b l a c k m a i d e n  b o o k  t W E N T Y  !!!:-  - -- ------ ²,-
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.l....:..:: .welcome dear reader _

this is book 20. we tried to make it a little greater than the
last ones to celebrate the four or five years anniversary :)

4o of blöcke counted the smilies in the last newsfile and they
were way too many. so i will try to suppress my happiness from
now on!!!!!

it took us more than 5 months to draw the amount of ansis you
can see in this pack and the result is quality-wise not too bad,
i think.

quantity-wise it's getting worse and worse and that's why we
decided to stop releasing books.

yes, sad but true, but read poti's article for more information
on the reasons :

the story of success

When Voice released the first black maiden artpack
in late 1994 he would never have guessed what a success
this artgroup should have 19 packs later. success on an
international level was nearly impossible back then,
as the artscene in germany was almost not existing.
probably he would never have thought that his group would
make it until book 20.

actually nobody spoke about books in the first artpacks.
the idea was introduced by voice

"[...] we call the whole of our creations
"the black maiden compendium". All the
packs released are just books thereof."   voice [9]

in my opinion book 9 was a milestone for black maiden.
Not only that the overall quality of the book was
bearable now (it's still worth a look now and then)
but also they seemed to have found the right team for
their work. three of the most wellknown artists from bm
were in the group already: avenger, leonardo and kyp.
all the problems of the previous releases seemed to fade
and they had to face a bride future.
seen in the retrospective, our 1997 "conflicts"
with other german groups like sarghad lead to another
quality-push. Under this preassure from outside the
group became what it is until this very day:
not only a group of people releasing art but also a
group of friends, even in reallife. avenger, as the new
senior, put the new group-feeling like that

" there were even rumours saying "black maiden is dead".
this is not true and it won't be true until the last
bm-member stops drawing [...]" avenger [12]

in addition one of the most influential artists
joined: noize. finally black maiden had reached a
level where we could compete on an international
level - we had guestcontributions and members which
were wellknown in our "ansi-world".
beneath our engagement for the artscene through the
books, crescent, beam or bmdraw it always was our aim
to get in contact with other parts of the scene. Our
annual demo-party Evoke and homepages for groups
like Tokyo Dawn Records do prove this.

The end of an era

As of today we will close the chapter of "the black
maiden compendium". there won't be any more "books" in
the future. with book 20 we have reached the top of what
we could do. An artpack like this would need
approximately 4 months - a release-rhythm we do not want
to get into. Lowering our release-quality is no option to us.

"it's better to burn out than to fade away" Neil Young

All this does not mean that black maiden is no longer.
We will just use other forms of distribution instead:
solo-releases and exibitions. this gives us the ability
to release art without the pack-typical time-preassure,
as these exibitions will be dynamical, webbased
presentations of our art.

avenger speaks up again:

while i dont agree to some of poti's comments in the
retrospective section, i hope you got the point.
black maiden is not dead. maybe you will even see more
lifesigns from us, since our web exhibitions will always
be updated when the artist finished his art piece.

i am really the last one to prefer web over dos - textmode,
but i DO NOT WANT to release only every half a year and
then it's still so few stuff.

it's not the fault of any members (oh well, some are just lazy
like me) but our time and interest for ansi are fading
slowly but steadily.

our future plans look like a web exhibition where every member
is going to release his stuff whenever he has finished it,
solo-packs and bi-monthly packages of the web-released art
accompanied with a little mag.

um, that's all that comes to my mind for that topic, so let's
go over to the ...

:  news / semi-news

gomorrah joined, a friend of pandur and an excellent vga artist.
i only wish he would get in contact somewhen.

now the sadder part:
konami left bm due to several reasons, whereas some are our fault,
one is certainly not. he told me bm would get almost no attention,
especially in mags, and that frustrated him quite a lot, which
i can understand perfectly and which was always one of our problems.
although he was not always too talkative he was a nice guy and
a really great artist. we were so damn proud when you joined us!
the very, very best to you wherever you go :)

black weasel lost his interest in ansi completely and decided to
leave for good. heh, i guess you'll still be around with us for
quite a well. farewell, wiesel!

shine's homepage heaven/o2 is online (but still under construction)
find it at http://kaoz.org/shine or something.

evoke is going to happen once again. you will find more infos
in the attached infofile.

party schedule:

poti, shine, kyp and pandur showed up at ambience 99, which was
said to be organized terribly but they had a lot of fun together
with the ecolove guys :)

dv8, zippy, poti, lord chaos, shine, shiva and me met at mekka/
symposium99. unfortunately the ansi compo got cancelled, but
we had our fun anyways.

shiva won (together with franky) the 4k-compo with an amazing
intro featuring speech synthesis (well, don't ask me if it was
really speech synthesis heh)

lord chaos came second in the multichannel compo, congrats to you two
i think the releases can be found at http://kaoz.org/kolor.

right now, pandur and poti are at takeover 99 - no nearer informations
available.

there were additional meetings at poti's, scope's(ex-teklordz)
and my birthday-parties.

pandur released a beta version of bmdraw (aka gildendraw), it's
available for dos and linux. get it at http://www.drastic.net!

soing wanted to appear in this newsfile, so here he is =)

i'd like to send some inactivity warnings to poldi and
smoke! wherever you are, please give a lifesign.

junk and his hiphop project syntax terror signed a
record deal with a sublabel of lost and found records.
be sure to check the first release in the near future!

poti participated in the homepage competition at ambience99,
but wasn't able to finish his entry in time. you can see his
design for tokyo dawn records at http://www.tdr.scene.org

our beam artmag got cancelled due to the lack of time and
motivation. shine and kyp released a small file called
beam03.zip where they explained the reasons and published
a last few articles.

guest contributions @
mmmmmmmmmmm l╬llll m lll mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm ╬╬ mm

black maiden would like to say thanks to following people because
their help made the bmbook look definately better!

cyberphreak, ex-bm member, contributed a nice oldskool pic,
milkmang, ex-bm member too, a killer 3d-logo,
not just another bm-member is noize (now with kolor) who donated
a brilliant vga for our birthday,
the famous ville a simple but perfect pic and storm from the
german group sia surprised me with his first longer pic, woo! :)

thanks a lot to you guys :)

final words:

this is the end of the last book's infofile. we will still
be around and there will be more bm releases, promised.
at this point i want to thank all members for all the work
they've done for bm over the years. i loved it, i still love
it and i will always love it.
that's it.

laters!@:

a   ``╬²  members╖╖╖╖╖:

&&avenger...........ansi/ascii  senior
&&deviate...........ansi
&&gomorrha..........vga
&&junk..............ansi/vga

&&leo...............ansi/vga/code senior
&&lord chaos........ascii
&&mother............ascii
&&osel..............internet
&&pandur............ansi
&&poldi.............ansi
&&poti..............internet/evoke
&&seltorn...........ascii/vga/code
&&shine.............ansi/ascii/vga
&&shiva.............code
&&smoke.............ansi
&&tex...............vga  founder
&&toot..............ansi
&&voice.............vga  founder
&&zippy.............ansi

&& .group email bmaiden@gmx.de
&& lworldheadquarterthe hazard/2 +492406929269x75+v34
aaaa@@&&@² irc channel#ansi.de / efnet
L&&homepage     http://kaoz.org/bm
²²²²&&²²²² ²²  ²