If you’re into lo-fi pop, then you can listen to Diego. I backed him up for an evening, and we recorded 8 vodka-induced songs. I used piano, siel mono, boxes and a megaphone.
RAMBLINGS
Chip Music Ripoff
Just recently the Norwegian band Fitts For Fight stole chiptunes from Stu, Binärpilot, drx, and others. They added their vocals and got hyped in Norway for their teen trash porn DIY style, and apparently made some money off it. After this scandal though, them and “their” songs got taken off Myspace and Last.fm. People are upset with this, and you can support their quest to find the original authors here. Eventhough stealing things without credit atleast used to be quite normal in the chipmusic scene, this is a bit too much! I can’t help but finding it a bit funny though. :)
Other examples of commercial rip-offs of chip music:
* Nelly Furtado’s last album featured a song called ‘Do It’ that was a total rip-off of Tempest‘s song Acid Jazzed Evening. Check out this torrent or this youtube-clip to get the idea. Legal action in the air…
* An older “rip-off” is the MTV-hit You’ve Got My Love where Bastian sampled the drums off Jeroen Tel and Reyn Ouwehand’s old C-64 song Rubicon. In the end, Bastian had to pay for it though.
* Bodenständig 2000 got ripped off by the commercial mobile phone terrorists Jamba a couple of years ago. I forgot about the details though…
* Zombie Nation‘s ‘Kernkraft 400’ covered David Whittaker’s Lazy Jones (subtrack21) but according to NME Whittaker did actually receive money for it.
I can’t think of any more examples. Help me out here. But anyway, the moral of this story is: don’t just take it away!
Demoscene Datatrash Stlars
I was in a basement in the south of Sweden last night, where the Commodore 64 demo scene elite d00ds gathered in some sort of oldschool worker-revolutionary book café …. thing. St Lars Meeting!. Nice sweaty crammed data action battlez by the Swedish (and other) C64-elite. I made a song at the party which was called Köttlars. (Play with VICE) It got first place in the competition, after settling it in a joystick shake-until-they-break Tour De France session with Zzap64. My song and visuals are in the finest of data trash traditions, and everytime the song is looped it’s slightly “remixed”. (Thanks to Mäts for coding the visuals.)
Talking about demoscene data trash… Check out the C64-demo Industrial Breakdown by Booze Design, the Vic-20 demo Robotic Liberation (youtube) by PWP, and the modern demoscene datatrash-stuff by the Slovakian Zden. Check out his demo PC-demo Metamorf for example.