Chiptune
March 4th, 2004
I’ve discovered a new genre of music. Such moments are always exciting, but this time it’s particularly so as the style in question is very much up my street.
It’s called variously Chipstyle or Chiptune (I’ll
go with Chiptune) and the basics are as follows:
Chiptune is electronic music made on outdated sequencing platforms like
Commodore 64’s and ZX Spectrums. Accordingly, the sounds used in the
music are somehow familiar, and tinged with nostalgia for children of
the 8-bit era like me.
The music is largely free of the 80’s cheese that you’d imagine would
afflict a genre with this pedigree – Chiptune is serious music with real
drive, emotion, and often humour.
I couldn’t imagine a form of music more perfectly a child of the Internet:
The ‘scene’ consists of a community of people from all over the planet;
the tunes are distributed over the web as mp3’s; and much of the music
is produced on PC’s running emulators, which are distributed over the
internet. There’s a heady geek feel to the whole sound.
Check out some sites, and open your ears. You’ll probably hate it:
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