ShockHound

LISTEN: 8-Bit Operators' "Pocket Calculator" (Glomag Mega Mix)

By Ken Micallef

You’ve grown up, you’ve got a real job, and your childhood video games are currently gathering dust in the basement of your parents’ house. In these days of Xbox and Playstation, no one even cares about those clunky old battery-powered games, right?
    Wrong. For a barmy subset of electronic dance musicians, the mighty morphin’ tones and textures of those same ‘80s/’90s video games are pure sonic gold, mined to entertain masses of similarly childhood-connected ravers. These nostalgic binary sounds have been called “8-bit music,” “chip music,” “bitpop” or “Nintendocore," but to the electronic crowd, they’re best known as “chiptunes.”   
    Chiptunes’ super silly sounds and playful beats typically emanate from Nintendo Game Boy controllers, Commodore 64 computers, Atari 2600 and Nintendo Entertainment Systems (NES) units retrofitted with software cartridges made by mad scientists in Germany and Sweden. Celebrated at clubs nationwide, globally and at the yearly Blip Festival (blipfestival.org), chiptunes artists have even contributed to a popular Kraftwerk covers album, 8-Bit Operators: The Music of Kraftwerk Perfomed on 8-Bit Video Game Systems (Astralwerks). But really, what’s all the fuss over midget gremlins from Super Mario Bros. barking spasmodically over a zippy dance beat?
    Chris Burke is simply gobsmacked by the question. “The artists get excited over using these tools to make music,” says Burke, who’s been rocking the bloops and bleeps under the name Glomag for over half a decade. “Tools are very limited and that forces you to be very creative, to squeeze every little bit of fun out of each note. Also the fact that the music has this game system sound that you can relate to this fun pastime that you once had. Maybe there is a little nostalgia in it, but you get over the nostalgia real quickly. Once you listen to the music, especially at a live gig, the nostalgia element melts away and what you’re left with is this incredibly vital sound and style of music.
      “Even the simplest melody played on a Game Boy has bursting-at-the-seams intensity to it,” he continues. “There’s not that refinement, that 16-bit resolution you get with other music. The notes are always on or off, it’s very binary. There is only so much tweaking you can do to finesse things. It gives it a raw edge and an intensity. And people really respond to it. After they stop being confused, they get a smile on their face.”       
    Listening to 8-Bit Operators: The Music of Kraftwerk Perfomed on 8-Bit Video Game Systems is like stepping into a time warp populated by nervous beats and nostalgically maniacal sounds, seemingly culled from a childhood spent banging the D-pad on toy game systems. The names of the artists covering classic Kraftwerk songs like “Radioactivity,” “Pocket Calculator,” “Computer Love” and “Trans-Europe Express” are as 8-bit oriented as the music itself: Nullsleep, 8 Bit Weapon,  Neotericz, GwEm & Counter Reset and Receptors glory in their primitive machines, which operate on an 8-bit platform as opposed to modern 16- or 24-bit CD players. The soundtracks, or chiptunes, to those original gaming systems were written in formats with the sounds being synthesized in real time by a game console sound chip, rather than modern sample-based synthesis.
           

LISTEN: Glomag's "DaMaGe"

While it’s rare for a burgeoning musical movement to erupt in scandal before it hits critical mass, that’s exactly what recently happened with chiptunes. Brian Harrod  the artist formerly known as Laromlab, was highly regarded in the chiptunes world for his adept covers of Daft Punk’s “Around The World” and “Aerodynamic,”  as well as his three albums of (seemingly) original 8-bit music. But unbeknownst to his label, Mushpot, or even his touring partner, Dan Wilcox (aka Robot Cowboy), Laromlab was a fraud: Instead of creating his own chiptunes, Harrod simply plagiarized from lesser known artists, including CrazyQ, Dubmood, Dma-SC and Lotek Style, and passed it off as his own.  
    It’s hard to believe that someone in this day and age could actually pass off another artist’s music as their own. And yet, given the insular world of chiptunes, and considering how easy it is to download anything digital, all it took was a lack of ethics and an empty hard drive for Harrod to perform his thievery. Upon being discovered by his label, Harrod offered a hasty online apology then promptly deep-sixed his career.  Mushpot went a step further, issuing both an apology letter and a fully credited track listing of the compositions and artists Harrod had robbed.
    “A couple of years back I was making electronic music that sounded very different and I hit a dry spell,” wrote Harrod in his apologia. “There is no explanation for it but the music wasn’t very good anyway, and somewhere deep inside of my brain it told me that I should just grab these guys’ music and pawn it off as my own. The trouble started when people began to notice the "Laromlab music" and a record label was interested and everything got out of hand. All the while, I had this in the back of my head that I was going to get caught but never dreamed that it would get this much attention...           
    “It took a lot of gall to do what I did,” Harrod continued, “and I take full blame. I pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes, including my wife (she had no clue), all of my friends, my tour partners, people that bought the CD, people that listened, everyone!!! But it also takes a lot of balls to come to everyone and say....I am a fake, none of this shit is mine.”
    Speaking with ShockHound shortly before his fall from 8-bit grace, Harrod appeared confident, even cocky. “I am trying to steer the music above ground, getting the house scene and dance scenes to take notice of this music,” he proclaimed, his nose growing longer with each proclamation. “I want to make it bigger instead of being just underground. We are trying to bring it further and get wider distribution for the music than just the Internet. We want to get it in stores.”      

    But for all his bravado, Harrod was, in restrospect, merely stacking lie upon lie in a cheap bid to maintain his standing in the chiptunes world, too bad he won’t be around to expound further, as his views on the 8-bit scene were actually quite eloquent.
    “We have the same views as a minimalist painter,” Harrod continued, comparing 8-bit music to visual art. “How much can we give you with what little we have? With electronic music software, we want to give you as much as we can. There is the challenge of trying to create the most complicated compositions that we can with three little waves on a Game Boy, or just seeing how much can be crammed into one little system without it coming out as complete noise.”
    Still, as with any movement, it takes more than one traitor to topple the mission. Receptor’s Jeremy Kolosine is currently overseeing another chipunes tribute album, this time dedicated to the Beatles. I Wanna Hold Yer Handheld will feature contributions from Treewave, 8 Bit, Glomag, Bubblyfish, Anamangauchi, Herb Witzelbaum, and Bacalau, as well as Receptors' own “Helter Skelter.”
    Even when covering relatively shiny happy music from the likes of Kraftwerk or the Beatles, coupled with chiptunes’ overt nostalgia, you might wonder why some would  find the music preferable to more established electronic styles like house or techno, or equally old fashioned scenes like trip-hop or drum ‘n’ bass.
    “There is a tension that comes from having to work in such a simple toolset,” Chris Burke believes. “Some electronic music suffers from a kind of overly broad anonymity. That is what a lot of people like about it, that there are no stars, it is not poppy. But there is also an incredible lack of focus in electronic music; I want to hear some kind of context to help me hone in on what it is that the artist is doing. Context really helps people understand what they are listening to; and with chiptunes being made on game consoles, that provides context and makes the music direct."

LISTEN: Receptors'  "Game Boy Will Travel"

So, how does one get started in the fantastic world of chiptunes? It's easy enough to dig out that old gaming crap from your parent's closet, right? Well, not exactly, as primitive as this music sounds, the ghost in the machine requires a little investment, at least from a software angle.
      “The software is simpler than that used with most electronic music,” Kolosine says. “Nanoloop software is simple, and Little Sound DJ is very intuitive. It’s got a simple tracker interface, it’s very easy to understand. There are some commands that demand hexadecimal values, but if you don’t know that just throw in some values and see what happens. The difficulty comes when you realize that you only have six buttons on a Game Boy, you have to internalize the controls. It is liberating to use something so simple, and you don’t have to worry about getting to different windows in Logic Audio." But despite requiring a modicum of technical know-how, this music which glories in the past looks primed to experience a renaissance of everyman proportions. Reformat the Planet, a documentary of the 2006 Blip Festival, is running in selected theaters and film festivals, and a compilation of original chiptunes, Gamegirls vs. Gameboys, may be released before I Wanna Hold Yer Handheld. Yes, the 8-bit future looks bright, new technology be damned.
    “The artists talk about working within limitations of the Game Boy,” Kolosine theorizes, “but it’s not about working in limitations but in the lack of limitations. There are more limitations in two guitars, bass, and drums than in a Game Boy. You have the whole world of sound at your fingertips. Rock music is limited.  When you listen to Game Boy music the first thing you hear are the Super Mario bleeps, but that’s not what it’s about. It couples convenience of a handheld device with the fact that more people have Game Boys then guitars in their closets.”

LISTEN: Receptors' "Disconnected"

Related Artists 8-Bit Operators Glomag Kraftwerk Receptors