The topics that I write about tend to be, more often than not, game centric. There was no overt decision to focus on this topic on this here weblog^[1], it is simply what I know best. Hell, when I started this by creating an account on Blogger I wasn’t even that much of a gamer. Back then, fresh out of high school and in my first (and only complete) year of university, I was a mere dabbler. I had no time or money for games, save for the occasional moments on my then-already outdated PC and the rare bout on my even more dated Playstation.

That was during the start of a new generation. The ill fated SEGA Dreamcast was already three months old and the Playstation 2 loomed over the horizon, four months away. Those were exciting times for videogamers, but I was having none of it. My interests were focused on school and, more so, the internet^[2], this whole new “weblog” thing, Napster, design, HTML, Flash 4, and the development and slow acceptance of the many standards that are now common on the web. These were heady one-point-oh days, full of homepages, no syndicated feeds, and teenagers younger than I getting millions of dollars to prop up internet businesses without any business.

It was the most doomed of all these ventures, Napster, that opened my eyes and ears to new things. My relationship with music throughout the 90s, in those pre-filesharing days, was a distant one. I became aware of things going on in the music world around 92 when I was watching Saturday Night Live and its live performances, when grunge was taking over the world. The confluence of these two things, in one set-destroying performance, is one of my earliest musical memories. I watched a lot of TV in those days and my limited contact with the music world came from that; I wasn’t an active music listener. It was around, for sure, but back then I was more intrigued by the sounds of F-Zero and Final Fantasy II and Actraiser.

High school was when I started to listen to the radio and watch MuchMusic, back when they still played music videos. It might be nostalgia, but those post-grunge years produced a massive amount of great music. It was hard not to get into something. While my listening was restricted to what was on the radio, and almost exclusively the mainstream and semi-mainstream new rock content of 102.1 The Edge, I’d occasionally get glimpses of material outside of that insular world. I remember the rare moments when MuchMusic would play Download’s Glassblower, Orbital’s The Box, and I recall absolutely loving and being amazed by FSOL’s My Kingdom.

Those three examples filtered through to me because they were relatively popular for their time, but anything beyond the fringes remained invisible to me. If it didn’t have a single and a music video, it didn’t exist. I owned a handful of CDs, but most of my money went into games. That was something I was informed about, reading front to back every month’s issue of EGM, the Official Playstation Magazine, and, sometimes, Next Generation. I felt comfortable, as a consumer, that I would make the right decisions with my money. I knew what I liked. I rented games, I bought games, I played games, and I listened to games. Music, in contrast, was a risky venture. It’s funny, then, to consider that my biggest encounter with the electronic music of the day came from a game, WipeOut XL. I remember really digging Fluke’s Atom Bomb video at the time, for obvious reasons.

That’s why Napster (and, partly, the streaming online radio of the time) was so important. It allowed me to explore those weird, underground segments of music on my own terms. That made me into a massive consumer of music and instilled in me a fresh passion for it. This has grown over the decade through to today. During my four months in London and Paris earlier in the year, music was often the only company I had and, in that time, I filled my suitcase with a thirty new CDs. 2008 was a breakthrough. This is the first time that I feel genuinely qualified to rant and rave, in thorough detail, about the albums of the year.

Yet, I find it more difficult than ever to express that. As my tastes get more eccentric and I become aware of more history and lineage, I realize how much I have missed and how much catching up I have left to do.

Unlike music, games had a prominent role in my life — bonding with friends, leading me on my career path — since I was six. That little pre-millennial break during my late teens was a mere footnote in my personal gaming history. A two year hiatus in a twenty-three year story. It didn’t last: I bought a Playstation 2 several months after its 2001 launch, after I had my first steady income, further adding to the Dreamcast’s demise. In the years that followed I acquired a further twenty game machines, including all the current systems, a post-death Dreamcast, the Genesis I never had, the SEGA CD I never wanted except for Snatcher, Snatcher, and a pair of Neo Geo Pockets (nice little systems, those.) This is beyond prominent now. It’s a lifestyle.

When it comes to writing about media, five years of passion, and only one of a fervent nature, can not compare to a lifetime’s worth. I might not be the best writer — I’m still learning — but my twenty-five year gaming life gives me enough perspective and cultural history to, I hope, give me a unique voice. It might take me another ten years before I feel as comfortable expressing my opinion about music as I do about games.

So, basically, I just wanted to say that my album of the year is:

1. I actually get a little miffed when I get labeled a “games blog,” but I’m used to it.
2. We were some of the lucky few to have cable internet at the time and I was making the most of it.

I walked the Avenue des Champs-Elysees a couple of times, up towards the Arc de Triomphe and back down to Place de Concorde and Tuileries, covering both sides of the perpetually busy road. The Avenue was what I expected it to be: lined end to end with designer shops, restaurants, tourists and image-obsessed locals. A couple of Starbucks rounds out the picture. In all my time there I stopped in two shops, the FNAC (French Best Buy, basically) and the Virgin Megastore. This says a lot about me.

The shelves in the DS and PSP “jeux video” sections were filled with most of the same crap that I’d be avoiding in Canada. I did find a copy of “Dr. Reiner Knizia’s Brainbenders” for the DS, a Europe only release I was eager to purchase, but the box was entirely in French which made me question whether the game was too. It would be safe to imagine that it would have multiple language options, but I didn’t want to take the chance; I’ll buy it in London. On other racks I noticed various “English Training” games for the DS which I thought quaint. I considered buying one for the novelty of it.

Is there anything new on the portable systems worth playing? Or is it a complete mess of licensed games and rehashes? Disappointing.

Thankfully, the music sections in these shops were quite good and I spent most of my time there. They’re not much different than the flagship Zavvi or HMV shops you can find in the UK or Canada, but it’s interesting to note the few minor regional differences. There was a section devoted to French bands and singers, of course, but it goes beyond that. In Canada, if you were looking for an Aphex Twin album you’d look in the “Electronic” section; in the UK it’s under “Dance”; here in Paris, it’s in “Techno.” To my untrained ears it seemed like an awfully specific label for a section that contained everything from Squarepusher and Justice to Air and Crystal Castles, bands that I’d hardly call “techno.”

Right next to “techno” was another rack labelled “trip-hop” and a wall of nothing but “House.” I wondered for a moment where I would find Portishead’s third album — their first two are universally classified as “trip-hop” but “Third” is its own thing altogether — and I think it saw it in yet another distinct section. “Electronic” might be vague but when I go looking for an album in the HMV on Yonge Street in Toronto, I know where to look. Here, I’d have to browse through three or four different sections.

There was also an entire wall dedicated to “lounge compilations.” This too seemed correct for France.

The final thing I noticed was that both of these retailers had considerably larger “contemporary composer” sections than can be found in similar stores in Canada. However, this could be a case of confirmation bias on my part. My interest in this music has grown recently so I might be noticing it more than I ever did. Ten years ago I was completely unaware of the “electronic” section in my local HMVs (or Sam The Record Man) and now it’s the first place I go. I’ll have to check the shops in Toronto when I get back to see if contemporary composers are as represented there as they are here, but man, I was tempted to get a few CDs for the fear that they might not be.

Unfortunately, the couple of items that I was specifically searching for I could not find. I hoped to find Kap Bambino‘s album “Zero Life, Night Vision” seeing as they’re French but when their label says that the album is “sold out” they aren’t kidding. It’s a shame. I understand why artists like that get such a limited print run, but they deserve more exposure in these post-Crystal Castles days, especially since they’re better and, as is typical, they predate them. Alas, it’s not how good you are, it’s who you know.

I didn’t want to leave empty handed so I bought Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians,” went home, hit YouTube and posted this incredible video to my Tumblr.

Thusly summarized it better than I ever could:

what is actually going on here will sound somewhat familiar to those who understand how to modulate sinusoidal waveforms binaurally or have at least learned “beat-matching”. this instance, however, involves the pianist attempting to play one piano at a very precise tempo, while simultaneously (and very minutely) increasing the tempo (based upon a sinusoidal timeline) played on the other piano. thusly bringing the two pianos into, and then out of, phase — thereby never achieving actual synchronicity until the 1st note on each piano being played is matched up again, then the performance drops to 8 notes and the cycle starts all over, then again to 4 notes.

it is also worthy to note that this composition is twenty minutes long in its entirity and is meant to be played by two pianists. the fact that one person can mentally and physically process this is truly astounding.

All in all, it was a worthwhile trek.

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.

Nostrich’s brief post about mp3 genre tags is something that I’ve been thinking about since I purchased an iPod Touch (and more so since I upgraded to iTunes 8.) Apple places too much focus on the genre tag, which has always been of dubious value. For years, the genre has been an unsorted mess in my music library. Any ID3 information I enter manually, I do so ignoring the genre tag (I never know how to classify music); and any ID3 information that is loaded for the CDDB comes back inconsistent or just plain weird. I couldn’t tell you the difference between Techno and House. There are many people like this, it seems, because most CDDB entries fall under the all encompassing “electronic” label. “Electronic” covers everything from music programmed on a GameBoy to instrumental Jazz with some post-production added to it. It’s a catch-all for anything that has ever met a computer. I couldn’t tell you at what point, specifically, “rock” ends and “post rock” begins. Or even “prog rock” or, hell, “progressive metal.” I don’t even have a clue what “DSP” or “Morr” or “Skwee” are supposed to be despite having music that is labelled as such. The only accurate genre tag listing I have is “soundtrack”, but that’s simply because it applies to the context of where the music was played rather than the nature of the music itself. If it wasn’t for a movie I wouldn’t know how to classify it.

iTunes itself doesn’t know how to group these genres. It has a few preset genres with fancy little iconic graphics, like “rock” and “rap” and “dance”, that it tries to group more specific labels into. “House”, for example, shows up with the “dance” icon. But even this grouping falls apart. “rock/pop” shows up as “rock” only; “brit pop” is neither “rock” or “pop”; and “rhythmic noise”, which is this, shows up as “R&B”. It clearly is as far from “R&B” as you can get.

So what to do about this superfluous tag? You can remove it from iTunes entirely but maybe there’s another way. I don’t know how useful it’ll be or what it will actually say in the end, but I’m going to go through my library and change every genre tag to represent the place of origin of the artist. If anything, it’ll be more concrete, and more useful, than “Unknown Genre.”

I miss some aspects of my desktop PC back home in Canada. The MacBook switch has been wonderful and I love it, but there are things that my PC had and could do that I have no access to anymore. I miss the other two thirds of my music library and the good speakers and headphones. I sorta miss being able to tinker around in Flash since the Mac version won’t let me use my PC serial (stupid. Lightroom 2 is platform independent) and I’m not about to pay again for software I already own. I miss being able to play through 95% of the games published on TIGSource, forced now to settle for the 5% that are OSX compatible (hey go play Smaze!) I miss gaming on the PC in general. It’s not something I did frequently, but it was always available and now that I’m playing Civiliation Revolutions I’m craving the real thing. And with all the music I’ve been listening to lately, I’m also craving for a bit of Audiosurf.

The great thing about Audiosurf is that it dynamically creates stages for you based on the music you feed it. As fun as it can be to play those tracks it’s sometimes interesting enough on its own to see how the game interprets whatever mp3 you provide. The ebbs and flows of the track and all the many coloured blocks that come your way do a good job of matching up with a song’s tempo, beat and general structure. Of course, being as I am, I started to play more and more esoteric “music” in Audiosurf, eventually reaching the point where the game “breaks”. Sunn o))) was my breaking point.

The game still worked, in a functional sense, but the music parser — which seems to look for beat and tempo and all those quantifiable things — didn’t know what the hell to do. What it visualized had very little to do with what the player was hearing. It generated one of the most insane, high speed levels in the game for a song, if you can call it that, that was super slooooow and droning. For a music game, this disconnect, wherein what is played exists without any connection to what is heard, amounts to the game being broken.

It’s the nature of user created content in videogames. If you allow random people to define the characteristics and challenges of your game, be prepared for a lot of white noise.

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.

Well, I made it. After an ordeal getting through the Chunnel I arrived in Paris on Monday evening. I’ve been here three whole days and it’s been completely gorgeous. In those three days I’ve had more sunshine than in any given three week period in London. It certainly makes for a more colourful first impression.

My studio is very small but it has a good location (two doors from the Metro, and a block away from another Metro line) and it’s perfectly accessorized. I have internet access again! And a TV (which I haven’t even bothered with) and stereo and free long-distance calling to North America. Awesome. However, with this weather it’d be a waste to make use of any of it so I’ve been out exploring, wandering, taking photos and being a flaneur.

That said, I do have access to the wonders of the internet so I do get see a lot of nerdy stuff again. Thus, I present three French musicians given an increasingly geekier treatment:

It is known that I have certain musical tastes that, so to speak, diverge from the mainstream. Despite my affinity for hyper-minimal glitchy stuff and 8-bit computer square waves and outright noise and glitch, I do like the occasional softer fare. Blondie’s “Parallel Lines”, for example, is one of my favourite albums. When “Hanging on the Telephone” was released for Rock Band, it was an instant purchase. So it was a bit of a surprise to see it reviewed in, of all places, Pitchfork today. 30 years after its original release, it’s likely older than most of their reviewers on staff.

They praise the album, giving it a highly respectable 9.7 (I will spare you from a rant about the idiotic 100 point scale with respect to reviewing something so subjective as music) and make some good points about its place in pop music lore.

The lush, shiny sound of Blondie still greatly informs European pop– which pulls less from hip-hop and R&B than its American counterpart– as evidenced by the Continent’s best recent pop architects and artists (producers Richard X and Xenomania, plus Robyn, Girls Aloud, and Annie); in America, however, the group is oddly seems tied to the past, a product of its era.

Now that I am on the other side of the Atlantic, I agree with that sentiment. The reason is simple. A Xenomania produced track, by the young songstress Gabriella Cilmi, has planted itself firmly in my head. I hear it on the radio all the time here and I admit to liking it a lot. It’s not exactly a guilty pleasure — it’s not corny enough for that — but it’s as far from some of my other tastes as you can get.

She has a great voice but there’s one thing I can’t quite get over. Blondie’s “Parallel Lines” is nearly twice as old as. She was born in 1991. The nineties. Christ am I starting to feel like an old fogey.

Harmonic 313‘s EP1 is an interesting, if brief, excursion into bleepy, old school “Detroit techno.” The record makes heavy use of retro Speak N Spell samples, which is probably one of the most sampled toys ever.

That little reference to the toy game isn’t restricted to the music though, it’s there through the packaging and website. All the track names are obscured behind a simple color coded substitution cipher. The website plays with this and makes a simple little interactive game out of it (with three lives and everything). The reward for completing it? A bonus unreleased track.

It’s all very simple stuff but this game adds a nice little reward and working your way through it is, in my mind, much more engaging and gives me a better sense for the music than any standard discography site with downloadable samples could ever provide. This is how to engage using the interactive medium. (Or, if you prefer more complex games, there’s Year Zero, as reviewed here.)

or, “The V in FLV Means ‘Video’”

The good thing about Flash becoming such a ubiquitous audio player online is that it has, essentially, killed off proprietary formats like ASX and Realmedia. Nearly every browser has Flash installed so it makes it easy for site operators to allow mp3 playback without having to worry about what players the user has installed or what the default download options are or whatever. You put up a simple Flash audio player and it works without any of the overhead that might scare away less computer savvy users. Additionally, Flash’s extensibility allows site operators to create players with the features and appearance that they want. They can’t do that with third party players unless they’re of the size of Microsoft or Apple.

Of course, these content providers want to have their cake and eat it too. They desire the ubiquity of flash and mp3 but they also want to restrict and contain the music, so that it’s not easily downloadable (Flash loads mp3s through the browser and if it can load them, the browser and the user can grab them too. Quite easily.) This has resulted in some overly complex mechanisms using tokens and sessions and other sorts of obfuscations, as seen in the above image. None of which work. These measures do nothing but add inconvenient speed bumps akin to the annoying “spaceball.gif” image overlays on Flickr and the old-school “do not right click” javascript popups. None of which ever worked.

Lately I’ve noticed a new trend, as seen in the imeem Player. Certain sites are now encoding all their audio as .flv, Flash Video, format. There’s no video, of course, since the format is being used as a wrapper for the mp3 audio. I understand why they do it. Their logic is that flv files can’t be as easily and freely distributed as mp3 files can (a lot of people wouldn’t know how to play an .flv file), but come on. Stop trying to ram a square peg into a round hole. There’s already a perfectly fine file format for playing back audio: mp3. Wrapping it up in some camouflage won’t work because it can easily be unwrapped.

Here’s a word of advice: if I can listen to your file in my browser it’s because it was already downloaded and it’s on my hard drive. This is how browsers work. Stop trying to put ineffectual roadblocks around this. If you are going to share it then share it. You’ll get more sales and promotion out of it. It worked for Nine Inch Nails and it’s hopefully working for Flashbulb. “Soundtrack To A Vacant Life” is a pretty solid album. Buy it.

Remember that time I wrote about the then new Crystal Castles album? My semi-review came from the perspective of someone familiar with the chiptune sound and annoyed by all the Pitchforkerati buzz proclaiming it “innovative.” I objected to those proclamations but, essentially, raved about the music itself and, essentially, admired Crystal Castles‘ nonchalance to the scene. They weren’t of the scene but they were of the same pop-culture zeitgeist, having grown up with 8-bit videogames, that created that scene. Synchronicity and all that.

As it turns out, they were full of shit.

One Crystal Castles quote from the previous post that bears repeating is the following:

That keyboard was made back in 2004 and then we learned about this whole 8-bit scene, which we don’t really have anything to do with. It’s a completely different world.

Which would be fine were it not for the fact that they have just been found to have been using unlicensed and unapproved samples from artists in the 8-bit scene, specifically Lo-Bat and Covox. Oops. It puts everything they have said in an entirely new light, especially when you consider the stink that they caused when it was revealed they used art on shirts and albums, that they found, without ever getting the artists permission.

One time is, maybe, a careless mistake. Two, three, four times over is kleptomania. The worst part is that they distance themselves –a completely different world– from the very same community that they are influenced by. Chiptunes? Not cool. Asshole douchebaggery? Totally hipster! Put it on Pitchfork.

The 8-bit Peoples website has the “official” response as well as links that detail the situation some more: Crystal Castles and Chip Music Copyright Infringements, Chiptune Music Theft Continues; Crystal Castles Abuses Creative Commons License and chipflip: plagiarism. The best place for information, however, is the epic (now 23 page) thread on the 8bitcollective forums.

Fuck that, Crystal Castles is now permanently off of my radar. Go listen to some chiptunes .

French electro-hipsters Justice recently released a new video for their track “Stress”. [hi-res video link] It lives up to the title. The video follows a gang of banlieue thugs as they go on a rampage across the city. It’s violent and uncompromising, likely to never be seen on TV on this side of the Atlantic, and, to no one’s surprise, already quite controversial. In some ways, it’s a very condensed version of La Haine [trailer].

On a superficial level, the violence is gratuitous. These thugs go around beating up bystanders, tourists, old ladies and security guards without any retribution. That’s likely why so many people have a problem with this video: they get away with it. After being subjected to this stressful ordeal the viewer is never given the karmic release they likely expected. Not only do they lack that catharsis, but by the end of it the viewer itself becomes as a victim to the thugs’ rampage.

The video works because there’s a constant tension between the actions of the characters on screen and the viewer, represented as the film crew. This is established early on when you see a hand come out a wipe the camera. From this point on you know that this isn’t some imaginary third person view, this is seen from the first person perspective of the cameraman. The characters are aware of it, though in an uneasy sort of way.

As it goes along they become more conscious of the camera. They goad it along, as though their carnage is for show.

Soon enough, the authorities come and try to take them and the camera down. You see a guard come, palm raised, at the camera. The screen goes black. A moment later, we are saved as the thugs turn on that guard and beat the shit out of him. Everyone runs. It is at this point when we become more aware of the camera crew as we see the sound guy, holding his microphone, running away alongside the thugs.

The camera crew — the viewer — has changed from a detached observer into someone complicit in the violence. They are no longer detached observers. It is no surprise that they, too, become victims to it. It’s hard to feel sympathy for them. They — we — brought it upon ourselves. In this sense it is far more reminiscent of Man Bites Dog than La Haine.

So is the violence in this video gratuitous? Yes. But that shouldn’t be seen as a celebration or glorification of it. The only people that would see it as such are those that look at it at a superficial level, seeing a bunch of hooligans beating up innocent people and nothing more. There’s more to it than just that.

It is, then, very appropriate that the video was let loose during the same week that saw the release of Grand Theft Auto IV.

As a final addendum to my post on Crystal Castles, I present:

Yes, somebody did a pure chiptune remix of Crystal Castles. I love it; it’s so meta. A lo-fi 8-bit remix of a song that, itself, was a lo-fi remix of a song. At this point, I expect and hope that somebody brings down the bits even more and remixes the 8-bit version using Monotone.

Edit (May 5, 08): Hey, it turns out Crystal Castles are thieving bastards and full of shit. Read more.

Crystal Castles is the latest buzz-making indie band to emerge out of Toronto, which has been a relative hotbed of cool independent (and post-independent) music. It’s a scene that has spawned the likes of MSTRKRFT, Holy Fuck and, before them, Death From Above 1979 and Broken Social Scene and the multitudes of artists connected to them in every conceivable way (like Feist.) The two-piece of Crystal Castles, instrumentalist Ethan Kath and vocalist Alice Glass, comes out blazing with fully armed synthesizers and their primary weapon of choice is a modded keyboard with an Atari 5200 chip in it. Yes, they’re basically creating Chiptunes.

I love chiptunes. It’s an aesthetic that has great modern and nostalgic appeal to me. The first music that I payed any attention to in my life was generated by an NES sound chip, and the last album that I listened to wasn’t very different. In the last five years I’ve been to two live shows: one was a friend’s band and the other featured bit shifter. So yes, it’s a sound I have a certain nerdy affinity to. I’m not the only one as it’s a thriving scene. There’s a countless number of artists, numerous labels, a full-on four day music festival (Report part 1, part 2) and even a documentary or two.

Crystal Castles in Toronto, courtesy of Charlyn.

Crystal Castles, whose sound I would describe as “The Knife if they were on 8-bit peoples, with a touch of Atari Teenage Riot“, doesn’t identify with that scene at all. Hell, their name isn’t a reference to the Atari videogame (as I first thought), it’s a reference to She-Ra. It’s not the world they came from. In an interview with Exclaim!, they say as much:

It was only to create annoying sounds. That keyboard was made back in 2004 and then we learned about this whole 8-bit scene, which we don’t really have anything to do with. It’s a completely different world.

That’s fine. That’s great. Music history isn’t a linear path; influence happens in parallel. The kids that grew up with the SID chips and the Atari and the NES, now in their twenties and thirties, all have personal experiences with that nostalgia and it will manifest itself in ways unique to them. It’s not synchronicity, it’s culture. What irks me about this isn’t the band, it’s the media writing about the band.

It’s not my intent to start a “my subculture is better than your subculture” pissing match — we’d lose, the indie army is far crazier and more numerous — but I hate how the oft ignored, under the radar and frequently dismissed 8-bit aesthetic that defined the chiptune world years and years ago is now seen as this great and novel innovation. It’s hyperbolic articles like this one that stir my shit. Attaching a classic game system sound chip to a keyboard makes for a totally unique and new sound? They are the most exciting and original band in the world right now? Really?

Tracks like “xxzxcuzx me” and “Love and Caring” and “Alice Practice” have been described by some as “8-bit terror”. It’s mosh-pit music for the Nintendo generation and the crowd reactions to their performances reveal as much. Suburban ghetto music writes:

The pit was open and as the ferocious, asphyxiating sheets of warped two-dimensional Gameboy glitches washed over me I was inspired to run in, fists waving, until I was pushed out by three different people roughly twice my size. Usually I am one to shy away from the actual ‘moshing’ but repeatedly I was going for it, especially when killer track ‘Alice Practice’ came on.

That “killer track” is oft described by Crystal Castles as an “accident.” What’s even more telling is that they seem rather ambivalent to that glitchy sound. In interviews they say that they did it to be annoying:

We like to use sounds that annoy people. Especially in the earlier songs, like “xxzxcuzx me” — that was just to annoy everyone. It’s really strange when people tell us it’s their favourite song.

That annoying sound — the very same one that is getting all the praise for being “innovative” and “something completely new” — is the very same sound that has been previously derided as nerdy nostalgic noise with no musical value. Look no further than Paul Ford’s “Six-Word Reviews of 763 SXSW Mp3s” for proof of this dismissal. There are threefour chiptune artists on that list and they all have one circle ratings. Aonami is described as “8-bit gunk” and Receptors gets the snarky “Can they win the boss level?” treatment. If anything, it proves that reviewing music is no different than reviewing the last time you masturbated: immeasurably personal and subjective.

That’s not to say that there isn’t any value in that — there is — it just depends on the context that is brought to the review. Paul Ford dismisses Receptors as noise; I hear Kraftwerkian lo-fi bit-pop. That’s my experience with it, no doubt fueled by the knwoledge that the man behind Receptors is the man behind 8-bit Operators, the chiptune Kraftwerk cover album. An album that is notable for being published by a “mainstream” label, AstralWerks. And when he hears as “8-bit gunk”, I hear a head bopping mix of nostalgia and awesome.

It’s a matter of perspective. When those not familiar with that chiptune “8-bit terror” sound hear it coming from Crystal Castles, and they like it, they like it because it’s something new and fresh and innovative. For me, however, it’s a sound that I’m already intimate with. I enjoy it because I know it. I have a frame of reference to it. I know of other acts and performances and songs with which I can compare their aesthetic to. When I hear about the mosh-pits to songs like “Alice Practice” and “xxzxcuzx me”, as mentioned above, I think about this performance by Hally at the Blip Festival.

As with everything else, it’s all been done before. David Sugar mixed nanoloop-powered Gameboy chiptunes with hip-hop over a year ago.
Beck did his thing three years ago with Ghettochip Malfunction on the Hell Yes EP. And Welle:Erdball have been doing it for over a decade. None of that matters though. Whether they’re seen as “innovative” or indie cool or as chiptune artists doesn’t change the fact that their music is fantastic. Their take on that 8-bit aesthetic is distinctly theirs. It’s personal. It’s good. It’s recommended. A fine addition to the chiptune canon.

Their debut self-titled album comes out this week.