Well, this was a pleasant surprise for a rather cool November afternoon: Bookmat has not one but two new Jahtari releases available for purchase and download. These came as a complete surprise, partly because Jahtari does a poor job with their site: not only was there no word that these were coming, but there still isn’t any word that they even exist.

First, there’s Tapes’ “Hissing Theatricals” which is a brilliant, if brief, foray into lo-fi 8-bit dub patterns, with an added cassette transfer hiss for that extra bit of texture. It’s very much in that Disrupt style but a little more, I don’t know, focused? The mp3 release costs only three pounds so it was an instant impulse purchase for me, especially after hearing the sample for “Gold Love Riddim.” It’s fantastic and worth the cost of the album on its own.

I love Boomkat, but their often sycophantic and overly enthusiastic reviews are some times a little too much. Every other album is massively recommended, a career definer, an essential purchase, three exclamation marks! etc. This is what happens when the reviewer is also the seller. That said, in this case, the album hits all my right buttons and I agree with their sentiment: Massively Recommended!. If I were to make another Bleeping mix, this would be featured front and centre. Hell, it even uses a Capcom opening chime sample — think Street Fighter 2 — which, coincidentally enough, I recently used too.

The second release is an EP between the man himself, Disrupt, and Glasgow MC Soom T. They’ve collaborated before and an entire performance can be heard on Jahtari’s site: Disrupt Live w/ SOOM T at Glasgow Art School. The track “Dirty Money”, from that live set, is what I ended my “Beep-Side” with. It was a bit rough and raw then, but it’s been given the title track treatment for this EP and it’s a lot more cohesive now. Filling out the rest of the EP are two other vocal tracks on the EP, and two instrumental dubs.

It’s a good collaboration with some good jams, but it’s a bit in your face. I’m just not naturally drawn to vocal stuff unless it’s really good, distorted, or just much more in the background. Which is why if I want to hear female vocals over 8-bit dubs I’ll more frequently turn to the low-key stylings Illyah & Limited Candy’s “Machines and Ghosts EP”. Unless I’m sticking it to the man, or Ken, then “Dirty Money” would do.

Here’s a B-Side I made to the previous Bleeping Beats mix that includes some new stuff, some stuff I couldn’t really fit in previously, a few goofy things, and some live performances that are a little raw and rough around the edges, all wrapped in a slight early-90s arcade vibe. (Though for all the fighting game references, I didn’t include anything off of Disrupt’s “Samurai Shodown”/”Last Blade” 7″, but it is freely downloadable at Jahtari).

I don’t have anything to say about this one except to note that this will be the last such mix for a long, long time. I’ve burned through my reserves and any further attempts would be repetitious. Besides, I’ve reached my limit for this wonkiness and I’m now purging my system with some ambient drones, and “hauntology”, and spacey synth lines. So good.

A couple weeks ago I posted a 40 minute mix on nerd music (you can download it here) that focused on (mostly) instrumental hip-hop and dub(step) musicians that incorporate the chiptune sound in their music. The genesis of this mix goes back to the end of August. I started compiling some tracks, quite a few of which I had previously posted on nerd music, that highlighted this sub-sub-genre. Then work and this whole moving to another continent thing got in the way and it sort of languished until about three weekends ago when, during an annoying flu, I finally pieced it together. I’m a little biased, but I very much like the mix. I think it flows nicely from track to track, includes a few little fun references, and it’s short enough to not be tedious. Here is a tracklist.

Coincidentally, in-between conception and final upload was when Hyperdub, home of Burial and Kode9, started issuing its 5 year anniversary EP series culminating in, two weeks ago, the massive 2 CD “5 Years of Hyperdub” compilation. That CD has, by my count, about 7 or 8 tracks that use chiptunes to some degree, and that’s not even counting the few tracks that use indeterminate lo-fi bleeps and synths or the Martyn track “Mega Drive Generation” with its obvious nod to videogames. If you like the 8-bit videogame sound then “5 Years of Hyperdub” is essential; doubly so since a lot of the other tracks are quite fantastic. The second disc also gives a pretty solid overview of Hyperdub’s output thus far.

When you look at the dubstep scene you realize quickly that it’s a fairly young genre. Not in terms of its own existence as a named thing, but as a measure of the age of many of its prominent musicians. They’re of the generation that doesn’t know a world before the Nintendo Entertainment System and a lot of the music reflects that. There’s Rusko dubstepping the Bionic Commando theme (and it’s pretty badass) and Joker cutting up the Metal Gear Solid 3 theme and the countless others bringing in Gameboys, and videogame samples and aesthetics. If you had a giant Venn Diagram of dubstep and 8-bit chiptunes, you’d see a large overlap between the two.

Why dubstep is particularly prone to this, more than other electronic styles, I don’t know. Maybe it has to do with its relatively lo-fi, home studio feel of the genre? Burial’s claims that he produced his first album entirely within Soundforge come to mind. There’s a hidden, untold history there, but it’d be best told by someone that knows the genre, and its players, better than I do. In the meantime, I’ll continue enjoying it until it’s pillaged and destroyed for all its worth. And if you do enjoy videogame-like music, but are afraid of the stigma that “pure” chiptunes can bring, you can’t go wrong with Hyperdub’s compilation.

I’ve also just uploaded my mix to SoundCloud. Interesting service. It’s embeded below:

The all-night art fest Nuit Blanche hit Paris last weekend. During my wanderings I came across some projected videos, a couple installations, and a giant disco ball. It wasn’t all that inspiring. To make matters worse, I made the classic Nuit Blanche mistake of heading out too early (basically, anytime before 2am) so anything of any possible interest was flooded with people. After a couple hours of this, I grabbed a crepe near Les Halles, got on the Metro, and called it a night. I didn’t even make it to midnight (by comparison, last year I was out to almost 6am.)

In a prime example of “grass is always” greener mentality, the Toronto event this year seemed more interesting. More large scale work, more Big Names™ if you’re into the Big Name™ artists, and, apparently, an impromptu guerilla chiptune performance near city hall by jefftheworld, amongst others. A lot of it is captured in jefftheworld’s YouTube channel. “So Empty, Space” is embeded below.

Here’s something for your ears. Get yourself a blender and throw in: French electro dancefloor sensibilities; a dash of The Prodigy, The Knife, Daft Punk; a barrage of GameBoys. Mix together for 93 minutes. Serve with a free download (direct link to 110MB zip file.)

Dubmood’s stellar chiptune-infused dance mix can be found on Data Airlines’ site (just search for a post from October 25th 2008. I’d link to the individual entry but, well, you see.) It’s high-energy music perfectly suited for dancefloors — unlike me — full of chiptune nerds — like me. And because it’s mixed together with a lot of techno and electronica, it never sounds overtly nerdy. Well, when it’s not pounding out the lyrics “wake up, skip school, turn on the Atari. With my console, I’m in control.”

Dubmood – Live at Kafe 44 Stockholm, 110MB .zip.

To give you a sense of what to expect, here’s a video of his performance at this year’s Blip Festival which, yes, I did not attend. There’s always next year.

B.Fleischmann is an Austrian musician that makes, for lack of a better word, electro-accoustic soundscapes. I have two of his CDs and, to give you a perspective, one contains two tracks (one is 52 minutes long) and the other is a double CD in which each CD contains one 50 minute (I believe, live) track. Some of his other albums are more conventional but these two are my first impressions of his work. You can get a sampling of his music at myspace. Listen to “excerpt from melancholie” specifically.

Herbert Weixelbaum is an Austrian musician that fell head-first into the world of gameboy music. He’s appeared on the 8-bit Operators “Tribute to Kraftwerk” and other chiptune compilations. If you’re at all into the Gameboy sound you might have seen a comparison of the waveforms of the many, many different Gameboy models (yes, they sound different. Some even sound different depending on whether the backlight is on or not.) That was him.

Apart from being Austrian musicians, the two don’t seem to have much in common but in 2004 they worked together and formed duo505, releasing the album “late.” I was introduced to this album a couple of years ago at Penguin Records in Toronto and I enjoyed it in occasional bursts. The duo505 sound (again, myspace link) was what you’d have expected from such a pairing. “Hi lo-fi”, as they say. The Gameboy sounds were there, with the more acoustic soundscapes, but they never were overpowering except on one track, “Nochwas” (link to embedded video.) The Gameboy was just another tool in their electronic mosaics. It worked well.

Skip to 2008. Duo505 releases a new album, Another Illusion, you can listen to some of it at lastfm, and I’m listening to it when I get to the song:

“Just An Illusion.”

It starts as this light and fluffy thing, which is already quite different from anything on the first album, before the synth lines start. They settle in and then the beat kicks in and the music ramps up and builds and the female vocals start. What? Then comes the chorus, consisting of some vocoded voices singing backup to a Kraftwerk-ian synthesized robot. At this moment I’m wondering “what the hell is going on here?” There were absolutely no vocals on “late.” There’s some piano in there too and glitchy distortions and, seriously, what the fuck?

The song finishes and I surmount my initial shock and reevaluate what I just heard. It was pure, unadulterated synthpop and it’s a complete aberration from the rest of the album which, for the most part, is more in line with their debut release. It’s as catchy, and as corny, as anything else in the genre and I love it. I then wish that more of the album was like that. The rest of it is still good, but it will be enjoyed in occasional bursts. “Just An Illusion,” however, will enter my more frequent playlist.

Addendum. Aha! No wonder why it’s so different: it’s a cover of a 1982 disco track by the band Imagination.

Malmo, Sweden’s^[1] 64Revolt is going to garner the inevitable comparison to Toronto’s Crystal Castles, which would be ill deserved. Though both bands share similar chiptune-fueled hardcore aesthetics, they developed that style independently of each other. Hell, 64Revolt’s self-titled release predates Crystal Castles’ debut Alice Practice by a few months. It’s not quite a Calculus-defining level of synchronicity but the timing does reveal a certain cultural post-gamer outcropping happening now (though it’s interesting that 64Revolt’s follow-up EP has a song called Alice, Sweet Alice, but I’ll attribute that to coincidence. For now. And it is! See comments.)

This all ties back to what I originally wrote about Crystal Castles back in March. This sound isn’t new, but it is generational. The kids that lived with the bleeps and blips of the NES sound chip and the SID and all sorts of 8-bit hardware grew up, bought keyboards, dusted off their old consoles and started bands. The chiptune scene that has been simmering in the deeper, darker parts of the internet for the better part of a decade is now bubbling up to the surface. Yes, it’s growing out from one niche into another larger niche, but it’s one that gets more attention and publicity; just look at all the fellatio attention that Pitchfork Media dished out to Crystal Castles.

It’s nostalgic, but in a progressive way. 64revolt’s influences, Famicoms and Atari Teenage Riot and synthpop, are blended together to create something new rather than to wax sentimental about the good old 8-bit days. That is a feeling that is hard to escape when listening to some chiptunes. And while their early material tends to be very Atari Teenage Riot, to the point where they did a cover for a tribute album, their newer tracks, which can be heard on their MySpace, show an evolution away from that. Their vocal stylings can be rough around the edges as their sound is still maturing, but I’m certain that the rawness to it will be ironed out. Or maybe that’s the appeal of it? Either way, I’m curious, and interested, to see what they come up with in the future because, at their best, they’ve proven that they’re already as capable as Crystal Castles. Listen to Neat Girl (Yellus Remix)^[2] for proof. It’s fully completely awesome.

The best thing about 64Revolt is that they don’t seem to be total wankers like Crystal Castles. They come across as very open, friendly and accessible. Their debut album and their follow-up EP are both available, in full, for free download, as are a lot of their newer tracks. Their full album, which is mostly a reworking of their earlier tracks, Aim For The Flat Top is available for purchase on iTunes and CD Baby. Check it out.^[3]

1. Sweden has some serious chiptune and synthpop pedigree. I’m not sure why.
2. Yes it’s a remix, but the best Crystal Castles tunes are remixes too, albeit in the inverse direction.
3. And I want to know why I was not made aware of their existence until now.