so golddust and joyful impossible, the feeling of Lissajou and Strangelette is ever effervescently, spontaneously, instantaneously changingevery cosmic into
powerfulnew and weird here is the suggestion of forever in an eyeblink, hoping hoperaves hands in air, strobelights in an undiscovered sky whateverness or techno otherwise, I will alwaysand timeless expanses vast adorehouse andacid thank you for all the idm you've kissed into my life.
It's surprising to me as someone who generally isn't that big on chip music that I'm on my third straight play through minusbaby's new album, Derecha. And even though I admittedly get fidgety and impatient on hearing more than one song at any given time in any given genre (chronic musical ADD), here I am humming along like an asshole, more forcefully with each repeated listen, ad-libbing riffs here and there while I finger-drum beats on my desktop like a white Candido, and quickly approaching my fourth return listen.
As an album, it's a mature progression from his previous EP, Left. And it's damn good. And I want to tell people about it, but what do I even say? It's chip music, but it doesn't sound like something from any video game I played when I was a kid. It's new music made with old-school mentality using a combination of sounds that could either be from 1985 or 2085. It's funky, it's danceable, it's composed, it's cerebral, it's performing a complicated samba throughout the Southern Hemisphere at times. It's all of these and yet it's none of these.
After having met at Blip Festival 2009, Coova and little-scale signed a treaty to merge their respective battalions and combine their unique combat styles in order to ward off evil enemy forces. Coova’s artillery of choice is the Nintendo Game Boy with the Nanoloop 1.5 ammo cartridge whilst little-scale’s war science research department has developed a weaponised strain of the SEGA Nomad. The result is an armed force to be reckoned with, ready to do battle on any audio playback system at high volumes.
Lost in orbit around the third planet from the star Canopus, the second brightest star in the night-time sky, the GSV Desmos drifts forgotten through outer space. The original crew have been dead for decades and their descendants are forced to scavenge in the huge craft's shadowy maze of decaying rooms and corridors. Kept alive by the ship's few remaining atmosphere systems, this is the soundtrack to the remaining survivors lonely voyage through the cosmos. Written using a Game Boy and some junkshop FM and GM keyboards, Desmos is a journey that invokes as much of the spirit of Oldfield as Jellica can possibly bring himself to summon and attempts to show off the DMG-01's synthesis capabilities to their fullest using a long squiggly line of wobbly electro.
Gear up, put on your helmet and sit back for Lander, a 20 minute journey of the four operators of the Galileon out of the ocean and into space. Linde's 8bitpeoples debut showcases his more ambient and floaty musical strata using simple FM synthesis and a couple of slow-working years of on and off tinkering with the songs. The resulting track list is a chronological journey of trance inducing loops, mellow pads, buzzing leads and bubbling sound effects all put together during unhealthily late nights, forming an unmistakably digital, yet organic, science fiction soundtrack. Listen and enjoy.
Using the YM2612 sound chip in the Sega Genesis and a Yamaha DX-100 keyboard, Joey Mariano, in TRENCHVENT, takes FM synthesis beneath the atmosphere to a secret place at the end of the ecosystem. Underwater, biology and technology morph into each other while the open air grows stale. Now, the coordinates have become a hot spot where crevices create sounds, and where an eel can ignore the mountains of waste above.
"Data Drop: 12 Tracks For Co-Conspirators," is an exclusive collection of previously unreleased tracks by Blip Festival 2009 participants; made available only to the event's supporters and donors. 8bitpeoples, The Tank, and the Blip Festival crew extend our genuine thanks to you for ensuring that Blip Festival 2009 took place, and we hope you enjoy the release.
Receptors has replaced an old toy with a new one, this time picking up a Nintendo DS and putting it to use with the Korg DS-10 software. The USER tracks were perhaps the most focused of the "groKwork" sessions, originally recorded during the Fall of 2008. Now, 8bitpeoples is pleased to present this fully extended and remastered edition - the USER Deluxe EP.
Roland had studied the data on the first four cartridges for a very long time, when he realized that the lamprey was hiding a fifth inside it's mouth. Discovered, the lamprey wheezed and sputtered, blowing air through the cartridge in an attempt to make it sound out a tune. Confused and frustrated, it spat the item out into the sand and disappeared into the vast, toxic lake. Roland dried it off, inserted it into the DMG, pressed start and heard the growling waveforms emerge. This sound brought to him the realization that a year had passed in this wasteland and there was now much work to be done.
In the early summer of 2007, the first demo from I'll Have You Naked By the End of this ROM, an 8 second loop from Mustard, was played for Nullsleep over tinny DS speakers. Thirty months of discarded demos, obsessive re-writes, and at least three mastering sessions later, one of the true innovators of chipbreak brings you 5 tracks of high speed guilt trips and over joyous ceremony. This is Raw. This Is Saskrotch.
The first time I listened to "Left" I was 6,000 feet above sea level being driven in a car navigating the winding roads of the Himalayas. The last time I listened to "Left" was a few minutes ago while watching some writers at the 5Pointz graffiti spot in Queens. Both times I was mentally transported to a place between those two extremes – the majestic and the everyday. Can something be both timeless and fresh? It can when the bass is the base and each snare truly ensnares.
Once again, minusbaby has shown us the proto-urban; an audio space where an imaginary city is built in the mind's eye from the rawest materials and yet still seems to be polished and eternal. Please, enjoy, as I do, the reductive/constructive paradox which is minusbaby's perpetual rhythm machine and sip and nibble from one of the most inconspicuously nuanced suppers ever to disguise itself as a snack. Simplicity was never so deceptive.
Official live-performance double-CD compilation, capturing the high-impact energy the Blip Festival 2008's live chipmusic performances. Produced by 2 Player Productions & featuring one track from each of the 2008 festival's 32 musical performers, including Sidabitball, Low-Gain, IAYD, Syphus, Role Model, Mr. Spastic, Starscream, Cow'p, Nullsleep, Lissajou, glomag, Stu, USK, and more. Professionally recorded, mixed, and mastered, and packaged in beautiful gatefold CD packaging designed by minusbaby. The phenomenon of live chipmusic has never before been so pristinely captured.
In the not so distant future awaits the election of the first third party candidate to the White House- they will hail from the Space Party, a political coalition founded by astrophysicists, former democrats and ex-NASA employees. In their 8bitpeoples debut EP, "Future, and It Doesn't Work", Starscream tell a tale of victory, science, and potentially catastrophic foreign policy.
IAYD makes his 8bitpeoples debut with "Supergalactic", an invitation to get punched in the face by light-speed melodies and sound barrier-breaching beats. Embark on a journey through the cosmos with six, powerful masterworks crafted from the dregs of shattered asteroids and the rusted husks of space vessels. Pushing forward and brimming with profound sonic vivacity, "Supergalactic" leaves you with a greater understanding of the Universe.
"AKID EP" by starPause is causing a ruckus. Four floor killers stacked with stinging slaps, bone-shaking bass, saucy diva snippets and tricked out retrigger commandos. Brain on the verge, move as you must! Only Piggy Tracker makes it possible. Art by Videogramo tew wey sekam. Mastering by Jesse Graffam rocks any sound system.
"Claps and Leads" marks Mr. Spastic's triumphant return to the 8bitpeoples catalogue; five deft exercises in virtuoso programming, balancing intricate technical skill with a warmly organic sound, all delivered in his signature bold-yet-delicate tech-soul style. Jazz, deep funk, disco, R&B, and full-on techno inflections collide and merge into an astonishing stylistic cocktail, all topped off with a shimmering pro-grade production sensibility. Dazzling artwork by Ui completes the package, sealing the deal on a certain future classic.
As Roland walked on through the desolation, he was acutely aware that he had lost something intangible. His only clues came to him by way of the DMG in his pocket. The lamprey was willing, for the moment, to help him search the debris for the small cartridges that fit into the DMG, each one supplying a new, crucial piece of information. The hidden truth would be thus revealed to him slowly, in sequence.
Cornbeast delivers Chip Hero, five songs from the soundtrack of an imaginary future video game where players perform along with the chip music hits of tomorrow, using controllers resembling the gaming gear of yesterday. Post-modern musical sensibilities collide with pre-information-age hardware, not so much closing the loop as introducing something unconventional, unexpected, and occasionally upbeat.
Those who lack discipline will be given some. 8GB's Pravda (The Truth) continues their globe-trotting persuasion that has only one end: World Audiovisual Domination!
8GB's open-minded approach to chip music twists the barriers of hardware limitations and attacks various oldschool platforms at the same time, while delivering the goods to shake booties all around and convert many chip non-believers to their regime. The Truth is out there, but the question remains: Smozhezh ti' vi'derzhat' pravdu?
After meeting in New York at the first Blip Festival, the scheme was hatched. The most unlikely of collaborations, between two of chip music's most enigmatic individuals, would be conducted in secrecy over the next year. Delicately woven Game Boy loops conspire with hypnotic banjo patterns. Layers of guitar dance over uncanny vocals. This is the EP you might have once heard, far-off in the static between two AM radio stations.
This release is testament to the positive social effects of alcohol ... On the one hand Nullsleep plied gwEm with drink to encourage him to agree to
do an 8bp release, on the other hand gwEm spiked Nullsleep's drink so that
he'd agree to make it a live album. When it came to finding someone
to record the show gwEm and Random ended up plying each other with drink
until they realized the logical course of action. Sadly, gwEm's long time
creative partners MC Counter Reset and Colin needed no such alcoholic
encouragement. Shows in Hell are easy to get, but hard to come back from. The next best thing we could find was the Bethnal Green Workingman's Club in London's east end. This is the pure sounddesk recording of a very special gig. The only instruments you hear are one Atari STe, a drum kit, and a Flying V through a seriously cranked Marshall.
Dormant for too long in M-.-n's secret vault were some of his finest
discodirt anthems. Once the prize possession of a happy few, they are now
unleashed, ready to contaminate the world. Enjoy.
After a five-year hiatus, minusbaby returns to our discography with the hip-shaking "Saudade for Beginners"; five tunes written in São Paulo, Brazil and East Harlem, New York City. Whereas "Monkey Patch" concerned itself with fictitious apes and animal hybrids, "Saudade for Beginners" aims to express life after the experience of saudade, a term often discussed pedantically by the academe, but best left to music and poetry as in bossa nova and samba – of which minusbaby is a devoted connoisseur. Shake what your mãe gave you.
Nullsleep emerges from the darkness with Unconditional Acceleration – an exploration of romance and tragedy in the 21st century. Five songs, limitless intensity. Ecstatic bursts of cascading waveforms race toward uncertainty. A feeling of ever increasing separation develops. Unattainable distances are approached and sheets of white noise issue forth from the fissures of an obsessively restructured reality. The sound surrenders in memory of another time and place, to which we can never return.
What is the difference between a modal and moduless window? Why do samuraj have long hair? Windows is so slow, but why? To slap happy bee, or not two III EP? That is the question! Teen Samurajs cutting hipster haircuts! The window of a chip, is in the whip of the hip. Never modulate the subconscious, beware of school. Provided with wings and/or antennae, unanimously, the bees agree, while hearing out these MP3s!
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