Free Music Archive - True Chip Till Death Blog

8bit BBQ at SXSW!

2010-03-16T09:43:47-04:00

Tonight marks the first of two chip music packed shows at Austin's Datapop, a collab between the Alamo Drafthouse, and 8bitpeoples. While not a SXSW event, the two-day free showcase is a nice bridge between the techy interactive aspect of the first week of SXSW and its older rockier musical component. Featuring act such as Hally, Bit Shifter, Nullsleep and more, the showcase is but a taste of the various chip related parties and showcases throughout the week. Official SXSW highlights include the 8bit cumbia fueled nudity of Meneo, Pains of Being Pure at Heart affiliated Depreciation Guild,and synthbreak wunderkin Talk To Animals.

It is always interested to see which of these acts are the "bubble" acts that break through to the "next level" of "rock fame", but you can saunter into the showcases and tell all your friends that you where there first! To get you started, we uploaded this SXSW mix with tracks from FMA chip artist appearing at the events, so enjoy and see you in seven!

Us, Cactus

2010-03-09T12:33:46-05:00

This week we are looking at a musician who has recently come back to chip music thanks to an invite to Blip Festival. More well known to electronic music fans as Khonner, he also released a chip music release for 8bitpeoples under the pseudonym I, Cactus. Owing as much to bands like Boards of Canada as lo-fi chip burbles, the release shows Khonners tracking prowess with easy going and precious beats, still holding up nearly 8 years after its initial release. Finally asked to play the 2009 Blip Festival has seemed to energize Khonner's involvement in the chip music scene, with a recent flurry of uploads to Chipmusic.org, produced on a Playstation Portable using the simple sample tracker littlegptracker.

Khonner is incredibly prolific, so you can stuff your pods with the tunes found here, or start crawling his discography. Until next time, enjoy Ruby Cactus, and see you in seven.

ChopMusic

2010-03-02T10:09:46-05:00

Along with Starpause, Overthruster was one of the most prolific of the the Minneapolis based lofi break-ish chip music assault group, :|krew. The group (pronounced COLON PIPE CREW) is one of the earliest US chip musicgroups to spring up in the early 2000's and their development, unchecked and Galapagos like in the wilds of the Twin Cities, owes a lot more to Punk, Breakcore, Bastard Noise and other types of harsh genres that you would not typically use to describe the sound that comes out of a Game Boy.

Overthruster has dozens of recordings on numerous lo-fi and no-fi Netlabels, and the tools he used to make these releases are equally diverse. His Game Boy material, showcased on his 2007 Dramacore release Slug Cock show a Game Boy that is far from interested in a nostalgic look back to one's childhood, and would rather focus on pushing the LSDJ tracker into its utmost limits, with harsh modulations, brutal hacked samples, and pulsing square percussion. Having always focused more on the noise and breakcore scenes, Overthruster is sadly not as well known in the chip community, especially amongst fans of the happier and poppier chipbreak artists like Saskrotch and Sabrepulse.

That's all for now, so enjoy Slug Cock and the rest of the Overthruster catalog elsewhere on the web, and see you guys in seven!

God is my Binärpilot

2010-02-23T15:24:11-05:00

When the Micromusic trend first started gaining traction in the late 90's, a key aspect of it was blending of chip music with existing styles in a club friendly way. One of the earliest and most prolific of these early artists has to be Binärpilot. Similar in approach to Psilodump, Binärpilot takes chip instruments and produces them using the same tactics as an experienced club producer, allowing the chip sounds to more easily compete with their expensive mainstream cousins on the beefiest of systems.

Binärpilot also is a big fan of the free music movement, with every one of his releases available for free, as well included in this giant torrent on The Pirate Bay. His seminal Commodore64+ release Remember C64? is uploaded for your approval, enjoy my favorite track Otosclerosis, and see you next time.

Floppy Party

2010-02-16T18:09:56-05:00

The history of chip music pretty much starts within the demoscene. As the sceners progressed from hacking existing games, showcasing their crews prowess in the loading screen to eventually making technically excellent standalone demo applications that pushed the limits of hardware, one thing that became constant was the progression from music out of the background to being a featured part of these productions. By the time the concept of Music Disks took shape, the musical compositions had become quite sophisticated. Some years later after the broadband internet era cut down on the appeal of these tiny floppy sized albums, the netlabel Backtrack decided for their first release to make a Windows music disc, named iHyper. The program is pretty simple. As the music plays, beat synced graphics are played that thematically match the action of the music. The sequence-like nature of the tracker file formats allow you to do lots of cool graphical effects rhythmically, so some music disks can be a tiny chip concert in your room (or at least a game minus the game play).
iHyper seems to have been made by chip music veterans and neophytes alike, with tracks from Nagz, Zinger, and Zabutom, as well as a host of (at that time) newcomers. It has seemed to pass mustard from demoscene veterans judging by the reception on its Pouet page, a notoriously tough crowd when it comes to technical song composition and graphic design. If you are interested in finding more demo scene productions and music disks, Pouet is a good place to start, but until then check out the audio uploaded here, or better yet run the music disk found here at archive.org, and catch you guys next time.

Da! Heard it yet?

2010-02-10T11:34:38-05:00

With all our Blip Festival uploads, we nearly missed noticing the arrival of Da! Heard it Records to the FMA. Having already been around for a few years, focusing on "Toyz-Pop, Electro Trash, Chiptune, Breakcore and Electro Punk among others, with a heavy leaning towards 8-bit music and pixel/net art."

Artists include the aforementioned Computer Truck, Goto80, Eat Rabbit, and Tom Woxom, but one of my personal favorites on the label have to be elechiptro-punks Ben Et Béné. The french duo, active since 2003, has many free releases scattered throughout the net (check out this rad remix of document1 by Lo-bat).

As far as their FMA release goes, check out Brest, from their Trip to Trip ep, and see you guys next week!

Lighter than Air

2010-02-02T14:58:46-05:00

Balún are quite different from many of the artists in the chip music scene, even the exceptional ones picked by myself (humility). They are a mixed gender four piece from San Juan, Puerto Rico who "build electro-acoustic melodies for imaginary films". The chip console sounds is just one detail in their complex arrangements that include acoustic instruments, vocals, electronics, and a wonderful sense of space and ambiance that is often missing from the more traditional chip musician's work.

Uploaded for your perusal is an earlier free EP from Observatory Online, that only hints at their tiny wall of sound that is expanded upon in the just released Memoria Textil, out today on their Bandcamp page as a pay what you want download.

We are still working on Blip Festival uploads, so more on that next week, in the meantime enjoy the title track from 'While Sleeping".

See you in seven!

2009 Blip Festival on your FMA PT. 2

2010-01-26T20:00:37-05:00

The Blip Festival page is still adding tracks, this week we have tracks from Chromix, Silreq, Albino Ghost Monkey, and Bit Shifter.

Bit Shifter is probably the most well known of the lot, as one of the festivals organizers and as member of the 8bitpeoples he has played shows all over the world. The Blip set catches him at the height of his powers, with pulse channel singalongs, punk cover stage takeovers, you will find that Bit Shifter tends to own whatever stage he walks on.

TCTD is currently showcasing its best of 2009 nominees, in preparation for this weekend's awards gala in New York City. Join us here next week as we get back into it with some choice cuts from the chip music scene. See ya then!

2009 Blip Festival on your FMA

2010-01-19T18:57:22-05:00

The result of months of planning and 3 wintery days in NYC, the first tracks from the 2009 Blip Festival are now online.

Blip Festival on the FMA

The collection launches this week with tracks from Nullsleep, glomag, minusbaby, tRasH cAn maN, Je deviens dj en 3 jours, The Hunters and with many more to come. For hard core fans and neophytes alike, these tracks are an amazing cross section of the international chip music scene, and a great taste of what you can expect from live shows like Pulsewave, 8static, Dutycycle, and Soundbytes, and countless others. Check out Nullsleep's track "Decade", and there's much more on the way, so keep an eye on the Blip09 collection or subscribe to its RSS feed to keep up! See you next week!

Amiga Samba

2010-01-12T13:33:21-05:00

Happy 2010 chip goons! After the stunning assault on the basic decency of the human auditory senses that was the 2009 Blip Festival, TCTD needed a few weeks of court ordered rest and relaxation in order to find some deep chiptune gems. This week we are focusing on Monotonik's "Best of AHX vol. 1", a collection of tunes made for the Amiga computer using a tracker named AHX.

AHX (formerly named THX before some skywalking lawyers shot first) was a late period Amiga tracker that was designed "especially to create C64-like synthetic tunes". Also there was "no support for sampled instruments as chip tunes are made to be as small in size as possible." The result is a file type that is transportable as a standard midi file, but to my ears much better sounding. The recently defunct Monotonik netlabel thought so too, and collected these tracks from the developers of the AHX tracker themselves, Martin 'Dexter' Wodoks and Manfred 'Pink' Linzner, who later went on to develop games for commercial games. If you are looking for more AHX tunes, you can check out this UP ROUGH gameboyadvance rom, or the AHX section on Necatarine.

And speaking of Blip Festival, come back next week when the FMA unveils some of the live recordings from last month's festival, until then you can check out "Flying" from minusbaby. See ya soon!

The Year in Chip on the FMA by TCTD for you, the discerning listener.

2009-12-29T11:51:55-05:00

Still realing from our numerous Blip Festival injuries, TCTD just wants to take the time to thank all the readers, FMA writers, tech gurus and WFMU for giving us a chance to get into some deep choon here on the FMA. Here is a mix of some of the amazing chip music we uploaded throughout the year, and let's hit the ground running with even more insanity in 2010.

Hyperventilize

2009-12-17T05:50:58-05:00

The mighty Blip Festival comes ashore THIS WEEKEND. Even if you are unable to attend in person there are plenty of vicarious methods you can use to enjoy the Festival from afar. First is the official Blip Blog, with posts, pictures and audio from artists, fans, and weirdos all week. Second, you can stream the entire festival on WFMU.org, hosted by Sound and Safe's own Trent (who was kinda enough to host some Blip performers last night on his Program.)

Finally, we have compiled a mix of all the FMA artists who will be appearing in some function at this years festival. Check out the mix below. The Free Music Archive will be bringing you sets from the festival in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!

What is right, and what is good.

2009-12-08T15:01:08-05:00

For those who follow such things, you'll find in the chip music as genre discussion lots of hand wringing about authenticity and the place chip sounds have in modern music. The weight of these arguments grow weakest when faced with the output of a significant artistic voice, whose results outweigh any semantic discussions of the source and the tools used, and just focus on the results. Swedish performer Psilodump has enough ammo for both sides of the debate. Having been involved with trackers and the demoscene since 1991, he has also crossed over doing remixes for Kraftwerk, Slagsmålsklubben and Bodenständig 2000, and has performed with Neil Landstrumm, Chris Liebing, Cari Lekebusch, Thomas Krome, Infected Mushroom, Slagsmålsklubben, Bit Shifter and Kleerup.

His 2005 release "You Sick Little Monkey" finds the typical chip arpeggios and blips mixed in with found audio and deep electronic percussion into a hard hitting blend of the two eras where one can longer tell where one starts and one ends. US fans are in for a treat as he is perhaps one of the most unheralded performers at next weeks Blip Festival, so check out this release and his extensive Archive.org catalog.

Speaking of Blip Festival, it starts next week! Check in next Tuesday for a special mix of Blip artists, or tune in next Monday to WFMU for a special edition of "Sound and Safe With Trent" with live performances, interviews and all that junk from some of the Blip Performers. See you in seven!

Over The Edge

2009-12-01T11:54:59-05:00

For chip music aficionados, the Blip Festival anticipation is reaching unbearable levels. Mere weeks away, the full lineup has been posted and amongst those announced, and coming back for their second year, is NYC's Starscream.Their last release on the 8Bitpeoples label, "Future and It Doesn't Work" is a masterful mix of perky Game Boy post-rock anthems, driving drums and a sense of futuristic humor.

Despite their youthful appearance, the duo of Damon Hardjowirogo and George Stroud , themselves barely out of high school, have become a crack live performance engine, playing dozens of shows in the last year. Check out "Future, And It Doesn't Work", and try to contain yourself for next weeks Blip Festival feature.

Until then, check out the official Blip Blog for more news and tunes you can use. See you in seven!

Super Maniacs!!!!

2009-11-30T01:15:09-05:00

We take a slight detour on our road to Blip Festival, with this Japanese compilation featuring tracks from former Blip performer Hally. TCTD staff writer Lazerbeat has the details:

"The X68000 was a short lived ('87-'93) home computer released by Sharp in Japan. The sound engine is the Yamaha YM2151, programmed using the x68's MML language. Anyone looking for a similar sound might want to try the Yamaha FB-01 which uses a virtually identical sound chip.

Many fans in Japan still make music on the Sharp x68000, one such group is Ground Zero, who compiled this release. FM Ongen (meaning "sound source") Super Maniacs is a fairly old compliation dating back to around 1999-2000. Originally only an extremely limited numbers of CDRs were produced so were are very proud to be able to share this collection with you. A couple of names are probably familiar to old school fans of the Japanese scene and the rest might be less well known. Either way, its just under 45 minutes of awesome tunes with an FM driven Gabber feel.

Take a look at youtube user SH2ARP's account for some trippy music videos for most of the songs and check the Ground Zero website for a truck load more x68000 music."

And speaking of Blip, we have announed a video contest for a chance to get free passes and to have your video screened at the festival. More details here! Enjoy this hally track, and see you in seven!

This aint your home no more

2009-11-30T01:15:38-05:00

One of the biggest such events of the year, The annual Chip Music fest, Blip Festival is quickly approaching a collision course with NYC Dec. 17th, 18th, and 19th. Furthermore, fans of WFMU and the FMA will be happy to known that both a live stream and archived recordings will be made available to fans and interested observers of chip music, so stayed tuned here for more details.

One of the more interesting performers on this years bill is The J. Arthur Keenes Band. In reality the brainchild of a single infuriatingly multi-talented composer Dan Mclay, the recently released Pamplemousse may be one of the most inventive and diverse chip release of 2009. Combining chip music sounds and melodies with various forms of electric and acoustic instrumentation along with an acerbic and poppy singing style shows Mclay at the height of his powers, and his listeners deep in the sway of his magical blend of Brian Wilson, Weezer, and whatever gear your roommate found in the alleyway this week. Enjoy Catfish Lagoon, and join us next week for another Blip artist from the 2009 roster.

Vigor Vim and Vitality.

2009-11-30T01:15:49-05:00

Monotonik, the ur-netlabel, is not only one of the earliest netlabels, but it has roots going back to the Amiga Mod scene. Founded 1996 by Simon 'h0l' Carless as an "outlet for talented electronic musicians who weren't getting the attention they deserved", the label has since gone on to release over 300 releases in a rainbow of genres. And while the music they covered have expanded far beyond the constraints of chipmusic, its artists should be recognized as an early success of chipmusic crossing over from its demoscene roots into the more general audience focused chip music style.

One of these early crossover artists, VIM, probably arrived a little too late to be a heavy demoscener, but he did contribute on a number of music disks, basically compilations meant to be distributed on floppy disks or over dial-up connections to various bbs and ftp sites. His style is all over the map, dabbling in various electronic genres, pushing the limits of the mod format with breaks, unique sound design, and catchy heartfelt melodies. Check out "A Random Collection Of Consonants", and join us next week, as we start our march to the biggest US chip music festival, Blip Festival 2009.

Ghostly Hangover

2009-11-30T01:12:48-05:00

If last week's Heosphoros release left you thirsting for more audio evil, or perhaps you missed this brutal chip metal mix from the weekend, or maybe you just have a jones for the spooky left in your veins, I think you will get a kick out of this weeks upload from Burnkit2600. This live focused audio assault unit features three dudes in goggles rocking out electronic music by hand on an array of synthesizers, game systems, drum machines, and more. Their style, a mix of proggy, breaky, synth punkery has them delighting audiences as diverse as the Bent Festival, Pulsewave, and the occasional Pinball Expos, all with definitive nerd rock groove. Check out B00, from last year's This is the Sound!, and see you all in seven.

The Blood Feast of the 2a03

2009-11-30T01:15:18-05:00

Brutal chip fiend Heosphoros would like to remind you that metal is not just tone, but groove. With his NES rom release Embered Recollections, he takes the sound of the Nintendo 8bit system, and plunders it for purpose of squarewave slaughter. The ROM, playable in any NES emulator features the disturbing and detailed imagery of Finland's Keff. The artwork makes me harken back to my own misspent youth staring in wonder at metal records on giant 12" sleeves Coconut records in Chicago. The smell of sweaty denim jackets mixing with the dying leaves of fall...

Heosphoros' style is intersting to me because it is influenced by both Konami metal classics like Castlevania, and Teenage Mutant Ninja turtles, but also by the thrash and progressive rock metal that inspired Konami. Whatever the geneology, the results are tight as they are extreme, so give the ep a listen, or better yet, fire up the ROM on your nes emulator of choice.

Hard Line Policies

2009-11-30T01:12:54-05:00

This week's chip music artist is the avant traditionalist, The Hardliner. His main output has seen release on a number of netlabels in the mid to late 2000's, although he remains active to this day. To me, he always been a sort of bridge artist, connecting the early demoscene style to the later tech innovators with his releases for labels like starpause's 20kbps records. The label focuses on low-bit encoded releases from lofi electronic producers and is not limited to chip music, with a eclectic array of noolders and bedroom producers.

These types of low-bit rate focused lof-fiedlity netlabels suited the early Internet when storage wasn't as cheap as it is today. The problem with that, however, is the persistence factor, and as these free services fall off the net there is the risk of the material being lost, especially when the artist doesn't have a strong netpresence, which is one of the reasons I've uploaded this weeks release by The Hardliner, something like bitter-bitter symphony. The Hardliner's catalog is poorly known, even within the greater chip music community, so give the ep a listen, check out his mental music video for his Relax Beat single Zoloft Blues after the jump, and catch you guys in seven.