► Hardhat – Toolboxing

Out now, here’s Toolboxing by Hardhat. It’s full-on instant techno with an interface made by the Javascript magician p01, known from the demoscene. There’s one long techno track and 17 additional bonus bangers, cued up and ready for your work out! The music was made on Gameboy Advance and fed through a Serge modular system. Yep yep, just look at how the bass makes Hardhat sweat! T-E-C-H-N-O!

Hardhat has been around in the chipscene for many years under names like Småm. He recently made two super interesting live music programs: the Pokrok sequencer for the Sony Pocketstation (!), and the nanoloopy Sqein for Nord Drum. Check them out! With this release he wanted to get out of his routine and make something different.

– I felt like I was being too dogmatic and precise when making music. It had to be this and that and bla bla snooze. I decided I wanted to make techno. Just techno. So I started to record really quick & fun little jam sessions with Game Boys and other consoles, stuff. I usually spent like 10 minutes recording and then maybe 15-20 minutes cutting it together to a more presentable track. These tracks are the bonus tracks.

– I found reBoy by Checkpoint to be a really nice sequencer for GBA, and I had wanted to process my Game Boys through the modular systems at my university for quite some time. It came together quite naturally. It’s a very simple setup though, I’m just using two envelopes & filters triggered by audio input- and that’s it. So basically, the entire Toolboxing main mix is made with reBoy, loaded with a bunch of OPL3 samples, running through the filters of a vintage Serge System. And if that’s not niche enough for you, I think my next release will be.

► Rico Zerone – Passenger

Chipflip proudly presents a new release from Rico Zerone and his Austrian world of computer funk and sensual space music. Passenger is his newest release with 21 minutes and 8 tracks in his characteristic styles. The drone-ish synthy ambient of Simulacrum and Morphic Resonance,  the easy-going stroller style of Cosmic Stroller, the dreamy cheese of Restart, to name a few. Short tracks that get the message across!

Check out the release here in a custom web interface designed by Enso and coded by Freedrull. You can also download all the songs as MP3, for free. Chipflip keeps it simple.

Get more from this powerful trio of lo-fi aficiandos: Rico Zerone / Enso / Freedrull

► Animal Romantics

Animal Romantics (slightly NSFW) is an audiovisual maxi single. Or music disk. Or … internet multimedia? Demo? Net art? Whatever you want to call it – this is 7 songs with synchronized visuals in Javascript and PETSCII. The music, text & visuals blend together to describe the construction of a lady, who has romantic dreams about monkeys.

You can even insert your own text and get a custom link to insult your friends with! Made by Raquel Meyers, evilpaul and Goto80 for the pl41nt3xt pavilion @ Wrong Biennale and Chipflip.

The song comes in one slow disco version and a faster vocoder pop version. They have been remixed by Limonious (the grand father of skweee), Steve (UK’s new king of FM-swing), The Toilet & Ljudit Andersson from the very underrated Mutantswing label, and finally a version from the don of Amiga disco, Dr. Vector. The whole thing runs in evilpaul’s text-mode Javascript library.

► PRESS PLAY

Works on most browsers, as long as you have a normal keyboard (hello mobile world).

₪ Future Potentials For ASCII Art

A. Bill Miller and I wrote a paper on ASCII art together last year, which was presesented at the French conference on computer art, CAC 3. Now we’re releasing it on chipflip.org behind a paywall! Nah, just kidding. This is PHR33 ZI3NCe w4R3Z!

Read Future Potentials For ASCII Art
(Logo by Spot/Up Rough)

tl;dr:

For some purists, ASCII art is only representational text graphics that uses 128 characters. In this paper, we define it as a broader genre with several subcategories.

The paper explains some of the origins of ASCII art, such as square kufic, poetry, hacking, typewriters and net art. It briefly mentions the different levels in which ASCII art can be understood and manipulated (such as character encoding, typeface, screen).

We discuss the future potentials of ASCII art mainly in terms of non-representative art and the ways in which ASCII art affects the way we communicate. How, for example, tricky Unicode band names pushes us to come up with words for symbols we never talked about before (hey Prince!). Or how URLs, account names and text advertising has given new relevance to ASCII art skills, and also created new challenges for ASCII artists.

In that sense, ASCII has gone from object to subject. It is no longer only an invisible transmitter, but an active ingredient in the way humans communicate.

We’ve edited the original text slightly and added links and pictures. Without permission. Sorry. Enjoy! If you have any suggestions feel free to leave a comment or send a mail.

► Omri Suleiman – Music For a 15 Year Old Me

A lot of chipmusic releases today is either “modern” or “chip”. Very few artists seem to pull off both, at the same time. This is exactly what Omri Suleiman does!

Music For a 15 Year Old Me builds on an oft-forgotten origin of chipmusic (crack intros) and fuses it with techno, house and UK hardcore from the 1990s. The results? A new future for chipmusic!

Stream and download for free at http://chipflip.org/05.

Crafted by the long-lost Amiga scene musician Omri Suleiman, it fuses dancefloor bass with sound tracker magic to form a refreshing mixture of crack intro mystics and dancefloor energy. Occasionally it has a similar machinic atmosphere to that of early Autechre, and other times it sounds like skilled guitar solos and computer ballads. As a plus, the original files all fit on a single floppy disk!

As usual, Chipflip doesn’t try to emulate the album form. Instead, this is more similar to a music disk with its eerie PETSCII  interface by Raquel Meyers and GotoAT. The MP3-archive is also available at archive.org.

Music For a 15 Year Old Me is Omri’s attempt to reach back to his teenage self, back when he was working with Amiga groups like Anarchy, Magnetic Fields and Scoopex. He was making chipmusic before the term even existed. Omri:

At that time maybe we referred to them more often as intro tunes, rather than chiptunes. The requirement that, after the copy protection was removed, a crack intro to publicise the group could be placed in the unused first sector of the floppy disk meant that the music had to be less than 10kb in size.

Eventually, Omri also started to perform in the London underground scene in acts like Afterglow and Invisible Technologies. They played live using two Amigas and a Yamaha music computer. While most of that music has been lost today (Raw EP on Beautiful Records is an exception), it is clear that Music For a 15 Year Old Me picks up on the ambience of Detroit techno, early UK hardcore and house. The process behind the release is also a nod back to himself:

To consider the only relevant audience to be, me, 20ish years ago – frees the creative process of considerations and conformities and fashion which can sometimes limit my approach to writing music.

In order to facilitate this concept, all of the songs have been produced using only a sound tracker type program (Milkytracker in this case), with the only sample editing being that available inside the tracker.

Which also means : no filters, no reverbs, no synths, no channel EQs or compression, no effects apart from those you program yourself by manipulating the pitch, volume or sample offset.

Here’s hoping that teenage Omri will pick up on this release, and respond with some more Suleiman music. To read Omri’s own words about this release, visit musicfora15yearoldme.com.

►???

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

► Phriz-B Live at Lazybird

Like many others, Phriz-B was making loud dance music on his Amiga in the early 1990’s. He didn’t exactly reach the charts with his tracker rave (unlike e.g. Urban Shakedown), but it was definitely good enough to go on an underground vinyl label.

Sadly, it never did. All that was ever released was a CDr in 2004. Luckily, I heard of this release from herv and got in touch with Phriz-B to get it re-released. What I got was even better – a live gig performed exactly 7 years ago with the original floppies from 1992-1994. No fancy equipment like hard drives or mixers. Original floppy headz, sweat!

Live at Lazybird contains some classic Amiga samples that some of you nerds might recognize. But other than that (and the precious Amiga distortion) this has little to do with chip/demo-blabla. This is party, not packdisk! Rave on!

Get it here

► Goto80 + 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 Goto80 (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!

► 01 Kommando Knorr

Here’s the first in a series of Chipflip-releases: Kommando Knorr. Finally they edited their C64-jams down to the song-format and agreed to release some of it. It’s electro-oriented (in the old sense) but still quite melodic and it doesn’t sound much like chipmusic, imho. First released as stickers on lcp. Enjoy!