As people consume content in smaller pieces and the influences from which content-creators draw their inspiration become more varied and well-integrated into finished works, things have settled into different categories than they're usually put into.
When I wander out into the new, overflowing marketplaces of digital and physical content, I find myself chasing not a scene, genre, or production aesthetic. I find myself chasing EMOTION. BIG, shining, unmistakable emotion. Lindsey Buckingham might call it BIG LOVE. In a world full of the pulpy asscrap shit out of a million boring Macbooks, the only things that consistently rise to the top of the pile are the sentimental ones. They come from associations drawn in formative years, from tunes attached to specific occasions or great sound systems. Like: the first time someone slipped you some tongue, in the back of the car with the best stereo you've ever pumped to, all in front of shimmering fiery spectacle of the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, and you're pretty much there.
So here is the best shit from 2009, the stuff that cut into me the deepest, OK?
Click on the links below the titles to hear the songs as they appeared in my shows over the year.
Tonight, the leading lights of the worldwide chip music movement are convening at Brooklyn's Bell House for the fourth-annual Blip Festival. And as you may have heard, WFMU will be webcasting all 3 days' worth of pixelated madness LIVE on a separate super-special blip stream, beginning at 8pm ET tonight!
The webcast is hosted by Trent of WFMU's Sound and Safe, who'll be DJ-ing between sets and talking with Blip Festival organizers, performers, & attendees throughout. Trent hosted a Blip Fest Warm-Up radio show on Monday night -- check out the playlist & archive here for live performances from
Je Deviens DJ En Trois Jour and Patric Catani, plus special guests C-Men and Peter Swimm.
Peter Swimm runs the True Chip Till Death blog, and curates weekly highlights from the chip music world on the Free Music Archive. Earlier this week, he posted a mix featuring some of the artists who'll be performing at this year's festival. Check it out after the jump!
WFMU will be webcasting this year's edition of the amazing BLIP FESTIVAL in its entirety!
Three days of pixelated madness LIVE from The Bell House in Brooklyn: Trash-bin symphonies and ray-chasing pixel pushers rule at the music and arts festival on December 17th, 18th, and 19th.
Entering its fourth year of celebrating the best and brightest from the realm of chipmusic and its related disciplines, the festival showcases the use of the former heavyweights of computing such as the Commodore 64 and Amiga, the Atari ST and 2600, and the Nintendo Entertainment System and Game Boy to create arresting music and visual art.
DJ Trent will host and DJ between sets both on the stream and in person at The Bell House.
NOTE: WFMU's webcasts from the Blip Festival will stream from a separate virtual location and will not pre-empt any normal FM or web broadcasts.
Tune into this Monday 12/14 from 8-11pm as DJ Trent gears up for Blip with a visit from some of the folks behind the fest: Patric Catani, Peter Swimm, Je Deviens DJ En Trois Jour, and Glomag exploit the deepest, brightest sounds from the edges of the 8-bit live on Sound and Safe.
The Blip Festival is presented by Manhattan arts organization The Tank, in partnership with NYC artist collective 8bitpeoples.
This post arrives slightly late for Halloween, but I'll take both William S. Burroughs and Edgar Allen Poe any time of the year. After some Poe readings by James Mason, we have this gem from the 1995 videogame "The Dark Eye", featuring William Burroughs reading "The Masque of the Red Death", accompanied by some creepy slides.
I don't think any of these came out in 2008 but they certainly made my 2008 sparkle more than any other songs that came out this year. There are some RealAudio and mp3 links in here so watch out.
The sequel to the play-along-with-the-music video game Rock Band, Rock Band 2, is coming out this Sunday! To celebrate, Trent will be hosting another live video game playing session on his show Monday 9/15, from 8 - 11pm EST.
Rock Band 2 is like the wildly popular Rock Band, but with more songs. Tune in live Monday evening to hear your favorite WFMU DJs (and others) slaughter the classics (virtually) via the brand new hyper-karaoke game. If you'd like to play live in the studio or remotely on Xbox Live, email Trent ASAP!
You can hear the last Rock Band session Trent aired (featuring Bryce on Tom Sawyer, Nick the Bard on Black Hole Sun, Maria on My Sharona) by checking out the archive here.
The full list of songs can be found after the jump, and you can see all of WFMU's upcoming special programs here.
Freezepop are not just a band. They're the first band in the world to become popular almost entirely because of their appearances not in newspapers, radio, magazines, or the blogosphere, but in video games. As a result, they're a convincing picture of the near future of music, gaming, and the worlds of art and commerce that surround both.
Just a few years ago, Freezepop's songs were sharing the stage with karaoke-style covers of "Smoke on the Water," "Ziggy Stardust," and "Spanish Castle Magic." Now, through a combination of good timing and great songwriting, they're sitting right up there with Bowie, Radiohead, and Blue Öyster Cult. Not karaoke-style Blue Öyster Cult, but the REAL Blue Öyster Cult...in a way. *
The Boston 3-piece has at its core The Duke of Pannekoeken, a programmer of infectious synth-pop and also of music for highly infectious video games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band. Liz Enthusiasm is Freezepop's bouncing, purple-haired frontwoman whose deadpan delivery is every bit as plasticky and cutting as their synth lines. The two were kind enough to answer a bunch of my stupidly detailed questions about music, licensing, the Cardigans, and the concepts of "fun" and "songwriting" in rhythm gaming. If you haven't experienced rhythm gaming or Freezepop, you might want to watch these videos to get an idea of what you're dealing with. The first is Freezepop's official video for "Less Talk More Rokk," and the second is the same song being played to perfection in Guitar Hero II.
Trent Wolbe: How have your audiences and concerts changed and/or grown over the years?
Liz Enthusiasm: Well, when we were in the smaller games (Frequency and Amplitude) it was more hardcore gamers who came to our shows, but Guitar Hero has really opened it up to a lot of people. One thing I really like is that there are all kinds of people there, all ages groups and different scenes. It's pretty cool.
TW: Duke - you work at Harmonix, the company that makes the best Rhythm games in the world. What is Freezepop's relationship to Harmonix, exactly?
The Duke of Pannekeoken: why thank you kindly for the praise... i hope to think that harmonix has worked really hard to try and bring fun, interactive music experiences to people! the relationship is pretty straight-forward... just after freezepop was started back in '99, i joined harmonix as a sound designer and composer and was tasked with writing music for our first game FreQuency, as well as authoring a number of other tracks in the game. after a couple of years doing that, i moved up and became the audio director for the Karaoke Revolution series of games, AntiGrav, and Guitar Hero 1 & 2. Since then, i've transitioned over to being a producer and lead the team that made Phase for the iPod which was released last fall. All of this has opened up a great opportunity for freezepop to include tracks in almost all of those games and reach whole new groups of fans. it's been amazing the reaction we've gotten to our songs in the games and has brought out lots of gamers to our shows.
TW: Do you write Freezepop songs and hope they'll end up in Rock Band, or see a hole in Rock Band, for example, and write to fill it?
LE: We generally use pre-existing songs of ours. There are certain ones that are just more obvious choices as to what would work well in the video game context.
DoP: For the most part, it's just a song we've written, and have gotten an opportunity to include it in a game, and then we've made some changes to the track that will make it play more fun. the only exception to this really was Less Talk More Rokk which was pretty much explicitly written knowing it was going to go into Guitar Hero 2. But it sounds pretty much like our other songs so it wasnt much of a stretch. We have added guitars and beefed up some of the instrumental parts in Brainpower to make sure it's super fun to play in Rock Band.
Sometimes you like to pat yourself on the back for having a fun idea like "Guitar Hero? What about Techno Hero!!!! That would be so much fun, like haha stupid what would you do, sit there and push play.....haha stupid idea."
Then someone from Japan blows your fucking brain away.
That person (female, I think, because of the spotty nail polish) is playing beatmania IIDX 15 DJ:Troopers. As you might be able to tell from all the postfixes, it's the latest in a very long run of titles Konami's Bemani series. It's included games like Guitar Freaks, that featured a guitar controller way before Guitar Hero came out, portable (!) rhythm games called Bemani Pocket, and most famously, Dance Dance Revolution. The IIDX iteration, which has been around since 1999, features two one-octave keyboard pads and a turntable controller (yes, she's using it in the video - check the pinky). Instead of a meager 50-someodd songs like Guitar Hero and Rock Band come with, they have...500 songs. Blam!
In December, there was a gigantic "Bemani 10th anniversary Memorial Event" concert in Tokyo called Gitado Live:
How in the goddamn fucking hell had I not heard of this entire world before this morning? It got me thinking. Right now, video gaming - in the United States, at least - is a world of extremes.
