herr_professor (Curator)

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!

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!

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!

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!

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!