Category: In the News

  • Mega Man 9 Alt Soundtrack

    yea I dont know why the dude look like a charecter from Aqua Teens either...
    yea I don't know why the dude look like a character from Aqua Teens either…

    By now many of you have seen of played Mega Man 9. The game, an incredibly hard and frustrating affair also has a surprisingly accurate sounding soundtrack.  The Games composer, Ippo Yamda discussed how the game was composed in a recent article:

    Strictly speaking the soundtrack of Mega Man 9 is not NES music, but to its very core it has been created in the spirit of NES music. We made use of a program that closely resembles the console’s sound source, producing very similar waveforms, and thereby were able to make music tracks that sound just like the original. In the days of Mega Man 1-6, you were challenged to manipulate the audio signals produced by the sound card within the range designated by the restrictions of the hardware. Naturally in making this game we had no hardware restrictions, but we stuck to the formula of three pulse wave channels and one noise channel. Within this framework we freely went about composing music.

    Helpful, but still pretty vague. The gang over at the Famitracker forums debated it further.
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  • PopMatters reviews Nullsleep live

    Now accepting writers!
    Now accepting writers!

    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.

    Read more

  • Chibi-Tech Interviewed on Denpa No Sekai

    All around chip god and sex idol Chibi-Tech is profile on the Denpa No Sekai Blog. The interview is massively in-depth and well worth the read.

    Excerpt:

    “Chiptune is slowly but surely getting recognized as a musical genre, though it remains solidly anchored in the gaming world that created it. I think the problem at this point is that it features no lyrical content or message. A Tokyo group called “DENPA PARTY” are throwing events and composing music under the “NO WAR” banner, clearly a political message (simple though it may be). If you started adding lyrics to your songs, what would they be like?

    The man, The Pixels
    The man, The Pixels

    Haha with all aside from synthesized vocal techniques, I honestly never thought of it this way. However, maybe that kind of deliverance can get certain problems with chiptune’s public perception off my chest!

    My problem is that the general public either thinks of chiptunes in two ways. One: Their first impressions are that chiptunes are not legitimate music in their own right simply due to their age — and often get dismissed as “crappy General MIDI sounds” not worthy of serious evaluation. Two: People exploit 8bit as some sort of retro-waxing of “a simpler time” without much real thought put into it. Emo-wanker groups are probably most well known for this. It honestly gets tiring to see a young kid yell out “Whoa that totally sounds like MEGAMAN MUSIC” without putting much thought to why I make this kind of music. It’s all a combination of misinformation and groups of people trying to stake their claim on its nostalgic factor.”

  • Depreciation Guild is playing CMJ

    And they get a nice write up on a college news website.

    The heart of Rock and Roll
    The heart of Rock and Roll

    The article itself is mostly a collection of their press clippings, but isn’t it refreshing to see something about chip artists that don’t obsess over the console part of their sound, or makes the (musical style) meets (retro game character at (name of relevant musical event) formulaic pun.