Free 8bit 80's chipfunk madness!

did anyone visit this?

chip music? love it!

me and my mate used to make up tapes of it and go round in his car playing it at top blast through the town centre in the late 90s in an attempt to drown out the rudeboys.

there have been mentions on ilm about it from time to time. was a big wired article some time back and, for some reason, last week's Rob Da Bank show contained a chip music spotlight including people such as DJ Scotch Egg.

um,
CHIP MUSIC SPECIAL:
Gameboyzz Orchestra - 'AutoFire'
DJ Scotch Egg - 'Tetris Wonderland'
David E Sugar - 'Strip Your Home'
also had small interviews with people. DJSE's was about 4 seconds long.

Malcolm Maclaren on chip music:
http://wired.com/wired/archive/11.11/mclaren.html (nov 2003)

Malcolm McLaren describes chip music as "distinctly human and more individual than simply switching on a drum machine"

=

Malcolm McLaren doesn't actually understand how these things work, does he!

I mean, geez, logic-wise that's like saying "checking email on my Blackberry is distinctly human and more individual than checking email on my desktop computer."

The flaw in your logic is that "writing chip music" is not the same thing as "switching on a drum machine". In fact, usually you would not use a drum machine at all.

But I would agree that this guy doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about. He seems to think that Chip Music began sometime after 2000 when a sequencer cartridge was written for the Gameboy! Never mind the fact that most chip music has been written for SID chips on the C64, and has been happening for over twenty years.

Also for some superb recent chip tunes check out Binarpilot's 'Defrag':

http://www.binaerpilot.info/?p=main&r=defrag

Umm, dude, the drum sequencing in chip music operates on the same logic as the drum sequencing in drum machines -- there's no grand difference in process. In fact, I can't think of a meaningful definition of "drum machine" that wouldn't involve chip sequencing: if you sequence a drum pattern in Gameboy Nanoloop, what could possibly remove that from the realm of "drum machines?" That's what a drum machine is!

I mean, if anything, the limited sound options of chip music make it (on the inherent level, not the "what you do with it" level) less human and less individual. I think that's what McLaren's reacting to -- he's hearing it as the sound of individuality because (a) less people do it, (b) it fully admits to its unreality, unlike drum machines, which are often made to pretend to be something else, and (c) the people doing chip music are sometimes doing more "individual" things with it than certain types of pop music. (Not often, though.)

Umm but yeah, apart from the details of what you can do and how you're doing it, the act of writing chip music is not particularly different from using a drum machine or a 303. There's no real categorical difference between the two items whatsoever -- they're different types of the same machine.

I was taking issue with your binary comparison:

"writing chip music":"switching on a drum machine"::"checking email on a blackberry":"checking email on a pc"

I think what McLaren was saying that writing synth music is more than a technical process, which it is, and that there is a lot of 'soul' that goes into it. I agree with you that "the act of writing chip music is not particularly different from using a drum machine or a 303", but it certainly is different from merely "switching on a drum machine".

Umm!

Wait, WTF, are you taking that statement literally? If he means it absolutely literally, then yes, writing music is more human and individual than simply flipping the "on" switch of a drum machine. Also more human and individual than pressing down the button on a toaster. But I don't think anyone would ever argue that, and I think it's pretty clear that that's not what he's trying to imply there.

Incidentally, the thing I like about chip sounds actually is in the limitations of them -- because it mirrors those of traditional instruments. An acoustic intrument has a certain timbre and a certain limited set of things it can do effectively, and that's actually a great thing in music -- in part because we have some notion of how the instrument sounds, and can get involved in what's being done within that circle. It actually does allow for a sense of "humanity," because we have enough of a grounding in what the instrument does to know what human effort is going into making the sounds we hear. We don't always get this from really nice sound-synthesizing electronics, which is totally cool for totally different reasons -- they can kind of do anything, and we don't know where the sound is "coming from," so it's just sound. But you take something like the Gameboy chip and we have a certain grounding -- we're familiar with its timbres and its sound, and so we can hear it almost like an acoustic instrument, which is a really interesting effect. For that reason I think I don't so much like pure chip music, because it sounds like a pre-programmed recital of some sort, but I love things where a limited chip sound is worked into bigger things. E.g. Max Tundra's 8-bit sounds, which I think aren't actually chip stuff but have that same kind of recognizable timbre and such: when he folds them into a composition it can feel a lot like a regular ensemble that just happens to feel like, say, a guitar / piano / Gameboy trio.

Oh wait wait, I think I see one non-stupid thing he could have meant by that. But that thing would have been better expressed by saying the music is "distinctly human and more individual than simply pushing a button." If he's just trying to say "it's not easy," that makes perfect sense, but the drum machine comparison seems to want to imply that chip music is somehow more individual and human than more upscale electronic tools.

I started this thread but it has lead me down a path which has left me lost.