chiptunes

Delete The Elite, a CD with a paper cover sold by the Norwegian chiptune artist Covox, is roughly 40 minutes of what can best be called nintendo fugues. I discovered Covox in late October 2007 at the Blip Festival in Manhattan. Not to be confused with an actual "Music Festival", Blip is best understood to be a kind of illegal gathering of nerds and socially dysfunctional ne'er-do-wells under the shaky auspices of music made entirely by or with the aid of logic chips from video game console systems.
Covox's setup consisted of four Nintendo Gameboys plugged into a standard Korg-style mixer. As with concept art, much of the work had been done before the show. Covox put four gameboy cassettes of his own design (and presumably, programming) into the Gameboys and simply began to play by pressing buttons on the Gameboys.

What is chiptune music, and what is its legacy? It is easy to gloss over music generated by video game chips as appeasement of our thinly-veiled nostalgia: after all, music on video games has only gotten better over time: as video game scores approach their film counterparts in quality and duration, the interest exhibited in them by DJ's and other aspiring chiptune artists diminishes correspondingly.
This view of the music, however, pays cheap service to what will ultimately prove to be a lasting and expansive footprint. The idea of manipulating (with modern technology, let us not forget) old sounds to create new music is nothing new: this is a paradigm invented by Hip-Hop music and earlier still in Jamaican Dubstep and dancehall.

To those who look back on the 80's with a pallid nostalgia which only comes from not actually experiencing the decade in question, chiptune music is a titillating foray into prelapsarian musical modes: "Look how silly we were, playing Mario, eating pizza bagels."

Discount this explanation, however, and things grow rather uncertain. Crystal Castles is unarguably the most famous example of "chiptune" music, and they don't even use video games to make their music: they simply sample it over and over again. To purists this is enough to disqualify the group, but purity was never the mission of the chiptune movement: endless derivation was its founding principle.
Listen to Air War on Crystal Castle's eponymous debut.

Behind distorted and chopped-up recitations of Allen Ginsburg's Howl, a deceptively simple chord progression made of sounds from (to my best estimate) a cheap handheld video game device such as a Gigapet or a Tomagachi. Repetition in poetry and music are pause for meditation, and as angering as Crystal Castles can become, it is a poignant reminder that crap culture is not there because we are stupid but because it is our best synthesis of the art, music, and film that provide a kind of heuristic backdrop to our own cultural-creative impulses. The Gameboy lives.