Budapest 111117
Tomorrow I’m performing with Raquel Meyers in Budapest, for the premiere of the new documentary about the Hungarian demoscene. Check out the trailer here. See you there!
An Inventory of Broken Things
I don’t really work with broken things so much anymore. Still, there are times when everything seems broken. Whatever you try to do, there is a problem. Let’s see:
Both my speakers are cracked (now using in-flight “headphones”). The laptop screen is falling off. The cartridge port of the C64 is glitching. There’s the broken SID condom and the left side of the Amiga keyboard doesn’t work.
Obviously this isn’t very helpful. It’s the kind of basic functionalities that perhaps even most glitch/noise artists rely on. But I’ve realised that I always liked this chaos. It’s a kind of techno angst. You’re never safe!
Of course, the SID condom meant that I could bring the C64 into the most absurd electrical jungles. No AC/DC outbursts could touch me! Now I’m back in paranoia land.
This is either stupid lamer-lazy “punk posing” or healthy and genuine non-control. I just know that it’s a productive environment for me. Nothing works, everything is great. Over and out.
Makedir
Paris, 5 November
I’m playing in Paris on 5 November w/ Computer Truck, Divag, Eat Rabbit, Bacalao, Dr Von Pnok and more. The event is organized by Festen and Dataglitch — keeping the French micro-spirit alive! More info here.
Göteborg, Stockholm, Budapest
After my longest break from gigs in 10 years, here are some upcoming shows:
Göteborg: 8 October @ Fängelset. With Nordloef and others.
Stockholm: 20 October @ Klubb Bitcrush. With Fsfreak.
Budapest: 17 November @ Moleman 2 release party. Performing with Raquel Meyers.
2SLEEP1
2SLEEP1 is a playlist of audiovisual performances in text mode, designed to make you fall asleep. The idea is to show the music being composed in real-time (Exedub) along with typewriter-style animations (e.g. Sjöman).
Both the music interface and the graphics are built up from text symbols. This means that the (graphical) objects can work together with the (musical) instructions, on a visual level. Vank is a first rough test of this and Matsamöt makes a similar thing, without the improvisation. Finally, Echidna is a silent movie with semi-live music.
Made by Raquel Meyers and me, mostly using c-64 and Amiga. The videos are early explorations of new methods, so it’s rather brutal at times. Greetz to Poison (rip) and Toplap!
Goto80: Summer of Seven 5/7 (7″/MP3 Pingipung)
A: Sombanova
B: Mamasita
10 years ago I released my first 7″, so this is the right time for another one. A skweee-bossanova that goes drum-machine Squarepusher (?) and a romantic dub-pop song with Acid Terrorist vocals. Available as 7″ (only 200 copies) but also as MP3 in all those iTunes-Beatport kind of places. More details at Pingipung’s page.
You can listen to the B-side’s dirty 6581 action here. The vocals were improvised by Acid Terrorist, while I was dubbing away with an SX-64 and Wersiboard with a hacked Defmon. The A-side is made with more modern hardware, but uses a 16 millisecond loop for all the instruments except the drums.
If you like the B-side, you’ll like the next audiovisual text mode sleep release that I’m making with Raquel Meyers. Stay hungry! And also: check out the rest of Pingipung’s Summer of Seven series. Almost completely chip-free, yeeess!
Update. Today (4 june, 2012) I realised that the melody of Sombanova is from Raymond Scott’s Portonofino 2. Very strange experience. Sometimes melodies come from cosmos and dreams, sometimes from hard work, and sometimes from other songs. Afaik, this is the first time I do this.
LCP-releases
Another LCP has passed. A good one, as usual. I brought a C64 with what I thought was a broken SID-chip. I thought that I’d finally destroyed it despite the magical SID CONDOM that Mogwai built and gave to me 3 years ago. My idiot-trick was to take out the cartridge while the computer is on. But not even that killed the SID. The SID CONDOM is the shit (but Mogwai doesn’t have time to build you one – haha pilutta dig).
My official releases were:
> Matsamöt – an ambient song with a beat. It was voted as one of the worst tunes, which can be a very good thing! It will be featured in the next release at Chipflip.
> In the name of the Sword – an epic text mode demo by Linde, Acid Terrorist and me. Sort of similar to the Acid Burger demo.
And some other things I liked:
> Rambo. A chronicle of.. – Twoflower’s identical copy of the title-pic from the old Rambo-game. Although it’s visually identical, the stored data is completely different, due to the way that the C64’s stores pixels. It “is” not the same picture.
> 2011 – A press space odyssey – an unfinished demo with the strange progressive oldskool style that only Offence delivers.
> Fire – Joe’s winning picture and it’s well nice!
About interviewing
Interviews are strange. Sometimes it’s almost like being a research assistant for the journalist — especially when it’s about chip/demo stuff. Unpaid work is always the best work!
But yeah, recently I was interviewed by a journalist who had obviously studied my Chipflip-timeline pretty well. That was a nice change. And one of the purposes of that list was indeed to educate researchers (though that might’ve been lost now, when it’s become so big).
Here is the article in English. It’s packed with references, many of which I’ve never heard about (which is good!). I like that Kjell Nordbo is mentioned as one of the most respected producers in the scene (my guess is that both 4mat and me mentioned him).
There are also three separate articles for me (English), Pixelh8 and 4mat. Here are some of the questions with my original answers, if u’re into those things. And if you want to know more, read here.
Q. Do you sometimes feel limited by hardware/software used?
The character of any technology lies in the limitations. If something is unlimited, it doesn’t even exist. : ) The fun part of playing a piano is to have two hands and fixed notes and so on. So yes, of course I feel limited. Often it’s in a good way of subconsciously feeling like “phew, I don’t have to make that decision” or “ah okay nice so I have to challenge myself to come up with a different solution than what I was thinking of”. Sometimes it’s just bad, of course, when you want to have more voices and so on. But then I’ll just record stuff and overdub.
Q. Where do you place the born of chip music?
Either
– 1951 with the first digital music
– 1977 and the first video game console with a soundchip
– 1989 when the term chipmusic first appeared in the demoscene
– 1999 with micromusic.net, record relases, concerts, etc
The origin of chipmusic was, I guess, rather expected. There were computers with software that you could use to make music. So people started to do that. And they distributed their music for free, to get maximum attention. Demos/intros/music-compilations started to appear on big floppy disks, sent around the world. Or – and perhaps more interesting – there were also modem-networks of hackers/traders etc who distributed these materials around the world.
Q. I noticed that people thinks that chip music is a derivation of some Warp ambient-techno, but you will confirm me that it’s not so (maybe it’s the contrary, and people like AFX has been influenced to the gaming culture).
Aphex Twin’s label Rephlex was one of the few labels who were connected with the early chipscene around year 2000. They released Bodenständig 2000’s album, which is one of the first examples, and still a fantastic album. Also artists like DMX Krew and Cylob were slightly involved with micromusic.net. But other than that – all the big labels like Warp were far too serious to have anything to do with chipmusic : ) In general, it’s quite rare to hear chipmusic that sounds like slow IDM. The C64-musician ED is a good exception though.
Watch Biggest Hockey Now!!!
YEAH! Jacob found a video recording of when HT Gold was big in Copenhagen. It’s a C64-game that Autoboy and I destroyed and improved. He did the assembly-tinkering, I made the sounds and the world became a slightly better place.