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Above: Typher performs at Wack on January 28. Photo by Mark Lyndersay Originally published in Newsday Businessday for February 18, 2021 Typher was walking back and forth backstage. The veteran calypsonian, born Cuthbert Blackett, was thinking through his delivery of True Dignity, his calypso response to the late Singing Sandra’s Sexy Employers. The show was supposed to be a livestream of the…

(picture: anonymous artist)

In the literal sense, chiptune refers to the sounds produced by the earliest forms of home computers and gaming hardware. It's those bleeps and bloops that fill you with overwhelming nostalgia, that make it seem like time has stood still since 1999, that make you yearn for a time before Facebook and YikYak when everyone still thought the internet was a “series of tubes”.

At the heart of this genre, we don't find artistic, misunderstood musical visionaries, we find computer programmers. In the late 1970s, these programmers were charged with the task of taking early chipsets and composing simple melodies. Games like Activision's Pressure Cooker included single-voice melodies, usually accompanied by looped bass lines. This remained the model for early video game music until a righteous dude and self-described “electronic music hobbyist” by the name of Bob Yannes came into the scene. In 1981, Yannes designed a new audio chip known as the SID (Sound Interface Device) which was capable of a relatively diverse array of sounds. The introduction of the SID in personal computers finally gave non-programmers an accessible medium for their own musical creation. This meant that chiptunes and video game music no longer had to be one and the same, and musicians took full advantage of this opportunity.

Chiptune began to emerge as a standalone genre. The Game Boy generation created music that, as Sex Pistols manager Malcom McLaren put it, “sounded like a video arcade gone mad”. Constantly growing in popularity and complexity through the 1980s until the present, chiptune artists have found their niches within the genre. Artists like Divag currently make music that sounds like what you'd find near the birth of chiptune, simple in design but wonderfully creative in execution. On the other hand, bands like The Depreciation Guild and Starscream combine chiptune elements with the instrumentation of punk and post-rock, taking advantage of modern technology to fuse genres. 

What I want to make abundantly (maybe even irritatingly) clear is that chiptune is not a simple novelty genre. It's not something somebody throws on when their friends are around just to get a few ironic headbobs and chuckles. It's a genre born out of technical limitations; limitations that challenged and inspired those bold enough to foray into uncharted waters. Hijacking the tools of corporate America, the first chiptune artists create their art without the help of major record labels, recording studios or top tier production software. The music first made was to serve as nothing more than a background theme, a simple tune that would haunt the sleep of gamers too avid. But the genre transcended these limitations as well, and although it started as a niche scene, chiptune now is far from an insular genre. Chiptune can be rough around the edges at times, and even I eventually get sick of the bleeps and bloops, but there's something so timeless and sentimental about it. It's both the old and the new, constantly reminding you that you're never too old to beat Megaman 2 for the 27th time, but only after you finish doing your taxes. It has a very special place in my heart, and I only hope that the love is shared with y'all.

Peace and love,

Cameron Malik

TRACKS

Vanishes – Beatrix Saves The Queen (2:58)

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Nullsleep – Ballistic Picnic (3:50)

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Slime Girls – Vacation Wasteland (3:38)

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Glomag – 4Shame (2:48)

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Bit Shifter – Hexadecimal Genome (3:19)

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PICE – Snow in The Trees (3:33)

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Divag – Gaga is Back (2:16)

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Dorothy's Magic Bag – Skaldjursakuten (3:42)

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Starscream – Kepler's Star Catalog (4:00)

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The Depreciation Guild – Nautilus (6:18)

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IAYD – Redshift (4:48)

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Jellica – Dennye (3:53)

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Knife City – Just Trash (5:14)

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PROTODOME - Interstaller Good Times. (3:18)

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astroskeleton – you are not alone (2:46)

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Trash80 – Sodium Sonet (3:09)

ARTSPEAK Radio – Also a Podcast!

  If you haven’t heard of it yet, you should tune into KKFI 90.1 this Wednesday and future Wednesday evenings for a radio show on the visual arts and literary community in Kansas City hosted by Maria Vasquez Boyd and Blair Schulman.  They interview members of the local community and also provide updates on current arts related events in the area.

At the beginning of this year, ARTSPEAK Radio…