That most wonderful time of the year is here, my lo-fi friends! The annual Blip Festival is almost upon us! In just three scant days, chiptune artists and afficianados from around the world will decend upon New York City as they have for the past two years and celebrate all that is good and futzwithable about video game hardware reappropriated for video and audio bliss. I'm excited. Can you tell I'm excited?
Four nights of live music performances (I know, it's hard to qualify them as "live" when most of the music is reliant on preprogrammed patterns on game cards, but it's still great), video shows, workshops and general camaraderie.
To get you prepped for the rockin', we're here to shed some light on some of what you can expect from this year's performances.
First up is the man known as noteNdo, who's been with Blip Festival from the very beginning. One of the most popular of the chip visual artists, noteNdo will be providing the video accompaniment to five performances throughout the four day festival this week. Rather than create pre-rendered videos for each song, noteNdo, much like the musicians he works with, has restructured game hardware to automatically generate patterns of light and color rhythmically with the music. What does this all look like? Well, here's a video demonstration set to Bit Shifter's "Tea With Galactus":
Now imagine that on a big screen behind somebody rocking out on their Game Boy while you stand in a crowd full of excited hipsters. Makes you want to dance, right? You're damn right it does.
noteNdo is also kicking off this year's festivities with a set of his own music. You can check out his MySpace page for samples of that sweetness, and be sure to come back here tomorrow for another look at what to expect from Blip Festival 2008!
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Chiptune Friday: Bit Shifter
Blip Festival: Reformat the Planet on Pitchfork.tv
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