Ascii Graffiti

Dec 7, 2014 | ,


ASCII-graffiti! Using an Ascii Arena logo by Spot, I cut out stencils from pizza boxes for the characters / \ ( ) | _ and sprayed this. Character by character. In freezing cold Götlabörj City. Observed by sceptical writers with knives, yo.

8-Bit Reggae Book

Nov 15, 2014 |

8-Bit Reggae is a book by the Swiss professor and ethnographer, Nicolas Nova. The topic might seem strange at first, because there’s not really that much 8-bit reggae around. Or is there? Well, there’s more than you think. And interesting parallells.

The book includes plenty of quotes from my good ol’ chipmusic thesis, which is always a good idea, hehe. Actually, I’ve helped out a little bit with it. Among other things, I did a dub track as a case study and wrote some words about it. I was kind of surprised myself about how many tangents there are between dub and chip. One thing, the way I see it atleast, is that dub and chip are both sort of genre, production method, and attitude at the same time.

I’m no stranger to dub. Some of you may have heard Papaya Dub way back from 2001 or Ajvar Relish, for example. Maybe I should do some more. Some day. If you’d like some, you could always order some dub here!

My master thesis in Japanese

Nov 1, 2014 |

My master thesis Power Users and Retro Puppets – a critical study of the methods and motivations in chipmusic from 2010, is now available in Japanese. Thanks to Takashi Kawano for the mad effort!

The title pretty much says it all, but to clarify: it’s based on interviews with 10 people, and several years of research on the history of chipmusic. It’s, as far as I remember, a decent mix of critical theory, new materialism and even some discourse theory I suppose. While I wrote it, I basically made my living from doing chipmusic shows aswell. Pretty intense times…

Anyway. I might rewrite it into a more accessible and fun-to-read text some day. If you know a publisher who could be interested, let me know!

Btw, I like this thin that Takashi wrote in another blog post:

“I think that viznut, goto80, and others refuse to represent the scene, raise questions about such discourses, and also don’t let go of potentials of the scene and those prods in a consistent way. This is a quite difficult program, however, without it, they could not survive.”

Linkan at A Little Bit

Oct 22, 2014 |

Some pictures from my piece Linkan at the exhibition A Little Bit, running at Bei Koc in Hannover to November. Linkan is a song, here printed in three different ways: as an audio waveform, as the notations in the tracker software, and as data in the RAM. 21 meters in total.

Visitors can listen to the song as it runs in a loop on the C64. For the opening, I made two very different improvisations with the song, and recorded it on two unique master cassettes which destinies are uncertain.




Linkan can be seen as a comment on contemporary music formats in three ways. 1) The fixed and locked-in character of a recording (the audio waveform) is to some extent a violent treatment of the potentials of digital music formats. 2) The separation between performed or recorded music on the one hand, and sheet music (the tracker prints) on the other, is blurry at best. And yet it still underpins the music economy. 3) The RAM-print describes both sheet music and performance.

Gijs Gieskes, Sleutelkind, Anton Kaun and gwEm are also in the exhibition, aswell as two works by me and Raquel Meyers: 2SLEEP1 and Swapdisk (with various C64-productions). The poster design was made by Johann Zambryski.




Big thanks to:

Waka_x, Mathman, frantic & bolo for help with conversions
Cem Koc & Ptoing for print help
iLKke
Kristoffer Bratt & Alma Alloro for crashing computers
Hollowman for c64 ram expertise
The Toilet for special measurement device

Following photos by Cem Koch:




Write-up at Radiograffiti

Oct 22, 2014 |

So, the oldschool yet progressive Radiograffiti label wrote some nice things about me for their WKND JMZ. Since I’m not so good at doing that myself, and since I’ve started to play this song live again, I’ll paste their text here:

Despite being almost ten years old, GOTO80’s proto amigacore/chipmusic hybrid “Spill” still manages to sound as fresh as the day it was first saved to an obsolete storage medium.

Since 1993, the prolific GOTO80 mastermind Anders Carlsson has never been short on creative output. When he isn’t releasing open source albums, providing audio for technical demos via his Hack n’ Trade demoscene group or performing on Swedish television cloaked in lettuce, he’s archiving chipmusic’s history and rethinking music distribution. During his two decades of activity, it’s safe to assume GOTO80 has released his fair share of unclassifiable music.

Among this high level of output, the Digi-Dig online/physical package was released on Da ! Heard It Records back in 2006 to very high praise due to his trademark glitchy programming style and free form songwriting. Even in Internet years, the album has aged very well and still maintains solid momentum throughout, but there is one song in particular which transcends and continues to serve as the ultimate Friday night get-the-fuck-out-of-work anthem – “Spill”.

GOTO80’s break-neck lead programming & Amiga drum combo are completely unfiltered and fight for center stage here. “Spill” is one of those rare tracks which demand a long study in technique *and* prime location on your weekend playlist.

Some of you may have known about “Spill” from the 8BP050 double CD on 8bitpeoples or floating around dark corners of the Internet mislabeled as “Data Garden Rock”.
Regardless of origin, Spill is worthy of your new WKND JMZ, but you knew that already.
Download Digi-Dig at: http://www.daheardit-records.net/en/discography/dhr-02#release