Reggae Dub(step)

American DJ Squincy Jones recently put out his Nintendub session which is not for the die hard chip-ears - see it more as a “crunkstep” set with the occassional occurence of NES-stuff. It would be nice to hear more chipmusic with a taste of dub, 2-step, grime, and these things. Quarta330 might be the most famous in this area, recently releasing a 12″ on the prominent label Hyperdub. Quarta has not been spreading MP3s around like most chipmusic people, but now you can download a live-set he performed a few months ago in Tokyo here. Another Japanese act with Gameboys and effects is Cow’p, also making some fresh dub, dancehall and jungle things. Check out this and this and download more from his site.

Although the music of the netlabel Jahtari is nice digital dub, I didn’t find much with Ataris or chipmusic, except for Dubmood’s release. But 8-bit dub has been made well by the demoscene group Up Rough for quite a while. Most of it is sample based Amiga MOD-music, performed with brilliance by for example Skope and Mortimer Twang. But the two most recent releases are C64 songs: Move Move Dub 000 and Move Move Dub 001 by Mortimer Twang. Slowly moving out of the world of Amiga demoscene, Up Rough for example has a radio that you can tune into now. Most of it is Amiga or C64 stuff, and far from just dub. Another member of Up Rough is that bastard Goto80, who has made dub-smelling music aswell, for example: Ajvar Relish and Emanation Machine (Hard Dub).

“Classical” Chip Music

I remember a few years ago when I found a song performed by 7 C64:s. It was a cover by some “old classical composition” (in lack of better terminology). Unfortunately I didn’t really dig more deeply into this, until yesterday. It was programmed by Linus Åkesson in assembler to “get rid of the boring, quantized timing found in most computer-developed music” as he puts it himself. I had never really made a connection between “classical” music and chipmusic before and this was a fresh eye-opener. Browsing through his website, it turns out that Linus Åkesson is a very interesting data boy. For example:

1) He created his own chip. Together with his demoscene crew Akesson made the actual chip that plays the sounds and music: The Hardware Chiptune Project (2007). In a few days they made a microcontroller (8 Mhz CPU, 8kb ROM, 2kb RAM), programmed the sound generator and the tracker-software to finally make the music. The result is something far less minimalistic than Tristan Perich’s 1-bit music (2006).

2) Åkesson made a melody search engine for the C64 music collection HVSC: SID Theme Search Engine. The HVSC contains most C64-songs ever released, and the fileformat is essentially open source - containing all instruments and notation. That is why Åkesson could generate a database with the notes from each channel of almost every C64-song - a process which took several days eventhough using an emulator.

But to get back to the “classical” music in SID-style. There are several compositions: Allt Under Himmelens Fäste originally by the legendary demoscener Mahoney, Romance originally by Chopin but now in SID+piano version and, Fratres originally by Arvo Pärt. There are even more but my favourite remains the 7xSID-song Förklädd Gud. The thing that gets to me is that it’s rare to hear chipmusic so carefully crafted. The sounds are 8-bit but the assembler dynamics of 7 SID chips (although emulated) makes it sound more like Wendy Carlos than Rob Hubbard. This is an interesting song to keep in your pocket when people blame chip music for being simplistic. So check out Åkesson’s website - there are lots of interesting projects and lots of information and downloads aswell.