4/17/2010

Alternative composing in chipmusic



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Video and sound by me. Created by editing dv compression in an hex editor.

Last Wednesday (April the
14th) I was invited to give a talk at Steim about alternative composing in chipmusic. First this made me feel a bit weary. Not only because I am not so much a musician but a visualist (sometimes with 8bit and sometimes with 67 6c 69 74 63 68 bits). So I was kind of out of my comfort zone. Secondly, saying something like "I am going to talk about chipmusic" sounds a bit like "I am going to talk about guitar music"; its just very general. Moreover, I am not a big chiptune fan at all. To me, most of this music sounds very similar - especially most of the music that uses the standard hardware+trackers. However, there is also a couple of musicians that I do like to follow and that I do think make very special music. So this talk had all the potential to become very bad and I really had to rethink what I do like about chipmusic.
There are a couple of things I like about this community (or niche/s). But to make it more specific and personal, I decided to focus on what uses of instruments, a material of chipmusic, inspires me the most in my own work. What I really enjoy about this community is the way some of the musicians use their material, in new, pushing ways (both soft and hardware). This is why I came up with the idea to do a little talk about alternative composing in the chip-scene - composers that inspire me to rethink how to use my technologies when I make video.


This is the list of artists I chose
Paul Slocum (Epson LQ-500 - EPROM chip music)
Sega Death (Sega Genesis cartridge elimination)
Goto80 (Commodore 64, defmon software)
little-scale (SEGA Master System, Ym2413 Fm chip and Ableton Live / Max/MSP)

Gijs Gieskes (Sega Nomad, Atmega168 chip)

Tristan Perich (1bit chip music)

My chip mix can be downloaded here
(txt file is to document what I like about the specific songs/artists I chose).

And a special thanks to Julian (c-men) and Sebastian (little-scale) for their help/sharing of thoughts!


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your font selection is unforgiveable

Unreadable.

Rosa Menkman said...

It was an experiment!
Thanks for telling me, hehe