“Chip Music” (Used 22 times)

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.

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 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!

Our friends at Phlow Magazine are compiling an advent-calendar's worth of Creative Commons charts from some of the world's most attuned netlabel listeners. This includes people like Michael Gregoire of Bloc Sonic (who just released their 25th NetBloc - congrats!), Phlow's esteemed staff members, and other creative commons music freaks. I'm working on my own list right now, honored to be involved in this very cool project. When all's said & done, Phlow's compiling another "Best of Netlabels Compilation: Netlabels at their Finest Hour" (here's the most recent one). And in the meantime, I've been enjoying hearing everyone's daily mixtapes.

I'm also discovering some new forces in the vast Creative Commons music world, like Masakuyi of the Music Forest blog. His best-of 2009 tipped me off to this 2-song digital 12'' single by Quarta330, a free Creative Commons release on Japan's Maltine Records. enjoy:

Maltine Records is a very cool sounding netlabel specializing in electronic sounds, hip-hop, mashups, house and dubstep. We're just starting to delve in to their catalog of nearly 50 releases -- if anyone is familiar and has some recommendations, please share!

Hailing from Tokyo, Toru Koda a.k.a. Quarta330 has a couple actual physical 12''s out on Kode9's world-renowned Hyperdub label, and a remix on a Warp Records digital comp. He's one of the 3 people behind the Tokyo-based chiptune collective Lo-Bit Playground, and he's collaborated with the likes of Flying Lotus. After the jump, enjoy a video of Quarta330 live at the 2006 Blip Festival in NY.