Collaborative review by music writer Anthony Read and games writer Tim Biggs.

In a time when a lot of us were growing up, the music and sound effects of computers and video games were not recorded and compressed, as they are now, to be played at the appropriate time. In those days the sounds were produced in real time by the sound chip within the machine itself. The limitations of those chips gave revered systems like the Atari 2600, Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Mega Drive their trademark sounds. Those same limitations, some years later, are responsible for the sheer awesomeness of chip tune music.

For the uninitiated, chip music either directly uses or draws inspiration from the chips of old machines to create music. The genre is wide and varied, from nostalgic sounds programmed in and pumped out of a gameboy to tunes that have been sampled and synthesized into modern trance experiences. The practice of creating visual art from modified machines is also growing in popularity. Blip Festival has been showcasing the best artists the scene has to offer for a while now, but last week saw its very first Australian show, at the Evelyn Hotel in Fitzroy. Below you’ll find our impressions of most acts (which featured both muscial artists and accompanying visual artists), along with selected images and video. You can find our playlist of short HD videos from every single act, as well as more information on them, right here.

Abortifacient

Jayson Haebich – visuals

“My Gameboy speaks better than I do.”

Anthony: Blipfest got off to a high-impact start with Abortifacient, and for the uninformed about chiptunes (eg: me), it was exactly as expected: glitchy, game-y, and full of energy. Abortifacient started out somewhat slowly, with a 15+ minute 8-bit assault, but the set really came alive when he brought on his occa-Australian accent and flung his thongs at the audience. This performance identity, while a touch grating, was an unexpected move that gave the crowd the necessary boost.

His second ‘set’ centred around a dubstep-inspired movement, driven by Abortifacient’s undeniable energy. While Abortifacient was exactly as expected, his intensity and attention to musical detail boded well for the rest of the acts.

Tim: Throwing thongs and swearing up an occa storm, Abortifacient didn’t strike me as the kind of bloke that was about to transport me to an alternate reality where MegaMan and Metroid were heavily augmented with filthy jungle dubstep, but that’s the only way I can describe the sound that affronted me as soon as he stopped yammering and picked up that Gameboy.

The visuals impressed too. Using input from a roof mounted Xbox Kinect, Haebich channelled his programming wizardry to distort Abortifacient’s image smoothly into pixels of various resolutions and then back again, in real time. Background graphics kept time with the beat and lent a fitting glow to an energetic set.

Bit Shifter

Batsly Adams – visuals



“Sometimes you decide when the song ends, sometimes the Gameboy does.”

Tim: As one of the main guys on the business side of the festival one would always expect big things from New Yorker and chip veteran Bit Shifter. Expectations were well and truly met with a masterful showing, Shifter pushing impossibly catchy tunes out the tiny Gameboy hardware. Some compressed vocals toward the end of the set were a nice touch, harking back to the terrible (but oh-so recognisable) voice implementation of the 8-bit era. This was followed by some actual vocals from Shifter in the final track, which he delivered surprisingly well to the extent that you could imagine their place on a Master Sytem track had they the technology to do that.

His Gameboy failed him at one point, but he handled it with humour and it in fact worked in his favour – showing how temperamental and tenuous the ancient hardware really is. I had a chance to speak to him briefly at the bar after his set, and he told me what a dream come true it was to bring his festival to Australia. If the looks on the faces of the fans were anything to go off, the feeling was very mutual.

Batsly Adams completely blew my mind and matched the “small hardware, huge output” theme of Bit Shifter’s set to a tee. Operating with Sega Mega Drive equipment and completely home built custom ROMs Batsly pulls off effects and transitions with aplomb way beyond the minds of those who created the hardware decades ago.

Anthony: After the relentless assault of the previous act, Bit Shifter came as a surprise; easily as energetic, but with a heightened sense of melody that pulled the audience in. As a co-founder of Blipfest (with Nullsleep), Bit Shifter combined the traditional rhythm-oriented sound of chipmusic with musical motifs and themes that could have easily been interpreted from Zelda or Final Fantasy.

One can see why Bit Shifter is an act so synonymous with 8-bit tunes, and his humble personality and classic rock and metal harmonies pushed the level of Blipfest up a notch.

Ten Thousand Free Men and Their Families

Gentle Hurst – visuals



“If someone doesn’t get a split lip in this next song, not including me of course, I’m going to be very, very disappointed.”

Anthony: For the chipmusic community, 10K (a lazier name given to this artist by his fans) was a metaphorical kick in the face. Armed with a basic set of tunes and a microphone, he screamed his lungs out for the entire set, only stopping for brief banter with the audience (which, for the record, seemed to enjoy abusing him as much as praising him).

His performance identity was odd; one couldn’t tell whether he was taking the piss or not. This over-the-top intensity garnered its opponents – one patron summed him as a “bogan who screamed in our faces for thirty painful minutes”. But this ambivalence helped his performance; atonal songs with lyrics like “we should all be friends” and “fuck you I’m leaving home” need a big stage presence to pull them off. He has this, in spades. Putting his physical body on the line in every song, 10K rallied his troops and destroyed the Blipfest crowd, one ridiculous lyric at a time.

Tim: What 10k’s act lacks in verisimilitude to actual video game music, it makes up for in its insight into gamers themselves and the culture they absorb themselves in. He stands out from the rest, spending far less time standing over his equipment making adjustments to the bloops and more time roaming the stage and playing the crowd.

Of course his music or lyrics aren’t about specific games as much as they are about an attitude that for better or worse typifies many of his generation – the first wave of natural born gamers. Everything he wants he wants now, and if he doesn’t get it he’s leaving home. For this reason, more than anyone else on the circuit, 10k has the ability to capture the attention and adoration of the chip music fans. He shares their feelings and more importantly their humour. And I do mean share, as he invites them to vent and contribute alongside him the whole way. Highlight of the set: 10k yelling at one heckler “your mum should have had an Abortifacient!”

7bit Hero

“I bet if lasers felt sadness they’d party with you!”

Tim: If there was only one act at Blip Festival that had exciting implications for industries outside of games and music it was certainly 7bit Hero, an act out of Brisbane that brought with them one really big idea. The group had set up a wireless network that everyone present was encouraged to connect to via their smartphone. Once activated the network took audience members to a sign-in page and told them to wait.

The band started playing and eventually 16 people in the room had their phones telling them they had been selected, before launching them into a game that they played against each other, the progress of which was displayed in real time behind the band who were laying down the wicked soundtrack. The game itself was ludicrously simple, involving tapping a button as fast as possible, but the spectacle of instantaneous and unexpected multi-player broadcast to the whole room was amazing.

Once the final battle was over and the winner decided, 7bit Hero reminded him (and us all) of the temporariness of triumph when your goals are virtual and arbitrary. Perfect.

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Anthony: One word sums up these guys perfectly; joy. While of course Tim was more taken with the technical aspects, for my part, 7bit Hero focus on the more melodic aspects of chipmusic.

The first ‘live band’ of the night, in that they used live instruments, the guys had a rockier sound than all before them. The vocalist had a high vocal range that blended with the music nicely, and the rhythms and melodies were of the crowd-pleasing variety. The ending of the set, while not giving anything anyway, transcended the chiptune background of the festival, and the jokey element gave them a lightness that was sorely lacking in all previous acts.

Saitone

iLKke – visuals



“I’m ready.”

Anthony: Confession: at this point of the night, I had to disappear due to work commitments the next day (I can almost hear the jeers…), so I didn’t get to see Saitone live. But, by listening to his work online, I can safely say that he sounds like a rhythm-heavy Mario theme gone bananas. There is a natural melody to his work that shines through in a distinctly Japanese-gamer way.

While not incredibly original, his work certainly conjures up a certain image of the artist – one who has fun with his tunes and has one eye firmly on gaming history.

Tim: While all of the original Japanese chip wunderkind’s set was amazing, it was the last sequence that really sums up Saitone’s whole feel and why I’m such a fan of his music. The sequence was an elongated and remixed version of the stage music from the original Dig Dug. The game doesn’t have a huge emotional resonance for me but the pitch and tone was so spot on it immediately brought to mind the feel of an NES. But with more party. As Saitone repeated and accelerated the tune it seemed to spread beyond Dig Dug and off through Kondo’s original Super Mario Bros ground theme and out the other side of Balloon Fight, meanwhile the man’s dancing and the obvious joy of the crowd only amplified the fun.

iLKke, an artist I was aware of but not for his ties to video games, matched the tone step for step with colourful backdrops and some adorable original pixel art.

Old Grey Wolf

Abortifacient – visuals



“What’s your name? Alien? Ok, everyone come up here and dance with Alien.”

Tim: Appearing very nervous at the beginning of his set (the first of the second day), Old Grey Wolf made the mistake of trying to get the crowd on board by dancing with the one guy who was moving, and was consequently grabbed.

His musical covers gave popular songs an 8-bit vibe, very much reminding me of games like Jungle Book that took their soundtracks from real-world instrumentals. Distorted vocals only added to this. His original songs, oddly enough, had a very similar feel. Old Grey Wolf very much took an approach reversed from the others – turning traditional musical form into games. Meanwhile Abortifacient reversed this again, using a bent-pin Sega Mega Drive to distort and destroy well known games like Sonic 2 and Altered Beast. Very interesting.

Anthony: Sup bru. I had to do it, I’m sorry. Old Grey Wolf hails from New Zealand, and his odd brand of pop-punk chiptunes started the second night of Blipfest the right way. While the crowd was still a little too thin to truly dance, it wouldn’t have mattered – Old Grey Wolf was all about the guitar, the blips and the vocals. And this is where the issue with his set lay; no-one could hear the beats. All the acts previously had heavy beats that everyone could dance to, and unfortunately, either due to bad mixing or lack of punch, these beats didn’t come through for him.

However, the joyous nature of his personality, mixed with reasonable covers of Blink182 and Oasis, made people throw their goodwill at him. Exactly what you’d expect from a first act for a night, but definitely good enough to warrant inclusion here.

Derris-Kharlan

Jayson Haebich – visuals



“Do you think I can get that Mario guy to get up and dance during my set?”

Anthony: Now THIS was a surprise. Of all the acts across both nights, Derris-Kharlan came in as equal favourite for this reviewer (with Nullsleep). By far the most ‘musical’ of the acts, D-K’s background in music theory and production was at the fore.

Beginning with a Ennio Morricone-inspired Western theme, his set jumped from song to song with barely a pause. Where D-K excelled was in employing a range of moods, styles, tempos and progressions that made for challenging listening. While other acts stayed within the same relative tempo from movement to movement, D-K slowed, quickened and changed pace for each song – ensuring that the audience knew exactly when a new song was beginning, something the other chipmusic acts failed to do.

However, the undisputed highlight of the set was a cover of Jamiroquai’s ‘Canned Heat’, complete with guest vocals from Hans of 7 Bit Hero and a random arrival of Mario and Luigi, both of whom provided surprisingly excellent dance moves. Normally, 7/8 time is impossible to dance to, but D-K made sure we did. An auspicious performance.

Tim: It’s immediately obvious that Derris-Kharlan has spent a lot of time listening to games. That may seem like a redundant statement to make regarding a chip artist, but I point it out specifically in this case because of the effortlessness with which the music taps into that quasi-conscious library of tunes every gamer has locked away in the vaults of their mind. Anybody who’s been playing for long enough knows what I mean. They’re the tunes you hum or finger-tap all day with no idea where they came from until finally you exclaim “Space Harrier 2! Why is that in there?”

Tapping into the tunes burned on our aural memory while still adding something original is a joy supplied by most chip music, but Derris-Kharlan has the art perfected. The complex undercurrent of bleeps and bloops keep the mind spinning with nostalgia, from Simon’s Quest to the NES Kirby. The accompanying guitar recalls specific riffs from later titles like F-Zero (Mute City), all the way up to the likes of The Windwaker (Dragon Roost Island). The homage is so complete I even found myself thinking of tunes that were obviously not invoked intentionally (Kalimari Desert?). Haebich’s phenomenal Kinect rig returned, and at one point he flashed an obligatory triforce. Brilliant.

Lazerbeat

iLKke – visuals

“Ok, this stuff is going to have a lot of bass.”

Tim: Lazerbeat was mostly a wall of crunchy, crunchy noise. I say that in a good way. I had a hard time trying to read something game-relevant into the bass, but I think I was missing the point. At the very least, the music defied my ability to assign it either a ‘chiptune’ label or a ‘straight dj set’, which is intriguing in itself. This is all except for that one tune that was clearly Ice Climbers on acid, which didn’t fit with the rest of the set but was amazing. I also enjoyed that he was using a laptop that looked like it was from 1995.

For the most part I was entranced by the visuals. iLKke brought back the funky fun from before, but added concepts like first-person starship shooting of some space invader look-alikes à la Star Wars trench scene, and initiating a boss battle graphic as the set drew to a close. Pretty darn classy.

Anthony: BOOM. This was the first sound we heard when Lazerbeat took the stage. He mentioned his set would be bassy, but that 808 drop was redonkulous. Lazerbeat’s set focused on minimal, spaced-out, slow tempo chiptunes, that sacrificed melody for sheer heandbangingness.

Throughout the set, he was conducting the crowd like a DJ; also, his penchant for raising his arms up before a drop, then opening them up for the hit, was a fantastic move that added so much more to his performance. Again, the highlight of his set was a cover, specifically of Blur’s ‘Song 2’, in which Derris-Kharlan was invited on stage to perform. The vocals, done by Lazerbeat, were OK, but it was the live guitar added by D-K that gave the song the punch it needed.

At this point, I was thinking, “OK – if this is the third act, what are the next two going to bring, because this guy is kicking my ass sideways right now.”

Dot.AY

Jayson Haebich – visuals



“What up bitches, this is education.”

Anthony: The first true ‘headliner’ of the night, Dot.AY shook up the audience with a far different approach to all before him. Informing us that his music would be abstract and bass-heavy, he was right on the money. His set was a masterclass in seeming out of control, yet staying perfectly within it. Spending half the time screaming at his failing equipment may have been real or faked; whatever way you look at it, it was a genius move that got people invested in his success.

Another fantastic element of his act was the fourth-beat improvisation in most songs. This gave each tune a unique feeling based on whatever his whim was at the time. And his beats – well, they were beastly, revving the audience up to frothing point. The only downside of the performance? Well – the less said about Amanda Palmer, the better. I’ll let you handle this one, Tim…

Tim: Melbourne’s own glitchy overachiever delivered with robotic sounds and a stream of off-kilter beats, gamey effects, bizarre soundscapes and filthy language. Like 10k, AY’s statement on gamer culture is huge. He raged at inconsistent and unpredictable equipment, there was obvious personal weight in his progress and he felt like he was trying so hard to impress us all. And impressed we were. Haebich matched the frantic off-kilter tone well, and kicked up his graphics a notch by not just transforming Dot.AY into pixels, but into cubes and a 3D model as well.

Special guest Amanda Palmer took the stage in a long gown, bound hands and a worried disposition at the end of the set, in a clear invocation of the kidnapped love-interest of countless games. While I understand all this was intended as a bonus crowd pleaser, the fact that the only woman to grace the stage for the entire night was depicted bound and helpless, reaching yearningly for the crowd and singing the “all for you” of Lana Del Rey’s ‘Video Games’ was pretty unfortunate. For me this could have been a chance for a bit of fun, but instead was an exploration of a disturbing side of gaming culture that’s best to frown upon rather than encourage.

Nullsleep

Batsly Adams – visuals



“I wanna see some fucking blood!”

Tim: Forgive me if I can’t offer any deep insights into Nullsleep’s set, as for the most part I was busy completely losing my gourd. The music was slow to start so I took a bit of a look at what Batsly Adams was doing (he and his US compatriot are an obvious match by the way, as his ROMs complemented the set in a way above and beyond anything he had done for the festival thus far), took some video of Nullsleep gearing up and the next thing I knew I might as well have been at that nightclub from the start of Blade, where the vampires dance mindlessly and furiously.

I’m not generally much of a dance fan, so the only reason to which I can attribute my total mindloss is that Nullsleep’s performance is so geared towards affecting the gamer and the chip fan. In my more lucid moments I noted the overall cyberpunk apocalypse feel so familiar to many of us from RPGs and adventure games (Final Fantasy VII is the obvious reference). Except while the settings of those games spurred us to embark on a crusade to set the world right, Nullsleep spurs us to get fired up about it and dance our faces off. I think I actually shouted “boom” at one point, unless that was the sound of the person next to me’s brain exploding.

Anthony: After the wasteful last song of Dot.AY, Nullsleep initially continued the boner-killer part of the night. His first words (“You guys are descended from convicts right? Then start acting like it!”) was directed at the audience during a transition. Hint: if you’re going to get a crowd revved up, try it during a song.

From this dodgy beginning, however, Nullsleep won me over one atonal grinding blasting beat at a time. A real watershed moment for the festival came when he started a particular song, and the bass in the room was shaking everything in sight; brutal is the key word here. The energy level of the crowd built and built into a pure frenzy where everyone was thrashing about harder than at a Cannibal Corpse gig.

The only downside of this rampant energy – his stage moves seemed a little forced, like every move and scream and headbang was tuned to every exact moment of every song. This being said, the energy and excitability of his performance well and truly won over the crowd and this reviewer.

Patric Catani

“Ok, my computer has never done that. Must be the other hemisphere.”

Anthony: The night’s energy level dipped somewhat with Mr Catani, but not in a bad way. This veteran of the chipmusic scene started somewhat dubiously, with no title slide on the projector or introduction from the MC. But his music spoke for itself – fun, joyous tunes that really made the room jump.

It was a real pleasure to see Patric work his music, as his program was projected onto the screen behind him at all points of the gig (except for a random film projected at certain points). We could see that he had prewritten all his music, but shifted and improvised at many points. He also provided the highlight of the whole night when, at one point, his rig cut out; with a ‘FUCK!’, he kicked it back in, right on the beat. Everyone went nuts. I must say that of all the acts, Patric was truly the most joyous, with 7bit Hero a close second.

Tim: Too exciting. Catani’s the kind of crazy German (not Dutch, as I originally thought) guy who invents soundtracks to imaginary games and then draws up documentation and back-story for all the characters in it. I was expecting nerdy. What I got was a homebrew Amiga media player projecting the video output right onto Catani’s face, so everyone present could watch him tweak every little setting and select every instrument in real time. If you were paying attention you could probably have seen exactly how far off his wavelength setting was when he nearly deafened everybody present while playing something called ‘hardsidbreak hotel’.

Going from Nullsleep to this was one extreme to the other. Catani was clean and razor-sharp, and had my mind moving as fast as Nullsleep had my legs spazzing out. Good clean nerdy fun. Just how I like it.

Hally

iLKke – visuals

“I don’t know if you’ll know this song here, because it’s ‘Surfing USA’.”

Tim: Hally introduced himself quietly and almost apologetically, before slipping on a pair of shades and transforming into a 1980s party animal. His entire act was distinctly Japanese, and not in the same nostalgic way as compatriot Saitone. Everything Hally did flashed innocently and knowingly at the same time. Think a more forceful Space Channel 5. Or a Sonic the Hedgehog soundtrack, after they introduced recorded music but before it got really terrible.

Of everyone at the festival Hally was most like a video game character himself. Apart from the aforementioned personality change, he sounded a ‘lose a life’ sound effect every now and again and collapsed to the floor. A ‘power up’ effect would hit seconds later and he’d be up again dancing. The whole place lost power at one point during his set, and Hally entertained the crowd by shouting and accepting a bottle of wine, which he kept for the rest of the night.

iLKke once again showed that while Batsly Adams (my personally favourite artist for the show) had the old school know-how and Haebich had the techno wow-factor, he had the most versatile art. He genuinely seemed to be having a good time as he watched Hally run about the stage, making fine adjustments to the graphics so the whole thing flowed perfectly.



Anthony: What does one say about a Japanese guy that stumbles onstage, takes a photo of the audience, puts on a pair of futuristic funky glasses, and proceeds to talk through a vocoder to bring out a separate personality? Well, nothing much else, apart from the fact that Hally was easily the most outgoing act of the night.

Although he basically pressed ‘play’ on his rig, his dancing and thrashing about made the performance that much more entertaining. On the Blipfest site he is described as the “original Saturday night cyber punk”, and his music suits – a real mix of dance DJ aesthetics and sounds and chiptunes. As the night progressed, I noticed a distinct shift from straight chipmusic to more dancey offshoots, and Hally was the perfect sendoff to a fantastic two days of blippt, blasty fun.

Unfortunately we cut a few acts from this review for length. They are: Monodeer (dark Dutch lo-fi), little-scale (complex, artsy and ambient), Trash80 (epic and progressive) and _ensnare_ (dancey house music from creator of Frozen Synapse game soundtrack). All good acts that you should check out. Short HD vids of their sets, along with the sets of everyone else from the festival, can again be found here.