with comrades at
mp3.com and the Mod Archive and Traxinspace, but due to circumstances, instead
they gathered digital dust and hibernated, perhaps indefinitely, on darkened
corners of disused hard drives. Now it gets its chance to re-assert its place
in the 1990s computer art historical record!
So every day for at least the next TEN days more, pending negotiations, Ill
be releasing a new lost or forgotten but basically unobtainable up until
now collection of computer music -- not all Mistigris work, but also from our
friends and fellow travellers, familiar names you will have seen on our
memberlists and in issues of Kithe... all from the one little but very
active area code of the 604: Vancouver, Canada. And they will be initially
released as exclusives to http://textmod.es
Despite the apparent semantic incompatibility in the sites name surely this
site should value the textmode artwork above all else!, its administrator Teh
Maze was at some point in the past involved with the creation, commission and
production of computer music and has a soft spot for it. Thus, within a day
of music-playing support for the sites browser gallery being requested, it
was implemented with apparent effortlessness.
While we have no doubt that Sixteen Colors and Artpacks.org will follow suit
in the mad rush to support the entirety of the creative work made in the
computer artscene -- not just the visual art -- so as not to be left behind
... in the meantime you neednt look these releases up there, because... well,
there really isnt much point in it, is there?
We now return you to this artpacks original infofile: disk 3 music of the
Mistigris 3-year-anniversary artpack release.
JAMES BROWN IS THE DEVIL! UNGH!
Cthulu here, again, delivering the info to go with the archive youre
viewing currently. However, unlike the infofiles in the previous two archives,
this one is going to be clear and to the point, and, most puzzling of all,
relevant to the contents of the archive.
This, our third archive of three for this release period, really
contains the lions share of what emerged from the anniversary pack, size-wise.
When claims were made that the pack was over 10 megs uncompressed, much of that
was due to these large song files, packaged away in a separate archive because
it both appeals to a different audience and is likely to be found in different
places, possibly independant of the first two parts containing computer art of
other formats.
So, what is this? Its music. Sure, sounds simple enough. Its a
release under the Mistigris franchise, a name which has for a while stood in theANSI art scene as a throwback to when music was an integrated part of that
scene, and, three years having elapsed since the very first Mistigris release inOctober of 1994, this monster archive represents something weve wanted to do
for quite a while, namely, leave a big mark with our music.
Judging from the file sizes, emphasis on the big.
Mistigris has traditionally followed the games and jumped through the
hoops of the ANSI scene, but in an effort to legitimize those artforms which
were being underappreciated in that community this represents an outreach from
us to the greater demo/music scene and community, to take note of our parallel
evolution and perhaps embrace one another as brethren.
Or at least to get you guys to listen to our songs.
What this archive stands for is variety. Variety in formats - .XM, .IT,.S3M, or whatever tickles the composers fancy. Fortunately for most of you,
their tastes havent gotten any more exotic than those relatively common formatsin this particular pack. Variety in styles - the material present here runs
the gamut from drum n bass to ambient trance to dance to fucked up bonky bells.Diversity. Noting that very few people will appreciate all of the music
contained here, most of you will at least enjoy a few of the songs.
Remixes. Vocals. Theyre all represented here in some forms or
another. Some of the artists here are participants in the ansi art scene - someof them even participating in different forms as well a somewhat rarity in the
somewhat specialized ansi art scene while we also feature a large selection of
songs from guest composers better known of the demoscene - to provide comparisonand contrast, and more importantly of all to bring both sides together at last.
Its a big step to download an archive this big especially in the ansi
scene, where a months release of ansi artworks from an entire group can be
smaller than a compressed single and though we dont neccessarily want to
invoke big expectations it should at least mirror our big hopes. This is the
first big music release weve ever made outside of the token songs included in
our typical monthly packs, and with support from the musicians out there it
wont be the last.
Mistigris is somewhat unique among groups in the ansi scene for its
relaxed attitude towards politics and membership. Were always looking for moremembers, and for those who cant commit to regular releases, we enjoy regular
patronage from guests who release work, no strings attached, in our packs as pertheir convenience. So if youre interested in an environment conductive to
creativity and experimentation without worrying about popular opinion or petty
bullshit, or if youre perhaps in the mind to crossover and do some work with
artists in other mediums, check us out. Were clean, we dont bite, and weve
got long, sexy legs.
The music is your special friend
- Cthulu
Mistigris Founder
November 1st, 1997
P. S. - dont forget to check out our high-resolution stuffs in MIST3YRB.ZIP
and the rest of our output ANSI, ascii, writing, code in MIST3YRA.ZIP at a
ftp site near you! Ooga!