My Presentation of 8-bit Users

Last week I made a presentation at Merz Academy called Hackers and Suckers: Understanding the 8-bit Underground. I was invited by Olia Lialina for a lecture series called Do You Believe in Users? in Stuttgart. This question should be understood in the context of a disappearing user in modern discourses on design. Computers have become normalized and invisible, and the user seems to have a similar fate. (read more in Olia’s Turing Complete User)

The talk was about 8-bit users, and the hype around 8-bit aesthetics. I talked about different 8-bit users – from those who unknowingly use 8-bit systems embedded in general tech-stuff, through stock freaks and airports, to chipmusic people and hackers. I explained how “8-bit” is both a semiotic and materialist concept, but often used as a socially constructed genre. 1950s music or 1920s textile can be called 8-bit today.

I explained what the qualities of 8-bit computing are, as based on my thesis: simple systems, immediacy, control and transgression. Some examples of technical and cultural transgression followed, and then I gave the whole “8-bit-punk-appropriator-reinvent-the-obsolete” speech and then dissed that perspective completely. Finally, I tried to explain my own view of non-antropocentric computing, man-machine creativity, media materialism, and so on. When I prepaired the presentation I called this Cosmic Computing, but I changed it because my presentation was already hippie enough…

• Humans cannot have a complete & perfect understanding of a computer.  Following ideas from Kittler – and the fact that 30-year-old technologies still surprise us – this seems controversial for computer scientists, but not so much for artists?
• Users bring forth new states, but that might be all normal for the machine. This is controversial for all ya’ll appropriatingz artistz, but not for Heidegger and computer scientists.
• All human-machine interactions are both limited and enriched by culture, technology, politics, economy, etcetera. Meaning that “limitations” and “possibilities” are cultural concepts that change all the time.
• Don’t make the machine look bad — don’t be a sucker. Make it proud! Another anti-human point, to get away from the arrogant ways that we treat technologies.

In hindsight, it was a pretty bad idea to be so anti-user in a lecture series designed to promote the user. (: And the discussion that followed mostly evolved around the concept of suckers. Some people seemed to interpret what I said as “if you are not a hacker you are a sucker”. This was unfortunate but understandable. I don’t mean that there are only two kinds of users. They are merely two extremes on a continuum.

Hackers explore the machine in artistic ways and they can be coders, musicians, designers — whatever. They are not necessarily experts but they know how to transgress the materiality/meaning of the hardware/software. They can make things that have never been done before with a particular machine, or something that wasn’t expected from it. That often requires not-so-rational methods, which is not always based on hard science. Just because you know “more” doesn’t make you better at transgression. There is a strong connection between user and computer. Respect, and sometimes a strong sense of attachment - even sexual? That’s probably easier to develop if you don’t plan to sell it when the next model comes out. (btw, this is not some kind of general-purpose-definition of the term hacker, just how I used it in this presentation)

Suckers, on the other hand, don’t seem to have this connection. They buy it, use it and throw it away. Either they don’t feel any connection to the object, or they don’t want to. They act as if they are disconnected from technology, and only suck out the good parts when it suits their personal needs.

It is a disrespectful use. The machines are treated merely as instrumental tools for their own satisfaction. Suckers are consumers to the bone. Amazing technologies are thrown at them, and suckers treat them as if they don’t even exist – until something stops working. Or they go all cargo cult.

I don’t like it when I act as a sucke.r, but it happens all the time. I recently got an iPhone for free. I’ve had it for months without using it, because I am scared of becoming a sucker 24/7. I am definitely not in charge of my life when it comes to technology. And I like that. Hm…

 

►???

Go ahead! Yeah! ► PRESS PLAY ON ??? (download: 1 2)

A few years ago there wasn’t much chip bass around, but since then it has become pretty common. The Canadian mystery man known as ??? is one of the top players, fusing reggae and hip hop into a melodic and fönky sauce, oscillating between dub and skweee. With one of the most ungoogliest names around, his music used to be pretty complicated to find (since he deleted it all the time), but then he released Wall You Need is Love on Pause in 2011.

His next release is right here, at Chipflip. No titles, no bullshit – pure irreductionsm! It consists of two mixes of 30 minutes each, accessible through an interface made by the Venezuelan artist ui. The first mix is a set of Gameboy dub, in ???’s characteristic carefree style. The second one is more hip hoppy, and also shows off some of his wobbly C64-songs. The hip hop mix also contains an Amiga remix that I made. Can you find it? Btw, ??? also makes less chippy stuff as Babaji Beat. Fade Runner

Amigacore Without Amiga?

At the excellent Bimbo Tower store in Paris, they have a specific section for Amigacore. I’ve never seen that before. It had about 10 vinyls with classics from DHR-people like Catani and Babalon, artists from Bloody Fist, and so on. But there were also two releases that I’d never heard about.

R-ictus – Onanisme Rituel (video) is some sort of speedcore and Vverevvolf Grehv’s album Zombie Aesthetics is a bit more metal-oriented (video). They are both quite lo-fi, but obviously not produced only with Amiga.

But it has the Amiga spirit. And perhaps some of it was even made with the Paula chip of the Amiga. But that’s not the point here. Perhaps Amigacore is a valid genre even without the Amiga? I wasn’t convinced about the term when I wrote this. But if there’s a special section for amigacore in a record store, it does have a broader relevance for music listeners.

I suppose that amigacore has lo-fi and distorted sounds that has not been drenched in cheesy postproduction effects like a lot of breakcore still seems to be. So it’s not only about the raw timbre, but also about the sequencing technique. I believe that trackers were highly influential on both IDM and breakcore in the 1990′s. Early ‘breakcore’ acts like Venetian Snares and Nasenbluten used the Amiga. So perhaps amigacore is basically like ‘oldschool breakcore’…?

 

Chip Rock

Maniac Mansion, who supposedly released an album in 1999 (hm), were a chip rock act from Louisiana, USA that split up in 2005. After that the two members started to make videos and porn music, apparently. The Maniac Mansion songs are not easy to come by anymore, but there are some on the Myspace. I stumbled across some of their MP3s on a forgotten harddrive, and thought I’d write a little piece about chip rock. I’ve written about other chip-genres here.

Anamanaguchi are probably the most famous ‘chip rock’ act these days, tending more towards pop than punk I suppose. The Depreciation Guild even more so, and are also gaining recognition outside of the chip-bubble. Going more towards punk, there’s for example Superdöner (hello myself) and Go With Fourteen O.

There is plenty of metal-smelling 8-bit music without guitars. People like Virt and Heospheros and Norrin Radd make intricate beep “metal” that relate to the old Konami NES-style. Others do it a bit harder like Laconic Zero (related to the underground-famous Next Life) and use C64 and guitar/bass. Aleksi Eeben’s the Grand Rules is a true metal epos, made strictly on C64 (in his own tracker I guess). To get more grindy you should check out Unas, who I can’t seem to find a link for atm. If you prefer things more noisy, you can check out chip noise.

It seems that ’nintendocore’ and ’8-bit screamo’ is pretty popular at the moment, but I’m not really sure. I used to be quite into this stuff, and also did some stuff, but I’ve lost touch. Anyway – the most intense chip rock I’ve seen, is the French one-man band, Duracell. He plays a regular drum-set, but triggers old videogame music with it. Despite the 1980s game music, it is surprisingly refreshing since he is such a good and violent drummer and because he actually sequences the music by using different trigger-combinations. He still seems to be doing long tours around Europe, so try to catch him!

Okay, now time for the last dance! Check out Klisje Paa Klisje – the Amiga scene’s answer to November Rain. Feel the power of 15-minute mega-ballad! There’s plenty more MOD-rock to be found, like Bruno’s Valerian 777. But now let’s end with a funny youtube-clip.

Chip Jazz: Miles Davis Tribute Released

Through TCTD we get to know that Kind of Bloop is out. It is a collection of 8-bit versions of Miles Davis’ 50-year-old album Kind of Blue. It has already made some people rather upset, as seen in some of the comments here, which is always a good start. And they made $2,000 in 4 hours, so it is apparently very popular.

As opposed to the conceptual use of chip-sounds here, these versions are jam-packed with notes and effects. It is top notch tracker aesthetics, made by the established figures Virt, Disasterpeace and Shnabubula and also Ast0r and Sergeeo that I weren’t familiar with before. It is a refreshing release in many ways: it’s far from standard harmony disco, it’s not only hardware purism, and as opposed to the abundance of content in so many other places, it is only 5 songs. On the downside, you can only get it through Amazon payment.

Andy Baio, the project leader, was only able to find four 8-bit jazz covers made before. Although that sounds absurd to me, he might be close to being right. Jazz is very different from chipmusic: improvisation, elaborate time signatures, and detailed timing are impossible in many chip music progams. There is not a lot of chip jazz to begin with, and those that do/did jazz didn’t do much covers. On the C64 there are no (STIL-searchable) covers of Davis, Coltrane, or Mingus. But really, four covers, ever? Neaeaääauh. Anyone has any ideas?

Amigacore

In the 1990s there were plenty of record releases with hardcore Amiga music. Artists like Neophyte, Nasenbluten and Patric Catani used Amigas, usually not for MIDI-sequencing, but bringing the crispy internal sound to dancefloors around the world. I have a feeling that the fact that they used Amigas was not important neither for artists nor audience. They just happened to use Amigas for making music – an attitude that sometimes feels absent among chipmusicians today. The Amiga hardcore music of the 90s might be the perfect antithesis to chipmusic that concerns techno-romanticism, videogame-nostalgia and easy dance music.

Maybe Atari Teenage Riot, or their label Digital Hardcore Recordings, brought this kind of low-tech digi-punk attitude to a larger audience, and made it more defined and “relevant”. But what kind of homecomputer hardcore is around today?

The reason for doing this post was reading (at tctd) about two new 7″ vinyls with Amigacore. Raverblood by Dispyz and I by Stagediver – both released at Radio Graffiti last month. They feature longer tracks with fresh arrangements, short grind slammer parts, beeps and melodies, crispy lo-fi samples, and classic Amiga artifacts such as the glitch you get when playing notes at note B3. (too high) Listen to them online, and buy them.

Two other rather recent amigacore releases are Davros vs Unibomber – The Final Amiga 500 Battle (2008) and Phriz-B – Pulsing Quiche Gas (2006). Xylocaine, John Dark, and Christoph de Babalon are other amigacore artists, but I am not sure which releases would fit in the timeline (ie, mainly use internal Amiga sounds). Does anyone know?

Btw, if you live in the Detroit area and like Amiga hardcore, you might want to check this.

Btw2, if you are a bit hesitant about using the term Amigacore, that makes two of us.

Noise Music

Noise is not as boring as you think. Mathematically speaking, noise is maximum content. It is everything at once, all frequencies in random order. When other shapes have some kind of continuity to fall back on, noise goes full out to never return. It is random and lacks order,which does not mean that everything can happen. White noise always sounds and looks like noise, it doesn’t just randomize itself into an opera. That is why noise music is fascinating to me, because it explores randomness in a social sense. For me, ideal noise music keeps transforming and contrasting and makes me feel displaced, confused. Noisy soundscapes in all honour and cut-up frenetics yeah yeah, but making good noise music is something far more difficult. I am not sure I ever experienced something like that from a recorded piece of music.

8-bit noise music is not very common, which means that good 8-bit noise music doesn’t really have best of compilations (yet!). It is maybe a bit like someone over at 8BC said about breakcore: the certain particularities with a genre that make it so good, are quite tricky to reproduce with an old soundchip and is therefore often completely lost. Indeed, good 8-bit breakcore is also quite rare (nevertheless something we will get back to in that thing called future). Here are a few examples of 8-bit noise music that I appreciate, and if you have more suggestions then feel free to leavy a harsh and random comment with maximum content. I must have left out a lot of gems, right?

Fjyssel is a Dane that uses the C64 data cassettes as audio material. He cuts it up, adds effects and other sounds.

Apostleship of Noise – a Swedish duo that use two Amiga500′s and other things, including about 10 effect pedals. The results are not very much like chip music at all.

Neurobit – Dutch one-man noise/ambient-band. “Producing soundscapes, drones, Pulses and noises using 4bit, 8bit, & LCD console sounds based on the idea of a live situation.”

Herr Galatran: Show 1×04 for Radio ill. (MP3 2008) Live noise improvisation on Atari 130XE in Berlin.

Narwhalz of Sound: American noise, probably irritating for some. Visit  dotcomandshit and myspace.

More occassional noise

Overthruster: Legendary American chaos musician, usually more rhythmical than drone-noisy.

Environmental Sound Collapse: Occasional noise from this American, usually harsh and dark.

Shame On Me

But a bit of self-promotion has to slip by here. I’ve done a few noise experiments, but this audiovisual piece is very overlooked. The visuals are made by Rosa Menkman (who also does research on glitch, noise, etc). I give you Eastern Fire Swim. (audio is an unedited C64-jam)

Cycle Music

What kind of music do you make when the coder has used almost all the computing power, the designer had his/her go, and there is not even enough CPU-power left to play sounds? You make zero cycle music!

Crossbow is a C64-programmer notorious for doing what other top-coders say is impossible. This time he made 80 ‘kefrens-bars’ wobble on the screen and then Deekay (very talented pixel artist) made a logo and told Crossbow to open the border for design-purposes. (The C64-screen has borders around the main screen, and displaying graphics there requires some tricks, but has been made since 1985)

So now the music is left with 5 cycles – basically five machine code instructions. This is an almost ridiculous challenge, and to my knowledge noone has attempted it before. (am I wrong?) That leaves a composer with exploring the hardware, since there is no room for software. The solution was to start a sound in each of the SID’s 3 channels just before the effect starts, then stop the sounds and let it play on without using the CPU. That would be as pure as chip music could get, but with the few cycles left there is also a bit of software involved. They are used to semi-randomly fetch values from the sine tables (of the demo effect) to change the tone of a triangle wave. Apart from the triangle tonality, there is a bass-tone that ringmodulates with a second channel, to create that slow oscillation that is so particular for the SID-chip. The result is one of the purest instances of chip music, the new age of chip meditation with a minimum amount of data. Software sucks, behold the randomoid chip drones!

The demo – Negative Karma – was first released on 27 December without music, which was added the following day. The programming behind the music was made by Crossbow, so we can call him the composer. (I will not discuss ‘algorithmic authorship’ here) It seems fair to say that the music could have been much more complex with more time spent on constructing less arbitrary algorithms. It could also be interesting to play more with the sounds – especially ringmodulation. Nevertheless, this is an exciting start for generative music with almost no software. As far as I know, there are very few examples of generative compositions in the demoscene. The Tiny Sid Compos involved some, such as Block Acid Dub by Frantic which is 256 bytes (including song player). Does anyone know of more generative 8-bit works? (that are more complex than Delta, To Be On Top, Hawkeye, Lazy Jones)

More classical chipmusic

Linus Åkesson has done it again, in May.

“It struck me that, at least in theory, organ pipes should generate quite primitive sound waves. If so, how come a church organ doesn’t sound like a chip tune, which is also built up from simple waveforms? Well, actually it will, if you remove the church. And if you connect a Commodore 64 home computer to a loudspeaker in a large hall, it will sound like an organ.”

Reverberations is an 8-bit approach to J. S. Bach. Obviously based on 8-bit hardware and code, this does however sound very little like chipmusic. Just as chipflip wrote before, with Åkesson’s skills in both classical music and C64-assembler, he can point the finger to the quantization we know from 99% of other chipmusic (and most digitally sequenced music?). “The goal is not to play the right notes in the right order; that’s the starting point” to use his own words. With the reverbs added, this really sounds like there is both an organ and an organist present. Halleluja!

Usually, chipmusic seems mostly concerned with pop, games, dancing, happiness, clubs and so on. By placing a C64 in a church (virtually) and having it play Bach with the feel, touch, and limitations of an organ players’ hands, it seems to me that Åkesson has made a pretty hardcore recontextualisation of chipmusic. When I listen to Reverberations I think about christianity, note sheets, motoric skills, and the 18th century. On one hand, that’s pretty crazy results from a C64 and reverb. On the other hand, it’s not really that surprising that a modern machine can simulate (emulate?) these simple waveforms. But anyway – this is a rather perfect example of 8-bit music that is not in the form of chipmusic. Reverberations has almost nothing to do with with the culture, composing style, software, and context of chipmusic. Only the technology is shared. Medium does not necessarily cause form, as I said before.

When I found this, I felt like releasing a song I did a while ago: religious chip rock. It was also made with a C64 and reverb, but I have some angel-like (hehehe) singing aswell. It is also not that quantized, since I am playing drums and guitar live on the C64-keyboard with a vodka-induced mind. I just uploaded it to labelable and internet2008 only for You.

Chiptune Tits

According to the graph I generated over at blogpulse, seems I should stop saying chipmusic and start talking about chiptune if I wanna hang with the majority. Or should that be chiptuneS..? Micromusic is not popular in the blogosphere anyway. The peak in May was caused by the Crystal Castles buzz, which I never wrote about here (well, it’s mentioned in the plagiarism-page). Anyway. I will try to stick to saying chiptune about a particular chip..eh..tune..song, which is a part of the genre chipmusic. But my perspective is doomed, I tell ya! Doomed to the death of deaths!

np: micromusic episode 01 by Starpause (dj set, chipcutupmicronoisepopelectroyeah)