True Chip Till Death

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!

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.

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!

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.

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.

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!