RAMBLINGS

text-mode.org back in action

The text-mode Tumblr that I started with Raquel Meyers in 2012 has hardly been active in the last years. But I started to do daily posts again a few weeks ago. You can see it both at the Tumblr and the wordpress blog and sometimes they are posted on Twitter as well.

I’ve gone through a lot of the archives, and scheduled some of the best posts to be reblogged daily over the next weeks… months… eh.. In fact, they are scheduled until June next year. And I didn’t even go through all of it yet.

If you don’t want to miss it, check the Tumblr. Sometimes they will be on Twitter, but the reblogs will never be posted on the WordPress since that is more like an archive. On the other hand, it’s a lot of fun to go there for random posts, combine tags, search, etc.

Ok, hasta luego!

Commodore Grooves videos

Data Airlines has just re-issued Commodore Grooves, and that made me think about videos and demos. Here’s a few of them that includes music from the album.

This Triad demo uses Raymond, and was released in 2001.

This video was made by Entter using the cassette-based video camera PXL-2000.

The Fantasy-video was released in 2004, in ye ancient times before video streaming and Youtube was a thing. Entter hosted the video on their servers, but didn’t really anticipate that it would become so popular. It was downloaded about 20,000 times I think, which created so much traffic that they had to pay a huge fee to the providers. In the end it worked out well, though. Funny how the cost of video has changed over the years..

Ull8 was used in one of the parts of the C64-demo 10 Strong Years. It was released to celebrate 10 years of Hack n’ Trade (the demogroup I founded) but it was delayed a few years. Besides, it later turned out that HT was not formed in 1993 as I always thought, but actually in 1994. Anyway.

At that time I worked a lot with Hollowman, first with his Triad-demos and then his demos for Fairlight. Pretending To See The Light uses Slobban.

Finally, this bad boy was featured as a video on the data part of the CD. It was made by Jens Nirme, who I lived with at the time.

Old releases popping up

If you are following me on Bandcamp, you’ve seen that I’m re-publishing a lot of old releases there. Just now I did Wet Pulse, for example.

If you’re not following me on Bandcamp, you haven’t seen that I’m re-publishing a lot of old releases there. Just now I did Wet Pulse, for example.

More stuff on the way!

New defMON-version

defMON is the C64-software that I’ve been using for the last 15 years or so. My computer compadre Mad Frantic made it, and I’ve helped him out with a few suggestions and ideas over the years.

The newest version includes some new sync features, like synchronizing two defMONs by connecting two C64s to the same disk drive (or just straight into the other). You can now also nudge the tempo, back or forth, to stay in sync with your local brass band. So yeah, good times they are a coming!

We are also closer than ever to actually making some video tutorials to defMON so perhaps the number of defMON-users will rise to a two digit number in the future..

MOS DEF MON!

 

Hong Kong and New Zealand

Me and the robot will be in New Zealand 26 April to 8 May, and Hong Kong 9 May to 15 May. In New Zealand I will partner up with Josh Bailey and his excellent Tesla Coil synthesizer, Chime Red. So if you (or someone you know) wants to set something up, don’t be shy.

Music as Recordings = Boring?

I talked to Elsa Ferreira who wrote a post about Algorave where me, Jacob Remin and the robot did a performance a few weeks back. I explained a bit about how the remixes on Floptrik could be “eternal remixes”, and then I got started on how boring it is that almost all digital music in the end gets released as boring recordings, stripped of all that juicy archeological data. I’ve released a lot of music as data rather than recordings, and it seems like the way of the future. Especially now, soon, when the bots can take all that data, analyze it, and commodify your creativity! Hooray!

Photo: James Vanderhoeven (at Algorave at Algomech Festival)

The new site is here

As some of you may have noticed, this site has had an extreme make-over for a while now with huge help from Spot/Up Rough. It’s still under construction, but I think I finally have a website that makes some sense. I really liked the previous awarded PETSCII site (by Raquel Meyers) but it was made in 2011 and it has run its course. So, enjoy the modern internet experience!

While looking through the server, I found a lost folder in the archives with lots of old sites of mine. It might be a mistake to post them now, but who cares? The oldest one I could find was from 2000 and is shown above. Full of teen angst, bla-bla… I think this one was at bizarr.blip.com/~goto80

This is the first page of the site from 2002 that works a bit so-so nowadays. It almost looks like a crappy version of the synthwave aesthetics of today?? Hm. Well, this one was at goto8o.boprecords.net iirc.

For this yellow 2004 site, I registered a subdomain at a pr0n site: goto80.myhardman.com. When I left that domain, it stayed alive for many years with absurd generated stuff combining Z80-processors and gay pr0n.

Entter’s 2005 site was based on the Fantasy-video and had a long and healthy life. It’s good to have the decrunching rasterlines back on the site now!

In 2008, the site became a WordPress blog and I spent plenty of time to get as much history as possible into the archives. You know that you can go back to 1993 in this blog still, right? No? Ok. After a while I got tired of the standard WordPress look, and I tried to make something GIF-freaky in 2010 but finally decided to go for something else.

This design from 2011 was made by Raquel Meyers. Beyond the landing page it was a side-scrolling WordPress blog and I was perhaps the only one who found it to be a perfectly reasonable internet cyber site.

Now, with the 2017-redesign, I think more people can appreciate this place. And I guess that’s good? I’ve also fixed a lot of linkrot (since the blog part has been around since 2008). I fixed no less than 320 dead links. which was a good reminder of the short memory of the internet. I’ve replaced the dead links with Wayback Machine backups where possible, but lots of releases and recordings and art works seem to be lost forever. It was during this process that I decided to make some of the lost releases available at this new Bandcamp page that I didn’t tell anyone about yet.

This is the 640th post on here. Next milestone is 1024 posts.