____twoism

Hey, everyone!
New poster here. I have this mystery about one of BoC’s songs I’ve known for a while and I thought I’d share it, hoping someone here could shed some light on it, finally.

Does anyone remember an old website called hell.com from the 90’s? There is a site around now with the same name but it’s not the original site from the late 90’s. The original site shutdown sometime around 2002/2003. The site was pretty weird and it just contained a bunch of links that led to other links that were just questions or strange phrases. They would take you to different pages and show you odd images. Every time you’d click a link it would send you somewhere different and it would never be the same place twice – pretty cool site I remember.

Anyways, my friend and I were on it exploring one night and we wound up on a page that had a creepy loop playing in the background. We thought it sounded pretty cool and my friend sampled it and used it for a track he put together for fun. This was 1999 and I hadn't heard any BoC tunes yet. I was aware of them being on warp records at the time but I was too busy being obsessed with aphex around then(haha) but in 2002 I bought their Geogaddi cd and was hooked on their music.

Well getting back to the point, very soon after I got MHTRTC. That’s when I heard the loop from the hell.com website. It was the loop from Sixtyten. I remember the version on the website was different from the album though. It was a perfect loop at high quality and didn’t sound like it was sampled from the album. It lasted longer and didn’t contain any of the other elements from the original track. I always believed it may have been an actual stem from the original.

Over the years I never thought too much about it, but it has always plagued my brain on how hell.com acquired such a loop of BoC’s that was so customized? It made me wonder if BoC made it for them? I’ve never seen anybody else bring it up before anywhere. My friend thought it was strange too, when we discovered it, but we never dwelled on it for long. He may still have the track he recorded – I’ll have to ask him. The thing is we recorded music from that era straight to cassette because we were only young teenagers with not very much $$. So it may be tricky finding it, if he still has it. He may though, he was better at taking care of his music from that time then I was.

Sorry for the super long post and taking forever to get to my point. I thought this question would be nice to start off with and introducing myself to the community. I hope one of yall out there knows what I’m talking about.
ltrs

Interesting post. Have you tried Wayback Archive yet? https://web.archive.org/web/20090101000 ... //hell.com

Also what if it's the other way round? What if BoC used that hell.com loop for Sixtyten? They obviously use a lot of samples from anywhere in their tracks. Seems plausible...

Hey thanks for the reply, Fredd-E, and nice to meet you. I’ve always wanted to give you thanks for taking over the old DavidAC site. I remember visiting that page a lot when I was in high school. Some early BOC era stuff.

I tried out that way back machine site and I was surprised to find that hell.com was up a bit longer then I previously thought. It’s been so long I think my mind just shut it out around 2003 for me. Anyway from what I seen it looks like the format may have changed some after 2003. 98 – 2001 is when I visited it the most and they had some pretty strange stuff going on in there I remember. Looking at the pages left on way back with those cryptic messages brought back memories of uneasiness I use to have as a kid seeing them. It’s funny now though.
A lot of the links are broken. It’s hard to find much left on there.
I checked the handful of links they had for 1999 – 2002 when the loop may have still been up but it was all mostly the same stuff. No pages with audio at all and I remember the site had a lot more to offer than what way back had saved. The other thing is the way the site worked back then made it hard to the find the same page twice because of so many links that led down their own path. It may be impossible to ever find it again. That was a interesting idea you had Fredd-E though, about BOC getting the loop from hell.com – I never thought of that. It could be the case as well. I did come across older info they had up on the page in 1996 and 97 that’s interesting. Here’s a post of it I copied and pasted:
NOTICE
hell.com is a private website.
for selected creative people to communicate, create & exhibit unique & cutting edge content & interactive experiences for the benefit of their peers without commercial motive or purpose.
there is absolutely no public access to this site. there are no guest privledges. there are no visitors.period
Membership is by invitation only.
if you have received an email of a frightening nature from hell.com please follow this link.
hell.com is a private web
the only way in is through membership.

membership is given to selected people of proven talent
who are willing and capable of adding something of merit to this private web.
if you are a a designer, programmer, game developer, conceptual artist, or hacker of extreme talent
& you work in this medium
in order to be considered please submit a url as a sample of your work or a brief description of your qualifications to
someone.
no you can't get in.
absolutely nobody gets to visit. there are no guests. there are no exceptions. don't even ask!
for those of you who refuse to accept this fact, it may be of note that hell is not located on this server.

I thought it was interesting how they stated membership was only given out to selected people who could contribute to the site such as artists. Also for creative people seeking no commercial motive or purpose. The whole thing gave BOC/hexagon Sun collective similarity vibes to me. Who knows, I thought, maybe BOC could have contributed something like the sixtyten loop to them for membership back in 96/97? I mean that was right before MHTRTC was publicly released. Of course this is all speculation.

I was thinking the site had to have some sort of permission to use the loop if it wasn’t theirs. The site gave no type of credit for anything it hosted and it was a pretty established site – tech wise. I just wanted to see if anybody else in the BOC fan base ever witnessed the BOC hell.com loop back then. Thanks for giving an interest Fredd-E; if I find anything more about it I’ll mention it here.
Thanks to the twoism org as well.

What a fantastic first couple of posts! Welcome. Look forward to digging into this later.

So for the last 20 minutes I've been trawling around the Wayback Archive for hell.com and it seems very, very cryptic (and interesting). Every snapshot seems to contain broken links, '404 NOT here' and weird links attatched to strings like '?' and if ( 1 + 1 == 1 ) { e8z = true; };. From the February 6th 1997 snapshot the page shows a broken link image, as well as the aforementioned 'This is a private domain. You must be invited.' The title of the page is also called 'WHY ARE YOU HERE'. If you click the 'This is a private domain. You must be invited.' Text, you are linked to a page which goes to hell.com/GOHOME, then immediately links to hell.com/GOHOME2. GOHOME just says 'GO HOME' with red text against a black background, and GOHOME2 just says 'GO HOME' with the inverse colours. The titles of the pages are 'BIG' and 'MISTAKE' respectively. I also noticed that after 20 seconds of staying on the 'WHY ARE YOU HERE' page, you get linked to hell.com/GOHOME, even if you don't do anything.

I also just discovered in the 2004-2005 snapshots the pages have these cryptics messages like 'you forgot' and 'there is no fate'.


Thanks AQfumes for posting this, I could spend hours looking at this archive, as this stuff really interests me

Thanks for the welcome, Mexicola. I look forward to being apart of the site.

Clearcut, I know what you mean. What's left of the site is still very interesting. I seen all those pages you referred to and they do look more menacing than you could describe. I'm glad i got you interest in it. The original site when up was even more wild I remember. It would be cool to figure out BoCs part in hell.com one day.

turns out you can get t-shirts and email domains too

https://web.archive.org/web/20040605003 ... /T/i2.html

I noticed that too speaker-to-animals. It looks like it was later in the site's years. That's what made me think they really changed their whole format from their original statement that said they seek no commercial motive or purpose. I just thought they were probably getting low on funds to keep the site up cause it did eventually shut down not too long after.

On a side note - it would be funny and sort of strange to actually see someone wearing one of those hell.com down facing arrow t-shirts in the streets.

Going through hell.com on the wayback machine, I was linked to http://www.sign69.com/medialounge/crop.html (and a lot of different websites as well). Upon clicking on this, you are taken to a random page on that same website, with a video and sound.

For example, for the number 1969, you get a video of what looks like Australian aboriginals, with 'The Width of a Circle' by David Bowie Playing in the background. Others have different sounds or songs

Perhaps it was this website that you were linked to and what sounded like Sixtyten was playing?

A thought: is there a website/service where one can view a website's domain owner history (not current)? Perhaps that might be useful.

A random thought: perhaps hell.com is the Hell Interface? What with it describing itself as 'for selected creative people to communicate, create & exhibit unique & cutting edge content & interactive experiences for the benefit of their peers without commercial motive or purpose.'

This discoveries are amazing! Nice work guys, let's see what else can be found about this

I've been going through the "http://www.sign69.com/medialounge/space(X).html"s, putting 1 as X and gradually going up by 1. so far I know (bare in mind as a 16 yr old my music knowledge isn't that good):
space7: things behind the sun by nick drake,
space8: packt like sardines in a crushd tin box
space26: all along the watchtower by bob dylan
space30: visions of Johanna by bob dylan
space36: grace by jeff buckley
space39: seven nation army by the white stripes
space41: ring of fire by johnny cash (but has 'You're all gonna die' being spammed in the background, really annoying)
space42: video killed the radio star by the buggles
space43: time of your life by green day
space45: love will tear us apart by joy division
space47: my milkshake brings all the boys to the yard by kelis
space48: if 6 was 9 by jimi hendrix
space49: hurt by johnny cash
space52: do it again by steely dan
space59: hey ya by outkast
space69: going to california by led zeppelin
space73: smooth criminal by michael jackson
space76: we are the champions by queen
space78: stayin alive by the bee gees
space84: i know the song, it's from an old b and q advert
space90: rocket man by elton john
space91: welcome to the machine by pink floyd
space92: can someone identify this? I know it but I can't place my finger on it.
space100: tubular bells by mike oldfield

only got up to 100

9999 is interesting. It yields an animated sprite pig dancing while a montage of various images from buildings to pornography flash in the background. The audio is the beginning of Creep with some synth pads layered over it.

Edit: it appears as though the audio is random for that one, or there are at least different tracks, because upon opening it again I heard some Eno.

just gonna say 7799 is hella weird.

This is like the predecessor to YTMND during the 'artfag' movement. I like it.

Would not imagine it has anything to do with BoC though other than simply using one of their tracks.

Space 666 is actually quite catchy with some cool visuals and illustrations.

THIS.....right here......is what's awesome about the internet sometimes.

Wee things like this.

mysterious....love it.

J

fancy a bit of weird?

http://www.sign69.com/medialounge/space4137.html

WT ACTUAL F

Is it me or is twoism especially awesome today?

I think I found a complete copy of hell.com on http://www.0100101110101101.org/home/co ... index.html
I've clicked around but haven't heard any audio.. yet..

clearcut wrote:Is it me or is twoism especially awesome today?

This is where twoism peaks. I all goes downhill from here on out.