The blasting sound of 8-bit sound waves is electrifying. Sounds crafted in retro waveform generators such as the one of the Comodore 64 and the Gameboy, can be quite beautiful, harmonic, noisy, and moving. The rhythms are fast, with a tempo usually higher than 180BPM. Melodies are simple and playful, made out with the rough sounds of sine, square and triangle waves. Although I enjoyed making and listening to chiptunes in the 90s in my home studio, I never assisted to a live concert of this kind of music. Last December 5, after the independent video game gathering Juegos Rancheros, I had the pleasure of discovering a vibrant community of chip music makers based in Austin, organized around the TXchipmusic project.
Although I listened to the sounds made by using 8-bit chips during my childhood as I played games in tha Atari 2600, intelevision, and the domestic personal computer, it was not until the end of the 1990s that I started to explore the aesthetic potential of the music made by old microprocessors. At that time I started to be engaged in amateur electronic music making at home and creative media production with the elektrodomestika project. I was fascinated when I discover the Comodore 64 capabilities for music composition through my friend and long time collaborator Roger Rappich. At that time, I decided to use emulators to play and remix SID music and also visited online communities such as the High Voltage SID Collection and dedicated web radios. Although I used these sounds during live performances and studio sessions, I actually just sampled them and was never quite generating the 8-bit synthesis in real time. That is the reason why I became so fascinated by seeing the performers at the TXchipmusic concert. All of them, where generating their sounds with their hacked Gameboys and Nintendo consoles in real time.
The TXchipmusic event was unique in its format. During the first part of the concert, it had an open mic sort of set-up, in where guest musicians could participate just by registering their name in a form. More than 10 different chipmusic makers performed their songs during this phase, engaging themselves in quite emotional and active body gestures, as they mixed their tracks and threw sounds following the intensity of the fast beats. Some of these performers also sang along with their 8-bit tunes creating a very nice blend of sounds.
The second half of the concert had longer performances by two chiptune musicians that came from other cities and one local austinite. Their performances were also very energetic and the audience, composed mostly by other performers, listened with attention and moved their heads to the beats. Star Fighter Dreams, who came from San Antonio had a special song that turned out to be a collaboration with a hip hop MC, who managed to rap in sync with the frenetic pace of the chiptune beats. IAYD, closed the event after Shanebro, a musician from New Orleans, performed his set. The music of IAYD was perhaps the most dance oriented of all the evening, it revealed some influences from techno and drum and bass, that combined well with the quality of the 8-bit sound. Although the crowd was small to turn the concert into a dancing party, I could easily imagine a situation where that happens.
I am curious to keep listening to the TXchipmusic scene and would love to learn about their processes of networking, hacking, and sharing. This community seems to be quite alive, and although is not very diverse in terms of gender, it seems to have some interesting practices around learning and technology.
