I just recalled a project that never really got the attention that it deserved. In 2007, Warren John Myles produced All Your Top 40 Are Belong To Us. Every week he made a Gameboy version of the #1 song in the UK, added vocals and drew a handmade cover for it. He only got one attempt at drawing the cover. Here he explains how the project was inspired by the low-fi/spontaneous manifesto Dogme 95. Annoyingly enough, none of the songs are online anymore. Two Internet years are like 7,000 dog years.
What I like abot AYT40ABTS is that it was such a double-edged project of forcing yourself to make something good out of something that was probably complete crap. It is not easy to follow through a project like this. When I met him last year he did indeed say that his social life did suffer from it at times. I’ve done similar projects myself – one MP3-release every month in 2007, and together with a friend one MP3 every day at internet2008. Or, we were supposed to but we are still struggling with September 2008. An Internet2008-year is like 0,5 dog years.
Little-scale and Lazerbeat are currently doing Lazerscale2010 where they each release one song per day. Five other musicians have joined in and they are all keeping up the paste, while two others have retired. Little-scale is tired after completing 20% but is still going strong and will defend the Australian honour in this war of the titans. It is like the Greek olympics, without the r.
Apparently they were inspired by the 30 Songs in 30 Days challenge which (afaik) began at 8bitcollective. It’s seen seen many failed attempts at delivering the goods, but some people stepped up: little-scale and Lazerbeat obviously, but also e.g 4mat, b-knox, larsby and zan-zan. I was surprised to see Tero make a very decent attempt aswell. Haven’t seen much releases from him after his top notch C64 acid 10+ years ago on vinyl and floppy.
Yea yeah. All hail the maniacs!
CHIPFLIP 
March 12, 2010 at 12:24 am |
Wow, Tero was my introduction to chip music. I’m going to give those a listen soon.
March 13, 2010 at 12:53 am |
HAH! 30 songs in 30 days really does eat up your time. I was ignoring work I needed to do to pay bills. :( As an exercise it was rather awesome, gave me some self esteem and learned a thing or two about my production techniques. I can’t imagine doing a track every day for a year!
January 9, 2011 at 12:43 pm |
[…] goal a few days into the new year, but the rest of the people didn’t make it. When I wrote this post I have to admit I didn’t think anyone would make it. Glad they proved me wrong. They are […]
October 15, 2012 at 8:28 pm |
[…] couple of years ago I made some lo-fi tracks together with Warren Myles. It’s some kind of cassette pop style, and two songs are now available for free over at […]