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…