catskull
Offline
NUMBSKULL
shitbird wrote:
catskull wrote:

IDK how shitpost.NSF exists and someone thinks chiptune is dead

exactly, i wasn't sayin it was dead. I got a lil emotional there haha, and I am admitting it's me with the problem. If I don't like the way things are, then make a way.

Oh yeah! Wasn't responding to you specifically, just makin a general goof. Thought I agree, the migration to facebook groups is unfortunate but understandable. They have the unique ability to hide everything you want to see and show everything you want hidden (even try and find a post from a few days ago? good luck!) But I get it, it's just where everyone is.

Imaginary
Offline
Whateverville, California
e.s.c. wrote:
Imaginary wrote:

Saying "thing X is cancelled due to lack of interest", is usually a signal from your own ego to alert you that you are losing interest in said thing. I hear musicians pushing out new work all the time. Is the scene as good as it could be? I dunno, what's that supposed to look like? Make music, consume music, support the musicians you like. Boom, done.

for the events, many of the people who are running them can't afford to lose money on them and venues usually cost money, so in those cases it's legit to eventually cut your loses if you keep ending up in the red. some friends of mine were doing breakcore events roughly quarterly in Chicago, but they were losing hundreds of dollars on each event, so now they're not really doing them anymore. there's no ego or loss of interest really on their parts, they're just adults with jobs that don't pay enough to eat substantial losses on a regular basis. especially since there's a lot of stress involved in organizing anything like that

Word dude, events are a whole different ballgame. We used to play mostly free house shows because dealing with local promotion companies was such a painful experience. The margins are truly miserable for anything that's not either "The Next Big Thing" or "About To Be The Next Big Thing".
With any very niche scene you're kinda just stuck accepting that you'll end up with marginal opportunity to see live examples.
Mad respect for anybody who goes out on a limb to make small local events happen.

I suppose the aforementioned post was more of a philosophical shunt of the standard "chiptune is dead/dying" theme that seems to underly the entire community. "The world is ending" says the man who is letting his world end. For the rest of us it's Tuesday and we have to be at work in an hour.

monx
Offline
San Francisco, CA

So i'm wondering, is this site all about active artists and live performance?
In that case, sure, it could be out of fashion from time to time.

But I think of chiptune - primitive waveforms and limited sound channels - more as an instrument, like piano or guitar, than a genre.  A strange instrument that relatively few have discovered, but one that takes skill to master.

In that way, I think chip music has about as much danger of "dying" as a harmonica.

e.s.c.
Offline
IL, US
monx wrote:

So i'm wondering, is this site all about active artists and live performance?
In that case, sure, it could be out of fashion from time to time.

But I think of chiptune - primitive waveforms and limited sound channels - more as an instrument, like piano or guitar, than a genre.  A strange instrument that relatively few have discovered, but one that takes skill to master.

In that way, I think chip music has about as much danger of "dying" as a harmonica.

it's about both, tbh

new zan-zan-zawa-veia
Offline

there's jazzfunk chiptune and demo chiptune and dance chiptune and art chiptune folks all pumping out huge amounts of works, netlabels still operating and competitions going on constantly all the time
i also scrolled past hundreds of tweets about the recent high profile event in japan where seemingly everyone in the world but me played live :B
things appear to be going well

i bet you could assemble a discord ring of artist discords many of which are publicly joinable
im a terrible internet hermit and i can tell it's really really easy to track down musicians you like if you wanna

it's just that maybe you'll never again summon up teh halcyon feeling where BRK can be an entire post

noisewaves
Offline
Michigan
new zan-zan-zawa-veia wrote:

there's jazzfunk chiptune

can you give me all of the links you have of this please?

spark300c
Offline

well mix into more genres. I still make chip punk.  about year ago I started to bit crash my guitar to create low fi crunch when put over drive before it. it sound nice in punk. how ever am not a good musician so it not likely to catch on. emulators allow people to make chip tunes without  real hard ware. I lucky enough to keep my gba around and now using that for chip tunes. What I hate is that music genre go through fads and cycle where you have up and downs. it people stuck to genre and keep make music help get alive in its down cycle.

Heosphoros
Offline

It took so long for it to die, it'd be a shame to bring it back really.

Duck
Offline
London, UK

CHIPTUNE in "NOT DEAD, JUST LATIN AMERICAN" shocker

https://daily.bandcamp.com/2018/12/05/l … une-guide/

bryface
Offline
vancouver, canada

chiptune so isn't dead, but the coverage / documentation / journalism of chiptune kinda sucks, and that's why everyone thinks nothing new is happening.  if there were more efforts to accurately capture the zeitgeist, then i think we'd feel a lot better about the state of things.

the last thing that i felt truly encapsulated everything that was going on with the chip scene is STILL the reformat the planet documentary (though one could argue that was more a natural side effect of blipfest itself being intentionally cross-sectional with its curation).  even 8bc's top 3 tracks feature implicitly reflected the trends of the time, so you could check it out every week and theorize about where the artform / scene is heading. 

but anyway there used to be more central, authoritative sources that the whole scene could use to get a convenient slice of the scene at large.  That WeeklyTreats project (1 song by a different chip artist every week of the year) was pretty nice because it included interviews that also conveyed the featured artist's insights on the scene itself.  goto80's chipflip blogposts were great too because of his perspective as a historian.  aaand of course TCTD

nowadays, to get a sense of the scene at large:
- there's chipwin, which imho has a long way to go in terms of the quality of its written content, and overall has a very low signal-to-noise ratio
- you have to spend a lot of time trawling twitter for the latest chatter
- you get what you can from chatter in various chip discords
- you go to chip shows / festivals in person and hope that the organizers are able to curate based on "what's happening right now" instead of "who can we get that's convenient"

So there's a lot of feelers that the average active chip musician has to put out to get a read on things.  That's tiring.  That's why i think a group of people dedicated to adequately document trends and happenings - with a strong editorial voice - would be a great thing for the scene... if only such people had the time and resources to commit to it.

btw that Latin American chip bandcamp article is great because it seems to reflect a real, mature effort to take a cross-sectional look at the current state of things, albeit a particular subculture of the chipscene itself.  more of that please.

Last edited by bryface (Dec 7, 2018 4:04 am)

Hide Your Tigers
Offline
Las Vegas

We jam pretty often in Vegas

Imaginary
Offline
Whateverville, California
bryface wrote:

So there's a lot of feelers that the average active chip musician has to put it to get a read on things.  That's tiring.  That's why i think a group of people dedicated to adequately document trends and happenings - with a strong editorial voice - would be a great thing for the scene... if only such people had the time and resources to commit to it.

This is me absolutely. I don't really have the time or interest for most forms of social media, so I end up missing out on a majority of the rad new music I know is being made. I absolutely do not have my finger on the pulse of the scene. It's kind of interesting in a way, because I know whatever I'm creating hasn't been subconsciously influenced by the newest developments in the scene. But overall it's frustrating because there have been some shocker moments of "so and so has a new things coming out" or "such and such label totally went under". If there were a reliable weekly blotter, I'd be all over it. As things stand now though, I end up just ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and moving on.

Duck
Offline
London, UK

Bandcamp Daily is pretty good at taking a slice of niche music and treating it with the respect the mainstream would get.

Music journalism as a whole has become quite difficult - blogging is kinda dead, forums are mostly slower... someone with time and devotion probably needs to do a podcast! wink

e.s.c.
Offline
IL, US

I've considered doing a podcast, but my taste is far different from what most if the scene is into. Guess it would be a good counterpoint to chipwin though

Imaginary
Offline
Whateverville, California
e.s.c. wrote:

I've considered doing a podcast, but my taste is far different from what most if the scene is into. Guess it would be a good counterpoint to chipwin though

As far as I'm concerned the fact that your interests would showcase a different subsection of the scene could only be seen as a good thing. Having 100 excellent chiptune news sources that constantly agreed about how great the same 25 artists are would be pointless.

Dolby-Z
Offline
East Coast USA

one big thing for me is the need for easier to use software. i wouldn't even bother with chip music if it weren't for Nanoloop & the Pocket Operators making it easy to incorporate into my workflow.