New Ad for the 2008 Blip Festival: Lo-Rez/High-Impact
Blip Festival 2008: The Promo from Richard Alexander Caraballo on Vimeo.
The BLIP FESTIVAL 2008 is a four-day (Dec 4-7) event showcasing nearly 40 musicians and visual artists in the lo-fi chipscene. It’s presented by the Manhattan art organization THE TANK and NYC artist collective 8BITPEOPLES.
The chipmusic phenomenon is like 8-bit punk. They essentially use old video game equipment and home computer hardware as musical instruments. The NES, Commodore 64, Atari ST, Nintendo Game Boy act as the lo-fit, low-res, high-impact electronic music makers.
It’s not nearly as big in the US as it is in the rest of the world; imagine lo-fi Europeans and outdated electronics and soldering irons and a fundamentally altered Gameboy in each hand. Ataris and Amigas and synthesizers and emulators.
Every generation has it’s intelligent music makers trying to say something new or make a point they think the mainstream is missing. The 8-bit drive of chipmusic is the same force that turned up the distortion and recorded on 8-tracks and innovated.
The scene is going to keep growing, especially with really well done, fitting ads like the one at the top of this post, done by Richard Alexander Caraballo (aka minusbaby) of 8BitPeoples and Stieg Retlin.