microPALOOZA

Posted by tomo at 02:52 AM in . | 1 Comments

December 30th in Portland, OR: The Pacific Northwest's first 'chip music' concert and Commodore 64 Super Summit -- microPALOOZA

Video game music aka "chip tunes" are made by programming the built-in synths in older gaming consoles such as the SID in the C64 or by inserting special game cartridges into their GameBoys [e.g. Nanoloop or LSDJ] to write 8-bit music on-the-go. While this music has quite a following in Europe, where the demo scene is still kicking, it has been slow to catch on Stateside. The new wave of video game tracks with no accompanying video games may have hit pop culture status several years ago with Alec Empire (of Atari Teenage Riot) releasing an album of pure, raw, non-postprocessed GameBoy tunes as Nintendo Teenage Robots. I was fortunately able to pick this up on 12" in Tokyo several years ago, but more recently the video game sound has seeped into, in many different shapes, the pico-pico styles of Japanese "pop" music like Capsule.

The concert in Portland currently has a line-up of five artists playing instruments ranging from Commodore64s to GameBoys to nasty Casios and various other broken toys. It will be taking place at Ground Kontrol, an oldskool arcade with "60+ classic arcade games and pinball machines...all the best, all in one place!" It's co-owned by Anthony Ramos of ele_mental, who moved to Portland from Columbus a few years ago. I've been wanting to visit Portland for awhile now and this is starting to sound like a worthy excuse...