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Blip Festival 2009 on the FMA
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Peter Swimm on 03/09/2010 at 12:32PM
Us, Cactus
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.
Peter Swimm on 03/02/2010 at 10:08AM
ChopMusic
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!
