PopMatters reviews Nullsleep live

PopMatters wrote a review of Nullsleep‘s Lit Lounge Show on Oct 3rd.  While its geat to see an lengthy article focusing on one of the live greats of the scene, the article falls short in a few ways. Some Excerpts:

But back to the familiar part for a moment: Imagine he’s set up like a conventional DJ, with pulsating basslines reaching outward from a huge 4×12 speaker cabinet atop of which he has placed a mixer cabled to two turntables. Now scratch the turntables—instead, they’re Game Boys.

Its a common conceit amongst many authors that chip music IS JUST like something you know very well, but MIND BLOWINGLY different. He goes on to overly complicate and mystify the process by describing artists using “expensive proprietary writers, others imported from Europe thanks to an industrious German” and making the logical leap that “it’s a lot like Tetris, but with square waves taking the place of those infernal L-shapes.”

But while he gets the basic demoracy of the chip platform wrong, he does touch on the point of it all with the following:

“There’s a minimalism in the equipment which you’d think would parallel the compositional philosophy, but in fact it seems to be the inverse. How much noise can we make with this?  How complex can the songs get with just two toys? With eight bits? Some say the absence of limitations is a mortal enemy of creativity; Johnson takes that philosophy and bites its head off as though it’s a dead bat.”

So it still worth a read, as we still wait for the right author to speak evocatively about the scene from an outsiders perspective.  I would like to see in the future authors start judging the music on the merits of the compostion isntead of waxing pihlosopically at length about the boring technical details, all the while getting many parts of the process incorrect, or simply representing them in a way that further distances the artists from potential fans.

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