RAMBLINGS

Another awful year has passed for planet earth, and I’m still around doing my multplexed shenanigans.

Text

I’ve published two texts this year. I spent far too many weeks looking for teletext in all the wrong places, which resulted in a spreadsheet for videotex & teletext services around the world, and the post A Global Look at Teletext on text-mode.org. Although a “somewhat obscure” topic, it did receive some attention when it was picked up by Hackaday. I also published a text called REJECT PIXELS <> EMBRACE TEXT in a sort of academic zine about “evil media”. Yeah, pixels are evil!

Oh, and it was nice to be mentioned in Lori Emerson’s book Other Networks, where she wrote about DATAGÅRDEN, a teletext piece that Raquel Meyers, Possan and I exhibited a long time ago.

Art

Entter’s One minute of WOW Computer with my music was shown at RGB Montreal. That was cool, since me and Entter haven’t done things together since 1899. Ailadi, on the other hand, is someone I’ve worked a lot with the past years. Ailadi’s PETSCII animations with my music were shown at the Kinomural Festival in Wroclaw, Poland. And she’s posted short PETSCII video comics with new music by me on Instagram, which I think we’ll collect to some sort of release in the future.

Jacob Remin and me have this art project, robot music, and we presented its newest shape at t3chfest in Madrid. It’s the most poppy one so far, with tightly synchronized visuals and lights. Good times!

Music

I have this album series of slow-long, very C64-based music, which I continued this year with B Y S A N. I also showed a video at Transmission64 in a similar style, featuring three C64-improvisations in one, and some very lazy visuals.

But this not really the kind of music I’ve been making this year. No, I’ve been busy with Amiga-music. That usually means either (1) all-over-the-place songs made with old crappy samples from this archive (see w93.m3u) or (2) chiptooon! I’ve released some of the (1)-songs in the Ailadi videos mentioned above, and one in a Razor keygen, but in general this is kind of homeless music. It doesn’t resonate with Amiga freaks, and doesn’t resonate with anyone else for that matter, hehe. Maybe they’ll end up on the 100% offline album that I’m planning to do, that very few people will ever know about?

I released two Amiga songs at the Gerp demoparty. The chiptune won the chip-compo, and I’m quite happy with it, but I think I prefer the weirder one that didn’t win. It’s kind of a mix of (1) and (2), with the amen break.

I also went to the Compusphere demoparty, where I won the “streaming music” compo with Trader’s Delight. It’s an homage to the traders – the masked heroes and heroines who spent (spend?) their time sending cracked software around the world so that you could easily find it when you needed it. This is a vocoder poptune to celebrate their dedication, which few of us can really understand.

I also released a (1)-style song: a melancholic almost folky song with delightlfully fresh Swedish vocals by Breakin: Bombero.

I didn’t do a lot of live performances this year, but when I did, I only did it in Gothenburg! I think that’s a first for me. I started doing my own visuals too. It’s of course mostly text graphics, and they’re not great yet, but when they are, you’ll probably see it here.

Graphics

Ok music bla bla bla, but who cares about music?? It’s all about text graphics these days, haven’t you heard? Myeah well, that’s what I’ve spent most of my time on anyway. I’ve done a few comissions this year and I released some very long ASCII/ANSI collections: Pyramidas, Best Requests, Hello and Leonas. I really like to work in this format, because it sits somewhere inbetween a time-based media and still imagery. It loves both improvisation and repetition.

Dubmood and me did lots of keygens and installers for Razor 1911 last year, and this year we started making demos too. Anamie was first conceptualized as a music video for my song with the same name, but it grew into a rather decent demo. I made tons of text animations for it, and Dubmood put things together, based on Anat’s code. Trivia: something like 99% of the filesize of the demo is the MP3…

After Anamie, I finally joined Razor 1911 after working with them quite a lot lately. We started working on a big demo for next year, but we also snuck in a small one for the Compusphere demoparty.

CMOS Cosmos was the next big collaboration from me and Dubmood, this time powered by Zabutom (music) and Flopine and Anat (code). The demo shared first place in the demo compo at Compusphere with this demo:

The Line is a small Amiga demo with my text graphics scrolling by, a song by Tempest (with some bits by me), and code by Koobo. Up Rough released another demo at Compusphere called Hypocrisy, that streams audio/video from a hard drive on Amiga 500. Bldzr and me did the video. There are still a few final tweaks to do before it goes public.

Speaking of the scene, you might have heard about The Art of Coding, an initiative to make the demoscene a global UNESCO heritage? Ziphoid and me did the application for Sweden this year, and it was accepted, which feels weird and wonderful. Let’s see what that leads to, if anything.

Games

Ok, enough about the scene already. Time for games! My music was used in a few games: GlitchPick, the Mortimer Files and first and foremost in Re/Phase. This is a game I’ve been involved with for quite a while now. We still have a long way to go, but there is a playable version available now. Check out dreihander.com for more info.

Yeah, that’s pretty much it? If you’re still feeling hungry, there is more stuff to eat in the archive.

My friend Josh has been working on a small language model that predicts C64 music, and he’s been using some of my music to test it out.

It’s called preframr – Predicting Register Encoded Frames Rendered As Musical Results – and it’s available as open source on GitHub. You can feed it some C64-tunes, train the model, and generate new C64-music.

There’s still work to be done, but it’s starting to output things that are 1) not too similar to the original and 2) makes sense as music. :D

So, Pat Fish contacted me about the lyrics of this old classic from the computer country world (btw, the song is here and cheers to PET.CORP for the video). Here’s his suggestion, feel free to sing-a-long!

Welcome to death’s asylum / Don’t come to death so silent
Come to cat turd idiot, Welcome to planet Earth

Welcome to edlin diamond, Up from Z
And I Poke up, from traditional IPs

But I got soul, AI got trouble
0:27 So [indistinguishable]

So I got soul, And I got 20
Just turn me on And let me GoTo80

0:45
Jesus is a tight hole, He and I would never die for
To come To say I got a lot

0:55
I pay back suffering, Is lottery
Up to Oh Ohhhh, I’m forever fat O

1:03
So I got soul, AI got trouble
1:07 So [indistinguishable]

1:11
So I got soul, And I got 20
Just turn me on and let me GoTo80

2:00
AI got soul, AI got trouble
2:06 So [indistinguishable]

So I got soul And I got 20
Just turn me on And let me GoTo80

@estysoft had another suggestion. Sing along to this one too!

Welcome to Nexus Island, come to Master Indian, welcome to Metal Curse,
welcome to Metal Island, come to me that I know, come from Dishonored IPs,

but I’ve got souls, and I’ve got troubles, nobody knows me and they always leave me here,
so I’ve got souls, and I’ve got money, just hurry up and let me go to Navy.

Jesus is my body and I would never die for you God, since I’m not alive,
I’ve been in torture in this library up to bone, lost forever’s value,

so I’ve got souls, and I’ve got troubles, nobody knows me and they always leave me here,
so I’ve got souls, and I’ve got money, just hurry up and let me go to Navy.
so I’ve got souls, and I’ve got troubles, nobody knows me and they always leave me here,
so I’ve got souls, and I’ve got money, just hurry up and let me go to Navy.

Both of these lyrics are absolutely amazing at times. And here’s what I thought the lyrics were:

don’t come from texas, i don’t come from west virginia. don’t come from planet earth. don’t come from adam, i don’t come from eve and i don’t come from fishes or monkeys.

but i’ve got soul, yeah i’ve got trouble. nobody knows me and they always leave me here. so i’ve got soul, and i’ve got money. just turn me off and let me goto80.

jesus didn’t die for me and i would never die for you coz you say i’m not alive. my pain and suffering is binary but true woo-o wo, got more errors than you.

The demoscene has become a national UNESCO-heritage in Sweden, thanks to an application that Ziphoid and me did last year. This has already happened in several European countries, as part of the international Art of Coding initiative to make the demoscene a global UNESCO heritage. I think this makes plenty of sense, since the demoscene is arguably the oldest creative digital subculture around. It has largely stuck to its own values and traditions throughout the world’s technological and economical shifts, and that sort of consistency is quite unusual in the digital world.

The main idea of the demoscene is to compete with productions that maximize a certain hardware, but that’s not what all demosceners like to do. My demogroup Hack n’ Trade for example, cares more about making weird stuff, and there are plenty of other groups like that. Some demosceners don’t release anything at all, but might do important work to keep the scene alive (BBS-trading, organizing parties, preserving software…).

I’ve written plenty of papers and blog posts about the demoscene, and I’ve often felt a gap between the stuff I write as a researcher and my personal experience of the demoscene. There is certainly an international demoscene with big events and huge releases that can be described in general terms, but what has mattered more to me is the local scenes, the small parties and the people you hang out with. Meeting up with a bunch of friends and making weird computer stuff “for no reason, really” is a great setting. That’s what I enjoy the most, in the end. For other sceners, it’s different.

There is a sort of diversity in the scene that is difficult to capture and generalize. The Swedish coder with a well-paid programming job and a busy family life might consider the demoscene as an escape to his teenage years, while the LSD-munching raver from France who trades illegal warez on BBSs and makes weird pixel art considers the scene as a free culture without corporate or art world bullshit. There’s room for both in the scene, because it is werdly conservative and open at the same time. And perhaps that is one of the reasons why it should be considered an intangible heritage.

Well, that was a pretty crappy year for the world, wasn’t it? My way of coping has mostly been to go try to focus on the good stuff, and dive deep into a few big projects (more about that at the end). But I did one little thing to comment on the world. Intro 107 is a tiny C64 textmode intro with a shitty cover of the Airwolf theme, released under a pseudonym. If it doesn’t speak for itself, I can reveal that it’s a sarcastic take on one of the world’s ultra right-wing governments.

I’ve been doing loads of text graphics this year. It’s the best way to relax, you should try it! You can use Moebius for straight up ASCII and ANSI, and lvllvl.com for anything more advanced (it’s basically like Photoshop for text graphics). You can see all my text graphics stuff here, but here are a few highlights:

Bastard PETSCII with a customized font for this.

GIF for Textscape. Watch out, it’s an NFT! Please don’t kill me.

One of several cracktros/installers by Razor 1911 that I did graphics for.

My graphics for 2.0 by HarleyLikesMusic, designed by Dubmood.

Music-wise, I’ve finished a new album that will be out next year, and I’ve done some other bits and bobs.

This set was streamed at Lovebyte in February, with visuals by the Portuguese wizard ps. The music is a bit of everything, but focused on slower stuff, and there’s plenty of unreleased stuff in there.

I’ve also made music for two art exhibitions by Tommi Musturi (aka Electric) – Deep Show and his contribution to SUPERBUBBLES. Both of these were were kind of eerie and hypnotic, like much of my music has been lately. Has Goto80 gone completely slow? Well, no! Cases in point from this year:

Me and PET.CORP went on a small tour, and we released a new video for Killer Piller, which runs in the browser. It won the wild compo at the Zoo’24 demoparty!

I co-authored an academic article a while back, that was finally published this year: Retro-mediation, Commodore 64, and Interoperational Devices. I did a brief presentation about the demoscene in Bucarest, and my talk 46 years of PETSCII in 21 minutes was streamed in November. Oh, and Ziphoid and me has probably managed to add the demoscene as a national intangible heritage in Sweden!

Finally, there are a few big projects that have kept me quite busy.

I’ve been continuing to work on a book about PETSCII-graphics, which might be finished next year. The research for that book has led me into numerous sub-projects, especially involving older PETSCII-graphics that are not well preserved. One of these sub-projects was to add or update old PETSCII material at text-mode.org to make things more searchable.

That work led me into more work on text-mode.org: posting new content, but also fixed a lot of things under the hood. I’m going through all the posts to fix images, info, links and tags. With some 4,000 posts it’s taking quite a while…

I’ve also been busy with my most enormous project yet. It’s an online archive/museum of music software, which currently holds some 1,500 programs for various platforms, times and places. I’ve been working on it for years, and it has changed direction many times over the years. Now the first goal is to get a searchable database online, which might happen next year if we’re lucky… Get in touch if you are curious and want to be involved!

Finally, I’ve continued to work on a soundtrack and sound design for a game. It’s been very cool to explore reactive music, rather than the linear composing I’m used to. The game will be revealed some time next year.

+++ATH

The Art of Coding is an initiative to enlist the demoscene on the list of UNESCO intangible world cultural heritage. The first step is to do it nationally, which has been done in several European countries already. Ziphoid and me did the application for Sweden in October, and it looks like it will be officially accepted in a few months. Oh yesh, let’s heritage!

I noticed on Demozoo that 2023 looks like a super busy year for me, demoscene-wise. It got my thinking… What have I been up to?

Demoscene stuff

In February, the C64 PETSCII-demo Skybox, which I made the music for, was nominated for a Meteoriks award in the demoscene, which was a first for me. Later on, I made the music for a ChatGPT-demo that caused quite some controversy in the demoscene. My group released a PETSCII-demo as a tribute to James who made the LVLLVL textmode editor that we love to use. We also released Riparian, a beutiful PETSCII-demo by Eryngi. Also, two of my songs were used in Lo-fi SID Music to Study/Relax to.

Performances

In March, I did a live-set for Lovebyte and Zden did textmodey glitchy visuals for it. You can watch it here. The same month I performed live with PET.CORP and their fabulicious PETSCII-visuals, which you can see here. We also performed at one of Belgium’s biggest festivals, Pukkelpop. The same festival saw the premiere for Infinite Acid Machine – the most recent form for the Robot Music project by Jacob Remin and me. We’ve worked quite a lot on that project this year, which culminated in an installation at Mira Festival in Barcelona.

Music and videos

My debut album Commodore Grooves was re-issued on cassette, I released a split tape with Defense Mechanism, and I went on an acid craze with a 12″ vinyl single and an album on cassette. One of the songs was a collaboration with Dubmood. They were accompanied by great videos from Raquel Meyers, Alma & Omri Alloro, PET.CORP (one, two), BLDZR and myself. BLDZR made a really cool Virtual Acid Karaoke Show, and I made a few silly Instagram-reels that I was very pleased with. In December, I released music on a floppy disk – Bork 28 – and I published two songs in Mutantswing’s advent calendar. One was a collab with The Toilet and the other was a silly AI-generated song.

Textmode

I released two ASCII collys. Purple Road came 2nd at Revision, which I think is the biggest demoscene event. Goto437 is my first venture into “PC ANSI” with the old MS DOS font. I also published a t-shirt with my own design, and did this thing for Evoke’s ASCII-competition.

I’ve re-booted text-mode.org, which I founded with Raquel Meyers many years ago. It’s a place for traditional textmode graphics, but also related things such as ancient crafts that share a similar aesthetics to computer-based textmode graphics. Right now, I’m pretty excited also by new typographic experiments with variable fonts and code.

Also, I’ve started working on a book with PETSCII-graphics. More updates will follow, hopefully. :)

Games

I’ve started working on game music. Like, proper adaptive game music! More about that later on… Meanwhile, there was a game about a Finnish astronaut released with an old song of mine in it.

So..

It does indeed look like a busy year! Thanks to everyone who’s worked with me: BLDZR, Jacob Remin, PET.CORP, Dubmood, Alma & Omri Alloro, Eryngi, dMG, Karin Irene Andersson, Zden, Jucke, Dino, Linde, Ant1, Jellica, Ray Manta, Raquel Meyers, Polyducks, Ash Checksum, Zabutom, Sascha Müller, Defense Mechanism, Oakgrove, Optiroc, Per Lindecrantz, Altemark, Cuadrigula, The Toilet, Planet Jone…

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!