'chip music' : the new punk.

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all this stuff about pulling apart old computer games and making a racket with them - who's heard anything about it except malcolm mclaren?
not me for one, and not ilx judging by the lack of 'chip' threads!

here's the original article:

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/omm/story/0,13887,1171230,00.html

but who's heard the tunes?

― piscesboy, Thursday, 17 June 2004 09:12 (twenty-one years ago)

I'm sure we've discussed making music with Game Boys before, as a side note on "laptopism" threads and such. I'd like to know if any musicians here have actually done this. I've seen some websites about it and it looks like a lot of fun. No, I've not knowingly heard anything made entirely from gameboy sounds. However, I remember Momus using a GB sample for a bassline or something on a Little Red Songbook track.

― AaronHz (AaronHz), Thursday, 17 June 2004 09:34 (twenty-one years ago)

I've heard some. The Swedish guy who invented the Little Sound DJ thingy that turns gameboys into music-machines has a band called Role Model, there's also a group called Puss. They're both ok but a bit tedious after a while, you can only take so much of that gameboying really. I have some vague recollection of hearing some Belgian gameboy pop as well but I can't really remember what it was.

― Hanna (Hanna), Thursday, 17 June 2004 09:37 (twenty-one years ago)

it's been done on a variety of levels for years. from direct sampling to hacking the game machines to straight up metal bands playing the tunes.

'folk music for a digital age'.

"oh malcolm, cumbuyah!"

what a moron ... if "chip music" as a genre label continues to get any more play somebody needs to be hit.
m.

― msp, Thursday, 17 June 2004 10:48 (twenty-one years ago)

Rephlex were putting out stuff like this in the late '90s, I dunno if it ever really transcended its novelty though...

― Jason J, Thursday, 17 June 2004 10:54 (twenty-one years ago)

I've been down with the chip stuff for several years, ever since I started getting into tracking. I've never made a true chip tune but the track "Succotash Wish" owes more than a passing nod to the scene. It's wicked stuff, really good fun and it's amazing what people do with only four channels and sounds made up of an nth of a second of white noise looped over and manipulated to make notes.

― dog latin (dog latin), Thursday, 17 June 2004 10:57 (twenty-one years ago)

the stuff i heard was all done in mod-trackers though, not gameboys. That Nintendo Teenage Robots thing that Alec Empire did was the biggest waste of time in the history of recorded sound.

― dog latin (dog latin), Thursday, 17 June 2004 10:59 (twenty-one years ago)

chip music is so last year

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.11/mclaren.html

― John Cocktolstoy, Thursday, 17 June 2004 11:19 (twenty-one years ago)

dog latin... what tracker software do you use? i never could get into it. my roommates and some of the folks i used to party with in college used to do some fun stuff with that.

the most bizarre was making a set of tracker songs from warcraft wavs. they actually played those at a rave-like event.

it was awful... i'm glad i was a fairly clean partier by that point.
m.

― msp, Thursday, 17 June 2004 12:00 (twenty-one years ago)

Yeah, it's odd - chip music started as a Commodore-64-sid-chip-revival by musicans such as 4-Mat using trackers on the Amiga in the late 80s, and because of their small size these tunes we're often used by cracking groups on their intros (small audio/visual shout-outs basically). As a bit of a fanboy of Commodore 64 musicians like Rob Hubbard and Martin Galway I got into this a bit and a few of my tunes we’re used on these intros by fairly minor groups - I was called Mutant Mango, of course the days of stupid handles are way behind me........

I love the harsh, metallic, robotic tone and rhythm of tracker “chip” music (Actually a simulation of synth sounds using tiny samples looped to their basic waveforms, rather than generated by a computer chip as in the Commodore 64.) But I can’t imagine it ever getting any widespread appeal to ever make it a proper widespread cultural phenomenon, but then again I’m thing of a very pure definition of chip music.

― Chewshabadoo (Chewshabadoo), Thursday, 17 June 2004 12:35 (twenty-one years ago)

yeah, get someone with enough sex appeal and the right hit and you'd be on your way to something. ("new wave".)

gygax and providence to thread...
m.

― msp, Thursday, 17 June 2004 13:03 (twenty-one years ago)

C64 hip-hop

― John Cocktolstoy, Thursday, 17 June 2004 13:08 (twenty-one years ago)

http://www.bulletsofautumn.com/boredoms/bores028b.jpg

― 0r4l R0b3rt5 (ex machina), Thursday, 17 June 2004 13:10 (twenty-one years ago)

msp - i used Impulse Tracker for years. It doesn't work on newer machines and I'm extremely bitter about this. Nothing will beat IT for ease of use.

The best electroclash stuff sounds like chip music, Ural 13 Diktators have used a lot of chip sounds I notice.

― dog latin (dog latin), Thursday, 17 June 2004 23:52 (twenty-one years ago)

Here's one of the threads where this has been discussed lately.

― noodle vague (noodle vague), Friday, 18 June 2004 00:23 (twenty-one years ago)

I've been making tracks on a Game Boy for a couple of years; irrespective of the idiom's mainstream viability (which I'm not too concerned about), the act of musicmaking itself is a total blast. The secret weapons are Nanoloop and Little Sound DJ, independently-developed cartridges that allow composition / sequencing / tracking on a physical Game Boy. Chewshabadoo (a few posts above) pretty much nailed it with respect to the origin of the idiom; what's interesting about transplanting a tracker to an actual Game Boy is that the user is no longer leashed to a computer. So a lot of interesting avenues make themselves available with respect to songwriting and performance. You can compose on the train, you can carry the thing around in your pocket, you can go to a gig with about 6 ounces of gear. And personally I enjoy the idea of working directly with the unit's onboard sound synthesis (as opposed to working with emulators or samples). There's some consternation and contention within the chiptune scene about Malcolm McLaren circling around its periphery and championing this stuff to the press, but so far he seems harmless. And while the consensus is that he's romanticizing this little mini-movement at the expense of accuracy, his enthusiasm and appreciation seems genuine.

Good places to start for the curious are http://www.micromusic.net/ (a community site & netlabel), http://www.8bitpeoples.com/ (an artist collective & netlabel), and http://www.vorc.org/ (a news portal for video game music and chiptunes).

Some of my favorite artists personally are Rugar (http://www.rugarandi.com/), Nullsleep (http://www.nullsleep.com/), Glomag (http://www.glomag.com/), Bubblyfish (http://www.bubblyfish.com/), Covox (http://www.covox.net/), Lo-Bat. (http://www.lo-bat.be/), Herbert Weixelbaum (http://members.chello.at/herbert_weixelbaum/gameboy.htm), K-> (http://midr2.under.jp/sound.html), Xik (http://www.wayfar.net/cat.php#wfr_0x000000), YMCK (http://www.ymck.net/), those are just for starters.

― Josh Davis (josh_anomaly), Friday, 18 June 2004 02:35 (twenty-one years ago)

if the people who've heard it consider punk a praiseworthy reference point then it's not the new punk

― Ronan (Ronan), Friday, 18 June 2004 02:46 (twenty-one years ago)

i read this as "chipmunks: the new punk" *snigger*

― gem (trisk), Friday, 18 June 2004 02:50 (twenty-one years ago)

http://users.rowan.edu/~hall/chipmunkpunk.jpg

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Friday, 18 June 2004 02:52 (twenty-one years ago)

haw haw I googled for the exact same image. beaten like a mule.

for serious tho, check out:

http://www.sidstation.com/

― tylero (tylero), Friday, 18 June 2004 05:10 (twenty-one years ago)

three months pass...

― Adam Bruneau (oliver8bit), Sunday, 26 September 2004 15:30 (twenty-one years ago)

(sorry, let's try that again...)

― Adam Bruneau (oliver8bit), Sunday, 26 September 2004 15:33 (twenty-one years ago)

Bloody hell...

Super Madrigal Brothers

― Adam Bruneau (oliver8bit), Sunday, 26 September 2004 15:35 (twenty-one years ago)

here's another person, mark denardo:

http://markdenardo.com/

he collaborated with malcom mclaren.

― maria tessa sciarrino (theoreticalgirl), Sunday, 26 September 2004 15:52 (twenty-one years ago)

twenty years pass...

Had no idea Joey Ramone officially sanctioned C64 and Atari chiptunes of SLUG in the 80s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnGposwHFS4

Joey's right though -- the Atari version is better:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unykc46pLjg

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C7bkRTHXQAAwxxg?format=jpg

― Philip Nunez, Sunday, 21 September 2025 06:31 (eight months ago)

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