Continuing 2 Player Productions’ drip-feed of performances from the 2007 Blip Festival, they’ve just uploaded this Bit Shifter track, Rough Weather, that gets the crowd all down and dirty, including one conspicuously spotted audience member that you may recognize from another games website (see if you can find them!).

19-year-old, precious, wind-swept Tom ‘hexachordal‘ Milsom does a fantastic cover of All My Little Words by long, long-time Offworld favorite Magnetic Fields (sobering realization: I first discovered them when Milson was three), equipped only with a Game Boy and a copy of LSDJ. [via Buzzfeed, via Tiff]

The latest NES flier (rom link) for The Tank’s May 30th Pulsewave show, which will feature performances by minusbaby, Lutin, and Adams/Stern, and visuals by JYK, noteNdo and Paris. As usual, Enso provides the 8-bit cinematics, accompanied by chip musician Joey ‘Animal Style‘ Mariano [MySpace].

Japan’s finest chiptune label (and accompanying 8-bit news network), VORC, has written in with word of their latest collection, 8-BIT PROPHET: a tribute to Japanese 80’s “techno-pop”/new wave band TM Network, with a particular twist: rather than instrumental covers, all vocals on the album have been produced using Yamaha’s singing speech-synth Vocaloid.

As noted earlier, Vocaloid’s spawned its own personified singing idol named Hatsune Miku, made famous by endless versions of popular songs spread on Japan’s YouTube equivalent, NicoNicoDouga (hear her version of Portal’s ‘Still Alive’, though her pronunciation’s obviously a bit stilted in English), and the combined style of her signature sound with 8-bit backing is actually not a half-step off of YMCK‘s own happy low-bit pop.

The album will be out June 3rd, with Posca handling the CDs and hearjapan handling worldwide digital distribution: they’ve currently got a two-song sampler available now.

While you’re visiting VORC, also see: their Squarewave Surfers compilation, with 8-bit musicians worldwide covering songs like Tequila and Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini (!), and Holy 8bit Night+, which gives Octoroc’s 8-bit Jesus a serious run for its holiday money.

「8-BIT PROPHET – TM Network Tribute Generated by Chiptune + Vocaloid」 [VORC Records, MySpace, YouTube]

LISTEN: FUTURE BOY’S 8-BIT MEGAMIX, THE LAST CHIPTUNE MIXTAPE YOU’LL EVER NEED

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5.18.2009

Brandon Boyer

8 Replies

Created for Kokoromi’s recent Live Game Sounds event I mentioned a few weeks back, Future Boy’s 8-bit Megamix clocks in at nearly two whole hours of chiptune and low-bit excellence from Freezepop to Treewave to Glomag to Anamanaguchi to Goto80 and everyone else you’ve heard of before, and more you will wonder why you hadn’t heard of yet.

Use it as a primer to the scene, use it as your Jetsons treadmill running mix, just don’t not download it immediately. If it weren’t 139 megs large, I’d embed it here.

While you’re there, also grab A Maze of Death, his ‘eclectro-pop’ opera produced in collaboration with Johnny Cashpoint and based on the Philip K. Dick novel of the same name, or his Strange Little World EP (both of which hover somewhere around Atom and His Package meets Magnetic Fields meets Cabel Sasser, when he can be bothered to compose), or any of the extra tracks and more traditional mixtapes he’s posted to his blog.

BLOG.POST[156] – 8-Bit Megamix [Future Boy]

Following up on our previous Korg DS-10 related posts, here’s a pair of DS covers of legendary Japanese synth-band YMO.

NATT021’s dual-DS powered cover of “Rydeen”, embedded above (original version), and PECG300’s Korg DS-10 cover of “Technopolis” below (orginal version.)

Knowing of YMO’s mid-70s electronic and computer game influences and their subsequent influences on videogame music composers like Hitoshi Sakimoto, there’s something genuinely fitting about seeing their classic tunes played on a Nintendo DS.

YMO “RYDEEN” on Nintendo DS (KORG DS-10) [YouTube]

Following the previously mentioned Data Spills show, Jeremiah ‘nullsleep’ Johnson played this afterparty, with graphics by outpt and Paris, the same glitch-duo behind Je Deviens DJ En 3 Jours’s recently mentioned Pulsewave show. [via nullsleep]

Je Deviens DJ En 3 Jours do digital hardcore with a backdrop of glitched out pixel lovelies at the previously previewed Pulsewave show at NYC’s The Tank. Vimeo uploader Gideon captured most of the night’s performance, including several of the open-mic performers — see also: 8BK-ok’s 8-bit Rocky Horror show, and also: JDDJ3J’s MySpace, where he’s got the best low-bit version of Plastic Bertrand’s Ca Plane Pour Moi I’ve ever heard.

Je Deviens DJ En 3 Jours [MySpace, Gideon on Vimeo]

Above, a preview of the title screen and first song from Alex Mauer’s second Vegavox album, his third LP to be released on an actual NES cart. Mauer’s been previously mentioned for his musical work both on the NES ROM flier for April’s Pulsewave show and the PlayPower organization’s work on a cheap 8-bit computer for developing worlds.

The album will be out soon on Pause Records (previously noted for their +Plus series of free indie game soundtrack downloads), and while his second collaborative NES cart album, Color Caves (preview), is out of print, you can still get his first Vegavox album (preview) via his headlessbarbie site.

headlessbarbie [Alex Mauer, Pause Records, via Daniel Rehn]

My only explanation is that they were unhidden hours after I originally posted: TinyCartridge notes that a BlipFest 2007 video of Tree Wave every bit as gorgeously shot as the rest of the Blip videos I recently linked is currently up for viewing.

The song in the video is ‘May Banners’, another off the same Cabana EP as their previously linked ‘Sleep’.

Order the Cabana EP via AtariAge here, or download the abridged version via archive.org here, and order the 2-disc 2 Player Productions’ BlipFest 2007 DVD here.

Tree Wave home [qotile]