About the Artist: Sm0hm (AKA Simon Mattisson) is a gameboy artist from Gothenburg, Sweden. I recommend giving his music a listen to while ripping through the following interview. You can hear some of his stuff on the obligatory Myspace Page.
Alex: What gear do you use to compose your music? (software and hardware)
Sm0hm: I always use Game Boys, but tend to play around with most stuff I find, like sequencers, trackers and some music games like Electroplankton and Gupey, but when I do serious composing, that I release it's Game Boy. On Game Boy I use the tracker Little Sound Dj and the step sequencer I do most of my music with Little Sound Dj
A: cool so do you have various gameboys? do you do any of the fancy MIDI sync-ing etc. or just solo gameboy per track?
S: I have four Game Boys, but I usually just use one. I have synced two game boys on some tunes, but I think that the charm of this kind of composing is the limits. It's really fun and cool to see how much you can push it. I don’t have any midi syncing devices, and I don't need one at the moment, but we'll see what happens in the future
A: Just on a side note which gameboy sound do you prefer?
S: I prefer the Dot matrix aka Greyboy. The sound is undoubtedly the best
A: OK so have you done any of the Pro-Sound Mod stuff for colour gameboys?
S: No, I'm pretty lost when it comes to stuff like that. The only thing I've done with my Game Boys so far is exchanging some of the back shells.. But I'm going to try to do the mod sometime
A: So did you make music before the Game Boy and LSDJ?
S: Not really. If you call mixing in Ejay and Garageband making music, so sure. But I would say no. I've been interested in music long before, but never really making anything. I've always dreamed of a portable music maker like LSDj. actually, I've always dreamed for it to be on the game boy console dunno why really.
A: I assume from Garageband and Ejay etc you knew about some music theory (scales etc) that you now apply to the Game Boy? or not?
S: When I started with LSDj I had absolutely no knowledge what-so-ever haha! When I used garageband and stuff like that I just dragged loops you know
A: Yeah right, cool that’s awesome, so has using LSDJ broadened your musical knowledge? Not just in a music theory sense but knowing what sounds good through trial and error etc?
S: Yes, very. You learn alot by making music yourself. Of course, there's much I don't HAVE to know, so in musical theory I guess I'm pretty lost. But now I can more easily hear the errors and faults in music and point out what they should do. My pitch hearing is perfect according to a test. Dunno if that have something to do with LSDj, but I guess that would be the most logical.
A: That’s awesome, Do you play live?
S: Yes, I've done it once… Really twice, but you can't really count the last time, it was in my living room playing for some of my close friends haha! The neighbours called us the next day and asked if it was us that played the loud music. The first and only time I (really) have played live was at a New Year’s Eve party. It was a very fun experience.
A: So that was just Game Boy, were you playing back songs or using LSDJ's live function?
S: just playing songs and acting like I’m really doing something! :D, that's pretty much the live standard, but I'm planning to do more advanced live stuff in the future
A: Yeah that’s what I gathered but I mean it’s a gameboy on stage for most people that’s cool enough.
S: yeah, true =), no one will guess that you can squeeze out amazing melodies and rhythms from an old video game
A: How big is the chiptune scene in Sweden?
S: people say that the chip scene is the biggest in Sweden, and I think that can have something to do with us all being addicted to video games. For instance, if you play a game like counterstrike or WoW, and say "Is there any Swedes here" you get spams of "yes". Though it's still not many that have heard of the term chip music, but many have encountered it.
A: Do you feel there is a kind of generation gap between the demo, mod scene programmers and people like you making music on Game Boy but without technical programming knowledge?
S: in a way, yes... I know many modders and demo sceners that laugh at my ignorance, but we're still the same in heart, really. This kind of music is there because the artist thinks it fun, there's no money involved, just strict fun and games. I think that's the line you can draw trough the demo, mod sceners and chiptunists like me, we're all doing it for fun.
A: You mentioned earlier that it’s great playing with the limitations but is that what makes it fun or is it the idea of making game music? I think it’s the sound, maybe? I don't really know but it is fun.
S: If I’m going to talk about everything that's fun with chip music I’m going to be stuck here all day! But, I just mentioned the limitations, because that it one of the most noticeable features when you compose for this format, except the sound of course. Yes, the sound is great fun too, to see how much you can do with it.
A: What chip artists do you listen to?
S: Woa, alot.. But the ones I have listened to most is Bit Shifter, Nullsleep, Quarta330, Xinon, USK, Role Model, Goto80, Trash80 and many, many more. but Bit shifter, Quarta and Role model are closest to my heart =)
A: What non-chip music do you listen too?
S: honestly, not much, but Daft Punk, Kraftwerk, some random house music and some Swedish reggae and ragga / hip hop can't hurt alot daft punk atm.
A: Do you play games much?
S: no, not much at all, but I used to be kinda addicted to video games as a child. I had a blue game boy pocket, my first console, that I played a lot on. I've always loved the sounds, I used to carry it around as a freestyler when I was a kid haha much N64 too much actually I’ve bought Gunpey for DS recently, it's a puzzle music game, has some chiptune elements in the sequencer, which was the main reason I bought it.. Though the game was addictive, and the sequencer was crap, so I’m now playing Gunpey like crazy.
A: Do you know about the Malcom McClaren 8bit article?
S: yes, I’ve read it, very interesting, he's playing at a festival called peace and love here in Sweden, I might go.
A: Oh really? What do you think about the whole opinion that chiptunes are a reaction against modern pop music?
S: actually, it depends.. I hate mainstream stuff and most pop music, so for me it's true in a way, but for others it may be different. I don't think it's a 'reaction' against pop music tho, I don't chip music exist for the single purpose of telling the world that we do not like pop music but I can see what he means by that, the comparison to punk. chip music often is a DIY, fuck you money craving label asshole, underground music style.
A: Do you compose with the Game Boy when you’re out and about? Do you think your surroundings affect the way you write songs?
S: I usually sit at home, but composing outside is very nice too. It does affect the way you write songs, I know many that must have good surroundings to write good music. I for one can't concentrate when there's other people around me, the only song I’ve composed when there's people around me is meet me in Cairo haha =). I always take my game boy with me though! You never know when you might want to compose some 8bit love 4bit actually...
This interview was performed by Alex Yabsley, and it originally appeared on the website gamemusic4all.com.
Showing posts with label CLASS5. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CLASS5. Show all posts
29.1.08
Chiptunes
According to Wikipedia chiptunes are music written in sound formats where all the sounds are synthesized in realtime by a computer or video game console sound chip, instead of using sample-based synthesis. Everyone needs to go check out the Wikipedia entry as well as checking out the following Youtube videos:
Blipfest 2007Happened this past December at Eyebeam in Chelsea (NYC). I had the privilege of attending.
VIEW VIDEO
The artist who was talking about his influences coming from the punk movement goes by the stage name Nullsleep. You can check his stuff out HERE.
The Sidtunes Jukebox is an online music player that plays Comodore 64 tracks. Many chiptune artists download these onto floppy disks and compile set lists to be mixed in a similar manner to the way a DJ mixes and scratches records.
COLOR_CAVES is a chiptune project that has been written and programmed for the Nintendo Entertainment System. The audio was done by Alex Mauer along with a Norwegian composer named Phlogiston. The programming was handled by No Carrier. According to Mauer this is the second ever album released solely on a Nintendo Cartridge. The first was also done by him. Here’s a demo of the NES Cart:
8.bit.weapon is a kid that makes chiptunes. Here is an interesting (kinda at least) video from G4TV on exactly what he does:
Goto80 is another artist worth checking out for sure. This Youtube video is in Spanish but you can listen to the chiptunes regardless…
The next post will be concerning making music on the gameboy platform. The #1 software choiceamongst gameboy Djs is LSDJ, “AKA: Little Sound DJ”. More chiptune stuff can be found at VORC.ORG. Obviously this is just a quick overview of the chiptune scene. If any of you have questions, comments, etc. please post them in the comments section here.
Get your own copy of the LSDJ .ROM Free, Here.
You can run it on a gameboy emulator, such as KiGB, which you can get Here
You can learn how to fool around with the LSDJ .ROM: Here
Blipfest 2007Happened this past December at Eyebeam in Chelsea (NYC). I had the privilege of attending.
VIEW VIDEO
The artist who was talking about his influences coming from the punk movement goes by the stage name Nullsleep. You can check his stuff out HERE.
The Sidtunes Jukebox is an online music player that plays Comodore 64 tracks. Many chiptune artists download these onto floppy disks and compile set lists to be mixed in a similar manner to the way a DJ mixes and scratches records.
COLOR_CAVES is a chiptune project that has been written and programmed for the Nintendo Entertainment System. The audio was done by Alex Mauer along with a Norwegian composer named Phlogiston. The programming was handled by No Carrier. According to Mauer this is the second ever album released solely on a Nintendo Cartridge. The first was also done by him. Here’s a demo of the NES Cart:
8.bit.weapon is a kid that makes chiptunes. Here is an interesting (kinda at least) video from G4TV on exactly what he does:
Goto80 is another artist worth checking out for sure. This Youtube video is in Spanish but you can listen to the chiptunes regardless…
The next post will be concerning making music on the gameboy platform. The #1 software choiceamongst gameboy Djs is LSDJ, “AKA: Little Sound DJ”. More chiptune stuff can be found at VORC.ORG. Obviously this is just a quick overview of the chiptune scene. If any of you have questions, comments, etc. please post them in the comments section here.
Get your own copy of the LSDJ .ROM Free, Here.
You can run it on a gameboy emulator, such as KiGB, which you can get Here
You can learn how to fool around with the LSDJ .ROM: Here
26.1.08
Malcom McLaren
8-Bit Punk
Malcolm McLaren, the subculture hacker who created the Sex Pistols, discovers the new underground sound. It's called chip music. Can you play lead Game Boy?
We live in a karaoke culture. The Japanese word means "empty orchestra" - a lifeless musical form unencumbered by creativity and free of responsibility. Simple, clean fun for the millennial nuclear family. You can't fail in a karaoke world. It's life by proxy, liberated by hindsight.
Authenticity, on the other hand, believes in the messy process of creativity. It's unpopular and out of fashion. It worships failure, regarding it as a romantic and noble pursuit - better to be a flamboyant failure than any kind of benign success.
Karaoke and authenticity can sit well together, but it takes artistry to make that happen. When it does, the results can be explosive. Like when punk rock reclaimed rock and roll, blowing the doors off the recording industry in the process. Or when hip hop transformed turntables and records into the instruments of a revolution. Now it's happening again. In dance clubs across Europe and America, young people are seizing the automated stuff of their world - handheld game machines, obsolete computers, anything with a sound chip - and forging a new kind of folk music for the digital age.
Until recently, I was feeling stifled by the tyranny of the new. New corporate lifestyles for doing everything well. Too well. iPod this. PowerBook that. Listening to albums, like Madonna's latest, that were made using Pro Tools - software that reduces virtually every mixdown effect to a mouse click - left me with a depressing sense of sameness, like everything on TV. I had decided to make an album about the "look" of music: the visual gestalt of youth culture. For me, music has always been a bridge between art and fashion, the two realms I care about most. It's one of the most natural expressions of the youthful need for confrontation and rebellion. Now it was lost in the hearts and minds of a karaoke world. I couldn't find my place in it.
Then I discovered chip music.
It all began on a freezing winter evening in snow-capped Zurich, Switzerland. Some friends of mine had a vague relationship with a small-label dude who caught my attention at a party rattling on about lo-fi. He soon had me playing phone tag with a clique of "reversible engineers" working illegally in Stockholm. I didn't know what that meant, but I was eager to find out.
The quest led me to the outskirts of Paris: Ivry sur Seine, to be exact, dead south of Chinatown. In that desolate industrial district, I had a 10 pm appointment with two guys named Thierry and Jacques.
The address turned out to be a forbidding, semi-abandoned factory. I couldn't open the gate, so I waited nervously in the darkness. After a while, a suspicious, balding youth came out of the building - Jacques. He seemed to have trouble finding the keys to undo the heavy chains that secured the premises. Finally, the doors swung open. After a terse greeting, he led me up a concrete stairway and through dark, labyrinthine corridors of peeling plaster.
"What's that smell?" I asked, my nostrils assaulted by what seemed like a hot pot of hairy horse and curry powder. "It's the Cameroon embassy," he answered, smirking. Jacques, a shy young man whose teeth were nearly black because of his fear of dentists, explained that wood carvers, graphic artists, photographers, and hip hop kids from North Africa worked here. Only half the factory had electricity or heat.
Two flights up, Thierry welcomed us into a dim, tiny room at the far end of the building. To my surprise, I found myself in an Ali Baba's cave of outdated studio equipment. The chamber was stuffed floor to ceiling with hardware from the dawn of the 1980s: dinosaurian Amigas and Ataris once prized for their sound chips and arcane applications, giant echo plates, and knob-studded analog synthesizers. In the center was a pair of dusty turntables, one with a 45-rpm single on its platter. Thierry put the needle to the groove. I reeled as the record player emitted a din like screaming dog whistles. It sounded like a video arcade gone mad.
The low light revealed the Frenchman's T-shirt. Emblazoned across his chest were the words FUCK PRO TOOLS. The phrase described perfectly what I'd been feeling for months. Like any fashion victim who comes across a new and stylish idea, I was smitten. Fashion is most easily used as a disguise - it allows you to be something you're not. It's much more difficult to use it to express who you are. I understood immediately that this was no facile fashion statement.
"Who made this record?" I asked. In stark contrast to the silent Jacques, Thierry - once he started talking - could hardly stop. "Mark DeNardo from Chicago," he said. This twentysomething Puerto Rican artist, he told me, is the Velvet Underground of the 21st century, the next step in the evolution of rock and roll. "This is chip music," Thierry continued, "made on an old Game Boy. I don't like hi-fi. I can't afford hi-fi. To make this music costs only 15 euros. You can pick up an old Game Boy from the marche aux puces," the Paris flea market. He presented an outdated Game Boy and, maneuvering his thumbs on the keys, showed me how to create musical sequences.
Thierry spun another record. "This is Puss," he explained. "He's from Stockholm. He sings with a girl: 'I'm the master, you are the slave.' They're the new ABBA!" The album cover featured a simple photo of a Game Boy, nothing more. I loved it.
The next record was an EP - an extended-play 7-inch - by a Stockholm artist called Role Model. The last time I had come across this format was in the 1960s, when I bought my first Rolling Stones record. Role Model sounded like a videogame fashion show, as though Twiggy were somehow stuck inside Space Invaders. It was intelligent dance music made using analog approaches, distinctly human and more individual than simply switching on a drum machine. The more I listened, the more contagious it became. The names of emerging artists rolled off Thierry's tongue: Adlib Sinner Forks, Bit Shifter, Nullsleep, Glomag, The Hardliner, Lo-Bat, 8-bit Construction Set - an entire lost tribe of Game Boy musicians.
The room became hazy with the exhaust of these chain-smoking French guys. I felt like I was at the end of the world, but I also thought I could be happy here.
Chip music is made using processors from the antediluvian 8-bit past. (Pro Tools, by contrast, starts at 24 bits.) The genre's seminal moment occurred three years ago when Role Model (real name: Johan Kotlinski) created a custom Game Boy cartridge called Little Sound DJ - LSDJ for short - that takes over the palmtop's internal synthesizer and turns the device into a musical workstation capable of playing sequences and arpeggios, but not chords.
Role Model, who's studying for an engineering degree at Stockholm's Royal Institute of Technology, manufactured LSDJ in Japan and offered it on the Web for about $70 until he sold all the cartridges he had made. The software is a simulacrum of DJ culture, combining the Game Boy's native bloops and bleeps with samples of old drum machines like the popular Roland TR-808. LSDJ isn't the only such cartridge: Nanoloop, made by German art student Oliver Wittchow, does similar things, but without the samples. It's easier to generate sounds right away with Nanoloop, but LSDJ is more musical and therefore more popular.
LSDJ may be technically illegal, but who cares? It's the only way Role Model and his cronies can afford to make their music. It's Le Resistance. Chip musicians plunder corporate technology and find unlikely uses for it. They make old sounds new again - without frills, a recording studio, or a major record label. It would be facile to describe the result as amateurish; it's underproduced because it feels better that way. The nature of the sound, and the equipment used to create it, is cheap. This is not music as a commodity but music as an idea. It's the Nintendo generation sampling its youth.
The essence of chip music is in reverse engineering an electronic interface - whether it's a Game Boy or a computer's sound chip - and subverting its original design. Chip music can be made using run-of-the-mill equipment, like a Casio keyboard, but first the insides must be scrambled. The lo-fi sound of the White Stripes and their ilk has a certain aesthetic kinship with chip music, but it's less tech-centric and not nearly as subversive. Kraftwerk might be the grandfathers of chip music - like today's reversible engineers, they invented many of their instruments. As for programs like Pro Tools, chip musicians don't think they're really creative. The sound isn't generated by circuitry, and you can't alter it by twisting a knob.
As DeNardo puts it, "The digital medium may have more accuracy, but it doesn't have as good a vibe. Playing with an analog machine that has an inaccurate bpm" - beats per minute, the dance-floor gauge of tempo - "can be a bitch. But when you can hear the sequence and feel it, it's like listening to a live band rather than someone singing along with a digital karaoke machine."
The urge to breathe some genuine fire into moribund electronica has spurred the chip music underground to embrace vinyl. When I first met Thierry and Jacques, they were waiting for a shipment of 3,000 EPs from a pressing plant in the Czech Republic. Why do chip musicians insist on using such a perversely obscure medium? In a world where information is free and experience is virtual, delicate vinyl discs, black and fetishistic, are precious. They're treasured, collectible, real. And, unlike CDs, they can't be reproduced easily. Chip musicians scorn CDs as cheap, disposable, and, at best, no more ecofriendly than vinyl.
Chip musicians can be found all over the world, but they're mostly in places where Game Boys are popular - the US, Sweden, Japan, Switzerland. Some are into the technical side of it, like Nullsleep, who graduated from Columbia with a degree in computer science. Others are just into the music. They like being pop-culture pirates, and they have little use for the mass market. Their output is deliberately inaccessible to radio and TV, indeed to anyone in the music industry who still believes in hi-fi. At this stage, they don't necessarily aspire to have an audience beyond that of their own choosing, which means friends. This will probably change. Most early punk gigs - the ones that are continually mythologized - had audiences of about 20 people, though today it seems like everyone was there.
I began working in Ivry Sur Seine, programming Game Boy sequences, then overdubbing analog synths, guitars, and vocals. I sent an MP3 to DeNardo, who, I learned, is a classically trained violinist and keenly aware of Steve Reich's orchestral minimalism and John Cage's I Ching-driven randomness. He'd picked up LSDJ from Bjork's Web site thinking it would make his music different. He created a Game Boy sequence to accompany one of my favorite old blues tunes, "Mighty Long Time" by Sonny Boy Williamson. Then he rewrote the lyrics and roughed out the chords on an acoustic guitar. We called the new track "Fashion Horse."
I remained in the factory for the next few months, cutting and pasting the ruins of Jimi Hendrix, John Lee Hooker, and Muddy Waters into a videogame wall of sound. I rocked with Adlib. DeNardo flew in from Chicago. We translated the modernist classical music of Francis Poulenc into Game Boy sequences and arpeggios. I went to China and developed a post-karaoke sound with Wild Strawberries, an all-girl group from Beijing. I found the look of music. This was fashion at its most cutting edge. So chic!
Chip music is still underground, but the scene is becoming less insular. Collaborations are beginning. It's easy to swap MP3s over the Net or daisy-chain a track, sending it to other chip musicians who embellish it in turn. F2F gatherings are starting to rumble in Paris and Chicago. The fashion for record players is growing - just look at the display window of Colette on the rue Saint-Honore, or in the pages of Jalouse and Vogue. Soon tribes devoted to their favorite retro noisemakers will emerge in bars and clubs everywhere, sliding effortlessly through holes in the karaoke culture, personalizing electronic music and taking it to the next level, whatever that might be. Perhaps it will be games for writing music, or mobile phones with MP3 capabilities that let you listen and modify at will.
Chip music is mutating into a growing taxonomy of styles - post-karaoke, rock-and-roll Game Boy, bastard blues - that represent the most anarchic display of the antihero in pop culture. The sound is raw, noisy, and at times poorly played and sung. Still, repurposing defunct devices to end-run a music industry in total decline constitutes a revolution. Chip music is the final repository of the marvelous, its makers the last possessors of the wand of Cinderella's fairy godmother.
Malcolm McLaren is a recording artist, producer, and clothing designer based in Paris. His foray into chip music, Fashionbeast, was released in the spring of 2004.
This article was originally published in Wired Magazine in November of 2003.
Malcolm McLaren, the subculture hacker who created the Sex Pistols, discovers the new underground sound. It's called chip music. Can you play lead Game Boy?
We live in a karaoke culture. The Japanese word means "empty orchestra" - a lifeless musical form unencumbered by creativity and free of responsibility. Simple, clean fun for the millennial nuclear family. You can't fail in a karaoke world. It's life by proxy, liberated by hindsight.
Authenticity, on the other hand, believes in the messy process of creativity. It's unpopular and out of fashion. It worships failure, regarding it as a romantic and noble pursuit - better to be a flamboyant failure than any kind of benign success.
Karaoke and authenticity can sit well together, but it takes artistry to make that happen. When it does, the results can be explosive. Like when punk rock reclaimed rock and roll, blowing the doors off the recording industry in the process. Or when hip hop transformed turntables and records into the instruments of a revolution. Now it's happening again. In dance clubs across Europe and America, young people are seizing the automated stuff of their world - handheld game machines, obsolete computers, anything with a sound chip - and forging a new kind of folk music for the digital age.
Until recently, I was feeling stifled by the tyranny of the new. New corporate lifestyles for doing everything well. Too well. iPod this. PowerBook that. Listening to albums, like Madonna's latest, that were made using Pro Tools - software that reduces virtually every mixdown effect to a mouse click - left me with a depressing sense of sameness, like everything on TV. I had decided to make an album about the "look" of music: the visual gestalt of youth culture. For me, music has always been a bridge between art and fashion, the two realms I care about most. It's one of the most natural expressions of the youthful need for confrontation and rebellion. Now it was lost in the hearts and minds of a karaoke world. I couldn't find my place in it.
Then I discovered chip music.
It all began on a freezing winter evening in snow-capped Zurich, Switzerland. Some friends of mine had a vague relationship with a small-label dude who caught my attention at a party rattling on about lo-fi. He soon had me playing phone tag with a clique of "reversible engineers" working illegally in Stockholm. I didn't know what that meant, but I was eager to find out.
The quest led me to the outskirts of Paris: Ivry sur Seine, to be exact, dead south of Chinatown. In that desolate industrial district, I had a 10 pm appointment with two guys named Thierry and Jacques.
The address turned out to be a forbidding, semi-abandoned factory. I couldn't open the gate, so I waited nervously in the darkness. After a while, a suspicious, balding youth came out of the building - Jacques. He seemed to have trouble finding the keys to undo the heavy chains that secured the premises. Finally, the doors swung open. After a terse greeting, he led me up a concrete stairway and through dark, labyrinthine corridors of peeling plaster.
"What's that smell?" I asked, my nostrils assaulted by what seemed like a hot pot of hairy horse and curry powder. "It's the Cameroon embassy," he answered, smirking. Jacques, a shy young man whose teeth were nearly black because of his fear of dentists, explained that wood carvers, graphic artists, photographers, and hip hop kids from North Africa worked here. Only half the factory had electricity or heat.
Two flights up, Thierry welcomed us into a dim, tiny room at the far end of the building. To my surprise, I found myself in an Ali Baba's cave of outdated studio equipment. The chamber was stuffed floor to ceiling with hardware from the dawn of the 1980s: dinosaurian Amigas and Ataris once prized for their sound chips and arcane applications, giant echo plates, and knob-studded analog synthesizers. In the center was a pair of dusty turntables, one with a 45-rpm single on its platter. Thierry put the needle to the groove. I reeled as the record player emitted a din like screaming dog whistles. It sounded like a video arcade gone mad.
The low light revealed the Frenchman's T-shirt. Emblazoned across his chest were the words FUCK PRO TOOLS. The phrase described perfectly what I'd been feeling for months. Like any fashion victim who comes across a new and stylish idea, I was smitten. Fashion is most easily used as a disguise - it allows you to be something you're not. It's much more difficult to use it to express who you are. I understood immediately that this was no facile fashion statement.
"Who made this record?" I asked. In stark contrast to the silent Jacques, Thierry - once he started talking - could hardly stop. "Mark DeNardo from Chicago," he said. This twentysomething Puerto Rican artist, he told me, is the Velvet Underground of the 21st century, the next step in the evolution of rock and roll. "This is chip music," Thierry continued, "made on an old Game Boy. I don't like hi-fi. I can't afford hi-fi. To make this music costs only 15 euros. You can pick up an old Game Boy from the marche aux puces," the Paris flea market. He presented an outdated Game Boy and, maneuvering his thumbs on the keys, showed me how to create musical sequences.
Thierry spun another record. "This is Puss," he explained. "He's from Stockholm. He sings with a girl: 'I'm the master, you are the slave.' They're the new ABBA!" The album cover featured a simple photo of a Game Boy, nothing more. I loved it.
The next record was an EP - an extended-play 7-inch - by a Stockholm artist called Role Model. The last time I had come across this format was in the 1960s, when I bought my first Rolling Stones record. Role Model sounded like a videogame fashion show, as though Twiggy were somehow stuck inside Space Invaders. It was intelligent dance music made using analog approaches, distinctly human and more individual than simply switching on a drum machine. The more I listened, the more contagious it became. The names of emerging artists rolled off Thierry's tongue: Adlib Sinner Forks, Bit Shifter, Nullsleep, Glomag, The Hardliner, Lo-Bat, 8-bit Construction Set - an entire lost tribe of Game Boy musicians.
The room became hazy with the exhaust of these chain-smoking French guys. I felt like I was at the end of the world, but I also thought I could be happy here.
Chip music is made using processors from the antediluvian 8-bit past. (Pro Tools, by contrast, starts at 24 bits.) The genre's seminal moment occurred three years ago when Role Model (real name: Johan Kotlinski) created a custom Game Boy cartridge called Little Sound DJ - LSDJ for short - that takes over the palmtop's internal synthesizer and turns the device into a musical workstation capable of playing sequences and arpeggios, but not chords.
Role Model, who's studying for an engineering degree at Stockholm's Royal Institute of Technology, manufactured LSDJ in Japan and offered it on the Web for about $70 until he sold all the cartridges he had made. The software is a simulacrum of DJ culture, combining the Game Boy's native bloops and bleeps with samples of old drum machines like the popular Roland TR-808. LSDJ isn't the only such cartridge: Nanoloop, made by German art student Oliver Wittchow, does similar things, but without the samples. It's easier to generate sounds right away with Nanoloop, but LSDJ is more musical and therefore more popular.
LSDJ may be technically illegal, but who cares? It's the only way Role Model and his cronies can afford to make their music. It's Le Resistance. Chip musicians plunder corporate technology and find unlikely uses for it. They make old sounds new again - without frills, a recording studio, or a major record label. It would be facile to describe the result as amateurish; it's underproduced because it feels better that way. The nature of the sound, and the equipment used to create it, is cheap. This is not music as a commodity but music as an idea. It's the Nintendo generation sampling its youth.
The essence of chip music is in reverse engineering an electronic interface - whether it's a Game Boy or a computer's sound chip - and subverting its original design. Chip music can be made using run-of-the-mill equipment, like a Casio keyboard, but first the insides must be scrambled. The lo-fi sound of the White Stripes and their ilk has a certain aesthetic kinship with chip music, but it's less tech-centric and not nearly as subversive. Kraftwerk might be the grandfathers of chip music - like today's reversible engineers, they invented many of their instruments. As for programs like Pro Tools, chip musicians don't think they're really creative. The sound isn't generated by circuitry, and you can't alter it by twisting a knob.
As DeNardo puts it, "The digital medium may have more accuracy, but it doesn't have as good a vibe. Playing with an analog machine that has an inaccurate bpm" - beats per minute, the dance-floor gauge of tempo - "can be a bitch. But when you can hear the sequence and feel it, it's like listening to a live band rather than someone singing along with a digital karaoke machine."
The urge to breathe some genuine fire into moribund electronica has spurred the chip music underground to embrace vinyl. When I first met Thierry and Jacques, they were waiting for a shipment of 3,000 EPs from a pressing plant in the Czech Republic. Why do chip musicians insist on using such a perversely obscure medium? In a world where information is free and experience is virtual, delicate vinyl discs, black and fetishistic, are precious. They're treasured, collectible, real. And, unlike CDs, they can't be reproduced easily. Chip musicians scorn CDs as cheap, disposable, and, at best, no more ecofriendly than vinyl.
Chip musicians can be found all over the world, but they're mostly in places where Game Boys are popular - the US, Sweden, Japan, Switzerland. Some are into the technical side of it, like Nullsleep, who graduated from Columbia with a degree in computer science. Others are just into the music. They like being pop-culture pirates, and they have little use for the mass market. Their output is deliberately inaccessible to radio and TV, indeed to anyone in the music industry who still believes in hi-fi. At this stage, they don't necessarily aspire to have an audience beyond that of their own choosing, which means friends. This will probably change. Most early punk gigs - the ones that are continually mythologized - had audiences of about 20 people, though today it seems like everyone was there.
I began working in Ivry Sur Seine, programming Game Boy sequences, then overdubbing analog synths, guitars, and vocals. I sent an MP3 to DeNardo, who, I learned, is a classically trained violinist and keenly aware of Steve Reich's orchestral minimalism and John Cage's I Ching-driven randomness. He'd picked up LSDJ from Bjork's Web site thinking it would make his music different. He created a Game Boy sequence to accompany one of my favorite old blues tunes, "Mighty Long Time" by Sonny Boy Williamson. Then he rewrote the lyrics and roughed out the chords on an acoustic guitar. We called the new track "Fashion Horse."
I remained in the factory for the next few months, cutting and pasting the ruins of Jimi Hendrix, John Lee Hooker, and Muddy Waters into a videogame wall of sound. I rocked with Adlib. DeNardo flew in from Chicago. We translated the modernist classical music of Francis Poulenc into Game Boy sequences and arpeggios. I went to China and developed a post-karaoke sound with Wild Strawberries, an all-girl group from Beijing. I found the look of music. This was fashion at its most cutting edge. So chic!
Chip music is still underground, but the scene is becoming less insular. Collaborations are beginning. It's easy to swap MP3s over the Net or daisy-chain a track, sending it to other chip musicians who embellish it in turn. F2F gatherings are starting to rumble in Paris and Chicago. The fashion for record players is growing - just look at the display window of Colette on the rue Saint-Honore, or in the pages of Jalouse and Vogue. Soon tribes devoted to their favorite retro noisemakers will emerge in bars and clubs everywhere, sliding effortlessly through holes in the karaoke culture, personalizing electronic music and taking it to the next level, whatever that might be. Perhaps it will be games for writing music, or mobile phones with MP3 capabilities that let you listen and modify at will.
Chip music is mutating into a growing taxonomy of styles - post-karaoke, rock-and-roll Game Boy, bastard blues - that represent the most anarchic display of the antihero in pop culture. The sound is raw, noisy, and at times poorly played and sung. Still, repurposing defunct devices to end-run a music industry in total decline constitutes a revolution. Chip music is the final repository of the marvelous, its makers the last possessors of the wand of Cinderella's fairy godmother.
Malcolm McLaren is a recording artist, producer, and clothing designer based in Paris. His foray into chip music, Fashionbeast, was released in the spring of 2004.
This article was originally published in Wired Magazine in November of 2003.
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