In a category loaded with winners, it took a stunning depth of complexity and raw punk rock infused live performer like starpause to rise above the pack. Sneaky beats and inventive live techniques all lead to the decision to acknowledge one of the scenes most riveting live performer.
Category: TCTD 2008 Awards
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Best Performer: Starpause
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Defender of the Chip: 2Player Productions
Perhaps the toughest hurdles our scene faces is that of promotion and of documentation. 2pp does both with style, dedication to details and overall high quality. In the years to come, artists may come and go, but the stunning visual documents they have helped produced should stand the test of time and do more to help engender crossover succes of our artists than any perhaps any other single group. -
Best Visual Artist: minusbaby
Picking our favorite sorta rican pixel pusher was difficult in the face of all the other talented artists, but it seems he went above and beyond this year on expanding his visual vocabulary and sheer volume of output. -
Artist of the Year
Oh my god! Its here for all the beans! Let’s DO IT!
The Best Artist is an incredibly subjective category. Being proficient on multiple levels is good, being synonymous with a style, or simply executing at a high level, all important things. Here are the innovators, the dominators, and the taste makers that are 2008’s Best Artists.
A multidimensional talent equally at home in art as in music, minusbaby had one of his most fruitful years with his various releases in music, art directing the Blip Festival, and taking his live performance to the next level. Always interesting, and ever moving, he could be a candidate in this category for years to come.
gwEm
As a coder of Maxymiser and a tireless advocate for his platform, gwEm has justification enough to be here. But he is also an awesome musician and live performer who seems equally at home in the club as he would be behind a podium waxing philosophically about chip, and the worlds view thereof.
Mr. Melvin is one of those talented multi instrumentalists who has the ability to excel at whatever genre he is involved in, and we are lucky to have him in our scene. At times funny, profane, and groundbreaking, his style is laid back and deceptively simple at times, but still waters run deep. Able to blend many styles in his own unique voice, and a amazing live performer, Bud is one of my personal favorites, and one everyone should have at least a passing familiarity with.
goto80 is also one of the best voices in the scene, especially for his firm connection to chips demoscenes roots. As a musician, performer, or blogger, his style is a breath of fresh air, even on works that are now seemingly older than most musicians in the scene. Able to bend and break the rules of chip composition with ease, he is perhaps most consistently inventive and fun musicians in the scene.
No artist is better on his own platform (just ask him!) than stu. Atari Solo was a soliloquy to the decimation of expectations for the poor little atari sound chip and his live show straddled the line between absolution and obliteration. One of the most exciting and accomplished composers in the scene shows signs of only getting better going into 2009.
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Best Live Visuals IV
All the way from my “madre Patria”, Spain, this crew which started as a duo is now a one man force, much alike The C-men, but still packs a punch: even if one would suppose that two factors on their own wouldn’t sum up as much, it seems these guys are working independently in an even greater energy.
A set by this guy contains a shit load of graphic content, all computer visual data, that is tinted by “glitches, ROM hacking, trash culture, machinima, visual algorithms, cyberpunk and random scripting”, all run by proprietary VJ software and, recently, triggered from his wireless device while he is rioting on stage or anywhere else. Oh yeah, he likes to perform in the truest sense of the word, many times doing life-defying stunts (he once almost dies in front of my eyes when performing together in Barcelona, when he missed teh border of a table he jumped on)
Playing around Europe in a myriad of festivals and club venues, but always closely tied in to chip musicians, the collaborations with Goto80 and Meneo are the most notorious, the latter one being the focus of Raul’s current interests and one of his most interesting projects.
I also cannot leave this text without mention of his former “partner in crime”, Raquel Meyers, since a lot of the work in the early days, like Goto80’s first AV presentations, were done with her in the team too, and as I said, she’s packing up some amazing visuals on her own as well, doing the Goto80 show now and performing solo for other musicians. This nomination is for her, too
Ladies and gentleman, please welcome:
ENTTER
[Santander, Spain]
BASIC - MENEO from Entter on Vimeo.
Meneo – I Know Basic