A Connoisseur and a Casionova

Chip or not? Two nice small videos by oneedo, one featuring music by the legendary Australian Casio rocker Casionova. It’s music made with the soundchips of keyboards, so that would make it chipmusic. He he, Hegel. He produced an album in a chicken farm in 2005, but unfortunately I can’t seem to find the photos anymore. There were other good aussie keyboard freaks back in the days, such as Reverse Engineers and Toydeath. There was a micro_hq in Melbourne also, and today there’s Game Boy Australia. Hello!

Neurobit: 8″ 8-bit Release Made of Plastic

Neurobit is a Dutch 8-bit ambient/noise artist working with Gameboy/NintendoDS/etc and lots of effect pedals to create some pretty lush-horror sounds. He has also released breakcore-oriented things as Rioteer. Neurobit just released an 8″ single that is not made of vinyl but from recycled plastic bottles. So it’s light and has its own sound to it, I suppose. Both songs are improvised Gameboy music, with no post-production. If there is a real deal, this might be it! “Every record is individually cut and all the artwork had to be delivered on a printed sheet of paper and was photocopied for the labels.” Limited edition of 100, so get it while it’s hot! More info here.

4-mat: 1989-2009: Chipmusic: Code: History

4-mat is one of the few composers who has been continuously active with chipmusic for 20 years – commercially aswell as in demos/crackintros. He’s also programmed a number of very good 8-bit productions for various 8-bit machines in Ate Bit such as the amzing 1k intro In A Loop (which doesn’t loop). He recently started a blog where he’s been posting all his chipmusic from 1989 to 2009, his own music drivers for the odd TED-chip inside C16/Plus4, and an interesting text about the beginning of (sample-based) chipmusic around 1989, and its due course up to today: 1 2 3. So yeah, if you haven’t checked out his stuff, you should. There’s not any real punchline to this post, no juicy gossip or strange theories. Btw, he just posted about the origins of  “that Paranoimia track” and supplied a previously unavailable music disk of the original author.

Octamed Jungle with Mulder

Do you remember the 1990s big beat and Fatboy Slim’s Rockafeller Skank? Well, one of the official remixes was made on Amiga by Mulder, and here’s a video of it running in Octamed! (the released version used an external sampler though) What I find fascinating with these clips is that the jungle I listened to as a teenager could very well have been made on Amiga. Sure, a lot of Protracker demoscene music was good enough to be released on record. But it wasn’t. And the world of records was something completely different. Maybe it’s a bit like realizing that Michael Jackson was making his music on a Sega. C:

Mulder also recently put online the drumtrack of Amazon II – Booya (Open Your Mind), which was synchronized by click-track to a second Amiga running the rest of the audio. Amazon II consisted of Tony B and Aphrodite, who also made music as Urban Shakedown that also released records with Amiga jungle.

This is perhaps irrelevant for what we call chipmusic today. Aesthetically and culturally, it surely is. (I really like jungle though). But technically, it uses the same Amiga “soundchip” that 4-mat and the others utilized to make the sample-based music that was chipmusic in the 1990s. I’ve touched on this semi-absurdity before and by including Osdorp Posse in the timeline. Selecta.

A Wiki on Soundchip Hacking

I just started a wiki about Soundchip Hacking at 8bc. Hopefully this can become a resource to get a quick explanation of different tricks that have developed over the years, and when it was made. So please help to contribute. Alles ist gut, as we say in Sweden.

C64 in Argentina: Crack the Crack

The Polish magazine C&A Fan #4 from last summer contained two articles on Commodore 64 and cracking in Argentina. For me this is a very interesting topic, because both the hardware, software, and the computer cultures were (are?) different there.

The first article is about the company Drean that manufactured the official Argentinian C64 clone, and the other one concerns “cracking” in Argentina. Together they paint a picture of how Drean bought faulty Commodore motherboards, fixed them up, and released them as official clones (unlike most clones that are unauthorized). For the software part, shops sold cracked games and even made their own versions of the EU/US crackintros. I really like this idea of ‘cracking the cracks’, messing with the commercial *and* the underground sense of copyright and attribution. (Hm, I think 8GB once told me that even demos were sold in South America..) Anyway, I asked the author Pablo Roldan for an English version, and I was happy to get a quick response. I have edited the text slightly and here they are for your pleasure. If you have more sources or information to add, please comment! I did not fact check these texts. Also, it seems that CSDb or intros.c64.org could use an update with South American software.

• The Cracking Scene in Argentina: English (original version in Spanish, Polish)
• Drean: Commodore in the Land of PAL-N: English, (original version in Spanish, Polish)

Free Friday Music on a Wednesday: little-scale

Check Handheld Heroes for little-scale’s new release: Nothing Has Been Left Unspoken. As usual it is a delicate mixture of melancholy, spacious harmonies, crispy 8-bits, hardware hacking and FM and PSG. Being a multi-instrumentalist, this time he uses Sega Mega Drive, Atari 2600 and Commodore 64. For the last few years, little-scale from Australia has shown great new approaches to chipmusic by merging hardware hacking, programming and music. Little-scale is a good example of how hardcore technology appropriation/appreciation goes hand in hand with composition. He has transgressed many soundchips, but his music is good regardless (I think).

For example, take Molecules from his last release. I’m just guessing, but perhaps he’s using the Atari2600 for which he’s made several hacks. In this song, he’s doing something apparently basic: playing samples and slightly detuning a pulsewave melody over time. Thing is, this hasn’t been done on the Atari2600 before because its timbre & tuning is quite odd. But also, this kind of detuning is rare to hear in chipmusic in general. Most chipmusic is fixed to chromatic scales, and it is surprisingly rare that music moves outside of this. I think it’s wonderful how the detuning makes me feel a bit uncomfortable+happy. With little-scale, music and interface goes hand in hand into the data sunset. Oink!

update: oh, he just did 30 songs in 30 days too!

The iPhone C64 Emulator and Progress=Change

Chipmusic is about accepting the system’s features (aka limitations), and expanding them (aka breaking them). 30 years of new sounds shows how a culture can progress through software and not hardware updates. Competition and community, trial and error & rationalism has contributed to it. But it presupposes that you are allowed to do what you want with the technology.

The C64 iPhone emulator was released in September as the first multi-purpose emulator on the iPhone. But Apple does not allow users to run downloadable code on the iPhone. Apple wants to retain control over what software is running on the iPhone (avoidable by jailbreaking and e.g. cydia). But since the C64 has a built-in BASIC programming language, Apple cannot stay in control. So the solution was to remove BASIC from the emulator, and offer a selection of something like 5 games. In that way, users cannot make their own software and they cannot load whatever software they want. This is the complete opposite to the hippie-libertarian-multimedia ‘coolness’ that has been around Apple since the 1970s. You know, Bill Gates writes a letter in 1976 to promote software copyright and ever since Apple has been cool and Microsoft evil…?

Whatever. But the iPhone C64-emulator transforms the C64-system into a restricted gaming console (but, but). Surely, 8-bit computers are often described as gaming computers. Indeed, they were developed (also) for gaming purposes, and not colourless and soundless business purposes. But they were not read-only and interpassive like consoles, so they should not be remembered, emulated and discussed as such. It is (even) harder to talk about intented uses of computers compared to e.g. Gameboy and NES, in that sense. Ie, there is nothing necessarily subversive about making your own music and software on a C64, even if chipmusic is often described in that way.

While the iPhone C64-emulator is just a piece of entertainment software, it plays part in a larger tendency to reduce old technology to something simplistic, something limited. But limited in what sense, and according to who? I can turn on my C64 and start programming in 1 second, and make music in 1 minute. I can easily have it fixed when it’s broken, or atleast understand what the problem is. I have access to 25 years of software and knowledge, and with a lack of commercial interests I do not have to consider intellectual property regulations. I don’t find 3 channels of sound to be limiting; I think it’s empowering. Of course, digital technology is improving in many quantitative and qualitative ways, enabling users to do more, and faster. But it is not a one-dimensional line of neutral progress – it is change, resulting from economic, cultural, social, and aesthetical values. New technology is not better per se. Even if it is, it doesn’t mean that new ideas require new technology. That modernist idea has been questioned in so many other fields, but is painfully present in digital media.

Oh well. So… here is some of little-scale’s soundchip-related iPhone apps! (Btw, does anyone know how the emulator can be sold, being based on the GPL-licensed Frodo?)

aSCIIaRENA – New Site for Scene Ascii

aSCIIaRENA has been announced by Up Rough and Divine Stylerz. Now you can easily watch fresh Amiga ASCII online, the way it was supposed to look, and hang out with elite ASCII boyz and girls. The site has some of the usual “social media” features such as a wall, forums, private messaging, voting, up/downloads. But those features are derived from old BBS-culture and not the Internet per se.

BBSs were extensively used already in the 1980s, and formed the backbone that allowed the cracker- and demoscene to blossom as somewhat isolated phenomena. Since a BBS is text-based, designers had to work with the default text characters that were sent over the phone lines. ASCII-artists designed graphics and logotypes in a graffiti-like style, quite different from current naive ASCII art online, the net.art ASCII-style of the 1990s, or earlier attempts of text art in the 1920s or 1860s.

ASCII artists release collections of their work (ASCII collys) and it’s these collys that are indexed at aSCIIaRENA. I think that almost all of it looks great, but I have a very soft spot for Amiga ASCII. I ran a small and shitty BBS in the mid 1990s (google-one-hit-wonder, almost), and called local boards with my 2400 baud modem. If you want read more on text art, check this post.

Chipdisco DJ Tool Out Now

PortaMod by Syphus, mentioned earlier, is now announced for the public here! It’s a new player for older music formats, which offers alot more than performing/visualizing recorded music. It’s basically a library for Processing to play MOD/XM/S3M, currently presented in a few different forms, for example the Chipdisco. It offers two decks for DJ-action, and is also a great way to perform your own music live. You can tranpose songs, tempo changes, automatic beatmatch, loop quarters of patterns and jump inbetween them, mute individual channels. And you can use either keyboard, mouse, or MIDI. Chipdisco also allows you to navigate through songs with the cursor keys. Left/right changes the song position in the pattern list, while up/down goes a step up or down in the current pattern playing.

The source will be shared, so it will be interesting to see what the future holds for MOD/XM/S3M performances/visualizers in Processing. (For those using Supercollider, you can use Fredrik Olofsson’s redMOD and redXM here.)