syphus

The Chip Tune Marching Band, which I helped organise in Newcastle and Helsinki, has gone to New York for Bent Fest without me (while I’ve been living it up at Breakpoint :). Jamie Allen (lecturer in the department I work for) and Kazuhiro Jo put this idea together and are doing the workshop wherever they can.

Yes, I hear you cry, there are no actual ‘chiptunes’ involved, per se. The phrase is attention-grabbing, though, and reflects the fact that people are making crazy chip-style noises with squarewave generators, and it’s all terribly good fun.

Having said that, if you look closely at the video on the Make article, you’ll notice a surprisingly high ratio of chip-musicians to regular people: Cerebral Scars, Goto80 and, of course, myself :D

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/04/handmade_music_bent_edition_-_tonig.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890

One of my two major personal discoveries at Blip Festival this year (the other being cow’p) has given me a good 24 hours of happy now that I’ve finally got around to downloading both of his 8bitpeoples releases.

Trash80 is a big deal, having done some really important Gameboy hardware dev, music for games like Darwinia and various other things, but since we obviously move in quite different circles I wasn’t very acquainted with his work before Blip. We hung out quite a bit through the five or so days we were in NYC, but he was the very last artist to play which mean that all the rest of us were chilled, no longer worrying about our own sets, and ready to hit the dancefloor for the grand finale. Well, fucking hell. Excellent stuff: for my money, the perfect application of chipstyle sounds in the fully-sequenced/produced arena. I could learn a thing or two about breaking down some my own entrenched production ‘values’ by listening to this guy.

Oh, he also saved Mia and I from getting unutterably lost in Manhattan at 3am with his GPS skillz. Tim, I salute you.

Shit, I almost forgot: the point of this entry was to send you to 8bitpeoples to download Icarus and Hologram! Do it.

Gamewave Podcast:

The nice chaps from Spheres of Chaos dropped some of my music into their latest Gamewave Podcast, along with some plugs for the IMMINENT Chiptune Alliance Tour.

Incidentally, a new date’s on the cards for London: 29th August at Barfly in Camden. Drag yourselves down!