The Change Mariner

Join the 8-Bit Music Revolution

Wired:

... Chip music is made using processors from the antediluvian 8-bit past. (Pro Tools, by contrast, starts at 24 bits.) The genre's seminal moment occurred three years ago when Role Model (real name: Johan Kotlinski) created a custom Game Boy cartridge called Little Sound DJ - LSDJ for short - that takes over the palmtop's internal synthesizer and turns the device into a musical workstation capable of playing sequences and arpeggios, but not chords.

Role Model, who's studying for an engineering degree at Stockholm's Royal Institute of Technology, manufactured LSDJ in Japan and offered it on the Web for about $70 until he sold all the cartridges he had made. The software is a simulacrum of DJ culture, combining the Game Boy's native bloops and bleeps with samples of old drum machines like the popular Roland TR-808. LSDJ isn't the only such cartridge: Nanoloop, made by German art student Oliver Wittchow, does similar things, but without the samples. It's easier to generate sounds right away with Nanoloop, but LSDJ is more musical and therefore more popular.

LSDJ may be technically illegal, but who cares? It's the only way Role Model and his cronies can afford to make their music. It's Le Resistance. Chip musicians plunder corporate technology and find unlikely uses for it. They make old sounds new again - without frills, a recording studio, or a major record label. It would be facile to describe the result as amateurish; it's underproduced because it feels better that way. The nature of the sound, and the equipment used to create it, is cheap. This is not music as a commodity but music as an idea. It's the Nintendo generation sampling its youth.

The essence of chip music is in reverse engineering an electronic interface - whether it's a Game Boy or a computer's sound chip - and subverting its original design. Chip music can be made using run-of-the-mill equipment, like a Casio keyboard, but first the insides must be scrambled. The lo-fi sound of the White Stripes and their ilk has a certain aesthetic kinship with chip music, but it's less tech-centric and not nearly as subversive. Kraftwerk might be the grandfathers of chip music - like today's reversible engineers, they invented many of their instruments. As for programs like Pro Tools, chip musicians don't think they're really creative. The sound isn't generated by circuitry, and you can't alter it by twisting a knob.