RAMBLINGS

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!

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.

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!

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!

The yellow and orange cassettes of 80864 have multiplied, and are back in stock! Get ’em here.