[jancsika]

A parallel, secret branch of Black MIDI:

Back in the 80s Trimpin traveled to Mexico City to visit Conlon Nancarrow. He made MIDI files of all of Nancarrow's player piano etudes-- highly complex, mostly dense pieces that consist of multiple melodies that move at different tempos. Nancarrow remarked how chilling it was to see all his piano rolls-- comprising decades of work-- reduced down to MIDI data that I'm guessing was fit onto a single 3.5" disk at that time.

That was a good two decades before the Black MIDI pieces referenced on Wikipedia. Yet AFAICT the wider community has never had access to those MIDI transcriptions. (I happen to have one for Study No. 36 that I made manually from Nancarrow's study score for a paper, but I can't remember where it is.)

So...

1. Nancarrow is listed as a kind of spiritual predecessor of Black MIDI on Wikipedia.

2. Nancarrow is also literally one of the early examples of what became Black MIDI decades later, except nobody knows that because those tiny files that could fit on a 3.5" disk were not (and probably still cannot be) distributed.

3. Copyright is one helluva drug.