Greetings ChipWINers, and a happy start of 2015 to you all! As I hope you stuffed your little bellies with food on whichever religious or lack thereof holiday you may have celebrated, and your eyes nice and wide on achieving those New Year’s resolutions, I’d like to thank you for joining me on Chip Treatment with Professor Oakes’ first installment of the new year. 2014 was an amazing year beaming with wonderful releases, and I am happy to include Diode Milliampere’s 7-track album ‘Psychic Pizza Connection’ released in collaboration with FEELTRIP Records, as this album lands itself a spot on the list of heavy-hitters and notable productions that should certainly be on your radar.

Psychic Pizza Connection by Diode Milliampere

Let’s face it, the chip community as of late is saturated with musicians new and old, novice and experienced, and while this certainly isn’t a negative thing, every inch of net is filled with releases. With net labels popping up left and right, Weekly Treats and Weekly Beats projects coming to the forefront, sifting through everything can be incredibly daunting and cumbersome. However, ‘Psychic Pizza Connection’ is a breath of fresh air — in a community where a musician’s weapon of choice is most likely LSDJ because of the interface’s ease of use, Milliampere’s 6th release packs a heavy punch in both production power similar to that of a larger commercial label and composition.

Composed using a Toshiba Libretto 70CT, Milliampere’s 25+ minute album is created entirely in Adlib Tracker II, subz3ro’s DOS/Windows/Linux compatible 18-channel FM tracker that takes up no more than 2000 kB of space on your HDD.

While that may sound like foreign language to the average music listener, Adlib Tracker II creates and produces sounds on computers that folks my age used to play Hovercraft and the DOOM series on (the very same computers that our mothers threw out when we upgraded our systems). It is able to synthesize sounds on these tiny machines that composers and coders during the mid 90’s couldn’t come close to producing or make full use of with the OPL3 sound chip. Boasting support up to 255 instruments (including both melodic and percussion), 89 effect commands, and 128 patterns, Milliampere’s use of Adlib Tracker II places him among the ranks of a very small percentage of the community that are actively using this tracker.

Psychic Pizza Connection by Diode Milliampere

Milinda opens the album with an unforgettable soundscape reminiscent of Chicago’s acid house movement with a simple yet soulful melody. Delivered through the very recognizable FM sound that Adlib Tracker II produces, this track’s synthetic, funky groove is a wonderful introduction to the album at large. Accompanied by deep drops and banging kicks, Milinda is a perfect soundtrack to a demoscene hacker brainstorm session. Most interesting is the track’s stereo output — an instrument outputs sound either to the the left, right, or both channels — but Adlib Tracker II, unlike most other trackers, cannot do both. To produce this, Milliampere takes instruments and alters the volume of them both so that it appears to fall somewhere in the middle, thus creating a stereo output. Also necessary to preface is the use of cymbals, hi-hats and other percussion bits in the track — a musician is able to create this using FM synthesis by making the interactions between the instruments so complicated in that is sounds like white noise, which can later be made into those percussion sounds.

Psychic Pizza Connection by Diode Milliampere

Samsara, which is the repeating cycle of birth, life, and death, and one’s actions and consequences, beautifully graces the album as its third track. Possessing an almost intergalactic, space-like tone, this track is a wonderful accompaniment to the calm, crisp atmosphere and the trickling of the rain against my windowsill as I write this. As the track begins to take form, it’s almost as if it urges you to wander through its journey. With a slow ease-in and introduction, Samsara appears as though it passes through many states of existence — a cycle if you will — which is the very nature of the word itself in Sanskrit.

Psychic Pizza Connection by Diode Milliampere

Odd Time, Milliampere’s fifth track of the album, boasts a completely different arrangement than that of its earlier precursor Milinda. With a lead-in and backing melody similar to that of a downtempo ambient track, Odd Time is another wonderful and soulful electronic piece of art. One of the shorter tracks of ‘Psychic Pizza Connection’ Odd Time is one of the ‘chiller’ tracks of the bunch, though the very prominent hi-hats and cymbals start to frenzy in a rhythmic pattern very early in the track’s introduction. Acid Tracker, the album’s concluding title, digs its metaphorical hands in a psychedelic drug-induced high, producing a sound very similar to that of its acid trance and goa counterparts.

This entire album, again 25+ minutes long, is less than 84 kB of data. Released digitally on Bandcamp for $10, on a 3.5” floppy enclosed in a jewel case for $10, or a limited edition package with the 3.5” floppy in a laser-cut pizza box with artwork designed by David Beltran and individually hand printed via linoleum stamp for $20. I highly recommend purchasing and listening to this album the next chance you have, as this is an album I feel will be very difficult to top in the months to come. Also, if you find yourself around the Chicago area mid April, be sure to check out Illinois’ first chipmusic festival (Facebook event) that Milliampere is curating and will be performing at.

Until next time on Chip Treatment, keep your third eye greasy. This is Professor Oakes signing off!

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Diode Milliampere

Adlib Tracker II | Bandcamp | Facebook | FEELTRIP Records | Soundcloud | Twitter

Psychic Pizza Connection by Diode Milliampere

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