Author: Peter Swimm

  • Chipflip: Mind Bending the Cult of the Bent

    Chipflip tackles the tangled family tree of circuit bending. He writes:

    But I also think that chipmusic and demoscene practitioners could learn a lot from the conceptual and noisy ways of sound art and circuit bending/”building”. It is funny how circuit bending, chip music, and the demoscene is sometimes presented as related to each other, even though they are so different. Chip music is (too often) about 4/4 happy bleep pop and using default samples of LSDJ. Demoscene music is (too often) about perfectionism and competition. Circuit bending is (too often) about tech-concepts and predictable noise.

    Yea I have to say my favorite musical acts tend to be the artists that transcend the obvious ironies inherent in their platforms and become figures greater than their platforms. Think of People like Dan Deacon, Little-Scale, or Depreciation Guild. Once you make the journey into the world, and get over the novelty at the end of the day, you still have to create captivating and interesting music and art.

  • 8Bit Today: The Art of Helm

    helm_img10_thumb8Bit today has a great interview with pixel pusher Helm.  As with previous profiles, Sander gets deep into the philosophy and techniques of the artists he interviews.

    An excerpt:

    To make a more specific statement I’ll say that pixel art teaches the visual artist to respect the the foundational elements of their chosen genre of work. In pixel art you cannot go any smaller than a single pixel, and so anything you compose has to be made from this finite element, the atom of the digital display. Of course that’s all barring messing with cathode ray tubes in old televisions that displayed pixel art which could do half pixels and less (this inexact realm actually annoys me to think about and I’m very happy the high-tech digital displays of today show a single pixel in all its crisp and lucid beauty). This might seem like a limitation to the beginning artist, but I’ve found that too much freedom makes the artist fear their medium. If you can do anything, where do you start? Limitations breed innovations.

  • One Thousand Stars by The Black Comets

    [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/0iIhAWxhBek" width="425" height="344" allowfullscreen="true" fvars="fs=1" /]

    via

    Nice Final Fantasy tribute (a game i’ve never gotten into) that gives me an thin excuse to post some garage rock on the blog.

  • EtherNES Might Appear

    bOOdaw writes:

    EtherNES is a NES networking project that Wookie is currently designing the schematics and working with the NESdev community to connect your NES to your LAN.  Fortunately a solution has been found for the difficult male expansion connector at the bottom of the NES.  A female connector has been found to work from the company Sullins Connectors (more information within the thread).

    Some of the current development application ideas for EtherNES once completed:

    * An NES BBS
    * An MMORPG
    * Synching NESes together for audio playback
    * Launching remote code
    * A MIDINES alternative
    * A text-based web browser…
    * Etc…

    Serial Communication + Powerpak might be a great dev enviroment, think compiling your song and sending it directly to hardware! Or the midi alternative would be cool as well, Will keep an eye on things.

  • MDX Player for the PSP appeared

    p9220003Thanks to the following tip from kami68k:

    An MDX Player for the PSP appeared, its made by BouKiCHi:
    http://clogging.web.fc2.com/

    more about MDX:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X68000%27s_MDX

    And on a sidenote, Naruto has announced a new Sound Driver for the Sharp X1 (why is everyone doing new Soundrivers lately?)

    There is nothing to see yet though:
    http://www.rootnyanplus.com/user/naruto/