5 posts tagged “chiptunes”
With my gang of resident nerdfolk in tow (Jared, Hamza, Ben, Matt, Andrew, and born-again nerd Kat), yesterday evening I made it out to the Micromusic SF Launch party at Mighty. Micromusic.net, self described as "low tech music for high tech people", is a chiptunes collective supporting music and performances worldwide. With hope, the concert last night was the beginning of what could be the beginning of a San Francisco chiptunes presence.
Let the power of savvy musical friends combine! My SF socialite senses are a-tinglin' in anticipation of the grab bag of awesome shows I'll be attending in the upcoming months. This is the first of my many attempts to inject the city into the .tiff and to inject the .tiff into the city.
As usual I owe great thanks to my friendly local scenesters Victor, ee.en, et al. for bringing my attention to such rich musical opportunities to pursue. I only wish ee.en could make it out for the Micromusic SF show ;_; as his company will be sorely missed. Here's a summary of my show list, with a little snippet of what I'm seeing this Thursday!
January 17
Dan Deacon @ The Great American Music Hall
When I was tossing out research references for the hipster party, I made the grave mistake of forgetting to mention the likes of Dan Deacon (he's the gentleman in the Goofy shirt). I had the pleasure of freshly encountering his music when he opened for Girl Talk at the Filmore back in September and have yet to have more fun getting caught up in a pulsing, jumping, clusterf**** of hipsters since. His performance titled Ultimate Reality sounds like quite the scene with a description like this:
It combines an intense musical composition for electronics and drums with a psychedelic montage of Arnold Schwarzenegger films that is projected at a monumental scale.
Songs to chime into: The Crystal Cat, Wham City Part 1 of 2, and Big Milk
Photos from the last show:
Purple Yam Café (and ELEMENOP) @ The Elbo Room
January 22
Mirah and The Blow @ The Great American Music Hall
February 7
Micromusic SF HQ Launch Party @ Underground SF
Featuring: Trash80, Nullsleep, Starpause, A_Rival, X|K, Chibi-Tech, Tumlt
For the record this show is the one I'm the most excited about! After getting a taste of the chiptune scene from my trip to NYC for Blipfest '07, I'm absolutely thrilled to see the starts of a small collective on the west coast and especially right in my town! Nullsleep is one of the artists at the forefront of the chiptune movement, a friend of a friend, and a master at his work. Not sure if the fancy pixel-licious light board will be a part of this show, but it should be a great couple of sets for sure.
Jet-setting to the other side on a red-eye flight with no sleep, this weekend I spent my days and nights remembering the very good city of New York. A weekend alone is not nearly enough to trace the lines of my nostalgia for the city, but I can't complain since the hours were action-packed and always filled to the brim with good people.
With help and encouragement from dear ee.en, I attended 8-bit-people and The Tank's all weekend Chiptune bash Blipfest 2007. Held at the Eyebeam gallery in Chelsea, the space was never left with an empty echo. Throes of candy-colored concert goers, from the mandatory city hipsters to the graying groups of vintage gamers, pulsated to the 8-bit performances and basked in the lite-brite like colors of the set. I spent a couple of nights dancing, nerd crowd-surfing, and bit-bumping, but the experience alone was intense enough to tire me out by the third night.
To give you a taste of what was had (and what should be hoped for in the next installment of Blipfest 2008) here's a trailer of last year's performance :
