On Sunday my next cassette, 0407, will be released on Data Airlines. Phwah, cassettes are so mainstream I hear you say. Well, then I’ve got something for you (soon) – a C64-cartridge by the name of DUBCRT. It has music, generative PETSCII-graphics, LEDs, and hidden parts presented in a mysteriously interactive mega interface. Made by me, iLKke and 4mat, and organized by DataDoor.
More about this later. For now, let’s focus on cassettes!
I’m putting out a new cassette soon and one of the most exciting things about it is actually the art work, hehe. All the illustration and design was made on a typewriter by the new typewriter master, Lord Nikon.
So keep your eyes open for this one. Will be released by Data Airlines.
As some of you know, I’ve written quite a lot about chip music and the demoscene: in books, papers, a master thesis, and so on. For the past years I’ve been more interested in researching text graphics, and published a paper together with A Bill Miller in 2012.
Now I’m doing a presentation about PETSCII at an academic conference Behind the Scenes in Lódzki, Poland. I did it together with Markku Reunanen (who maintains the demoscene research site) and Tero Heikkinen (who wrote the PETSCII editor together with Markku). Unfortunately I’m not attending in person, but Markku & Tero know how to do it right!
At the same conference Gleb Albert is doing a presentation of his new research on the 1980s cracker scene. It seems to be an in-depth look at this sparsely researched subculture, and especially interesting since it considers ideology. Read more here.
So it took iTunes about a month to publish my album, and rename it. Into “moon and linear clouds”, as Tim Koch put it. Just like they didn’t accept the names of Files in Space, they didn’t accept the OTL-like name of this either. Protip, Apple: if you co-invent a standard you might want to follow it.
Anyway – it’s there now. And also on Spotify. And maybe some other places too. But the cassettes are sold out.
So, last weekend I was in Copenhagen to perform at the party for Lu Yang‘s exhibition ANTI-HUMANISM. It was a wild night, with Meneo bringing the crowd into pure naked extacy, as always.
I started the evening with two improvised sessions, where I continuously took requests from the audience about what music to do. I sat in an office/slave-like setting (see image). Sort of like a mix between Dataslav and my recent improv-explorations. And it went really well! I’ll see if I can get some recordings of it online.
I was also asked to write a text about 8-bit music for the catalogue of the exhibition. You can read it here: A retrospective on the stories and aesthetics of 8-bit music
Yeah 2014 bla bla. Well, here’s what I was up to: Among the live performances I did, I played in Valencia for the final party of Europe in 8 Bits, in Manchester for the chipmusic festival Superbyte, in a bus parked in Gothenburg for Snel Hest, at Flogsta’s 10 year skweee anniversary, and I performed a live petscii-movie with Raquel Meyers for kids in Paris.
I’ve kept on doing t3xtm0.de (Tumblr, Twitter) together with Raquel Meyers, and we now have 2700+ posts with 5000+ images, and about 6000 followers and le Tumblr. Chipflip is also moving along with some pretty great new releases in 2014, and some new text material aswell.
Artwise, there were for example faxes, L0ve Byt3z, Kung Fu Glitch, HT Gold, and I made an art exhibition/performance at Bei Koc gallery in Hannover. I printed the song Linkan in 3 forms: as audio waveform, as the interface view of the program it was made in, and as RAM-data on a dot matrix printer. For the opening I made two very different jams with the song, which was recorded on two cassettes that I don’t know what happened to. So – this was all a small scale experiment about what music is, how it is represented, and how it’s distributed.
I presented the Custom8 project, where you can order your own custom album by me for 30 euros. And there was quite a response! Kept me busy for several weeks. The way I see it, is that I spend 1 hour going through thousands of my own songs to compile what you ask for. The way you see it, you are a happy consumer in the age of mass customization. Or something..
I released an album, more or less called Files in Space, that sold out in a week but is now available as cassettes or CD again. I played with obfuscation by replacing alphabetical letters with similar-looking Unicode characters, and also spammed the titles with diacritics, which led to problems for operating systems, music distributors and file systems. In other words – big success!
I had music featured in films, documentaries, and games. I released two mixes, and the one I did together with Divag was #1 at the IDM-charts at Mixcloud.
I’ve continued to make improvised C64-sets with the defMON tracker. I just start the computer and go. Without any preparations whatsoever, I make the instruments and the compositions on the fly. In 2014 I did it after screenings of movies about Aaron Schwartz and Piratbyrån at Doc Lounge, at the live coding after party for the FARM-workshop, and at the academic live composing event Friktion.
I made some Ascii graffiti and thought I was the first one to do so, only to find that a US startup made a similar thing just a few weeks before. Not sure they did it character-by-character though. But maybe nobody cares?
Yeah, and the 8-bit reggae book was released. I was interviewed for it and made a song for the book aswell.
Boink 14!
There’s a very limited repress of the Files in Space cassette available, starting today. This time in a flowery urin/gold colour! Get yours here.
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.”
Next weekend I’m playing a secret show in Stockholm (feel cool if you know about it), and the weekend after that I’m going to Hannover to do a small exhibition, and a live concert with Gijs Gieskes and gwEm. Good bananas!
I think the exhibition is going to be pretty cool. I’ve dot matrix printed 7 meters of music for it. And there’s going to be 7 meters more. And then probably in fact 7 meters more! And you can never go wrong with that. Maybe.
Custom8 has been a big success! I’ve been breaking a lot of sweat to process all the orders for the past 2 weeks, and now I’ve almost caught up with all the orders. So yeah – ready for more! Tell me what’s missing in your life, and I fix it.
The idea for Custom8 is to spend no more than one hour per release. That gives me enough time to find the right songs for most orders, and maybe record a song that I might only have on a floppy somewhere. From my point of view, this is what you pay for: 1 hour of work. Not music. For me, the songs are already there.
Although, some people ask for customized songs. Perhaps the text is not clear enough here. But if I think I can do the song in around 1 hour, I do it anyway.
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It’s a lot of fun with the variety of orders. One guy was a Goto80-collector and took the opportunity to order some super rare releases, bonus tracks, and such. Other people ask for specific blends of certain bands and artists. Or songs that are similar to other songs I’ve made. Here’s some examples of what the orders look like:
music for parrots
parallel universes, shuffling beats, domesticated sounds
experimental hip-hop, LA beat scene, deep house, early dubstep, german techno, sludge/stoner metal
I would like a custom album in which each successive piece of music is more complex than the previous one. So, it should start with the simplest track and end with the most complex one. The genre/style of these pieces is not important; what matters is their complexity.
cinematic love songs pure minimal *ONLY THE BEST*
dark future decadence campfire music. hypnotic sleazy erotic body synth, not too kitschy. eerie, suggestive.
Bruce Springsteen vs. Captain Beefheart drone Calypso in the Heino style dubstep David Bowie 70s does David Bowie 90s as heard by David Bowie 80s EBM Balenesian Klezmer metal Russian Pop written by PJ Harvey dub Harry Partch does breakcore on a modified Dutch Harmonica (or harmonium) glitch
the typical pop-rock sounding first album of a young parisian hipster band
tunes without ‘beats’. I mean, sans sounds that imitate drums. At least half of the tunes should be slow. Make me cry.
something that gives me a boner.