Reformat the Planet
Reformat the Planet is a documentary about the chiptune movement, which takes as its narrative centre the 2006 Blip Festival held at the Tank art space in New York.
I haven't been as big into chiptunes as I have other kinds of geek music, but I've been on an electronic music kick recently and a number of the artists in the film caught my fancy.
A cover of Kraftwerk's 'Computer Love' by Covox:
And an original by the same artist:
8bitpeoples: a chiptune label.
Starpause has a lot of links to various media, his EP, AKID is on bandcamp.
Random (formerly Randomizer?), not to be confused with the hip hop artist of the same name has a ton of tracks available, including this bad ass version of the Mortal Kombat theme (that's a link to an mp3).
This Jeroen Tel track is much closer to the videogame roots of the genre:
Part of the genre's appeal rests on nostalgia, certainly, but that's not the appeal for me. I didn't play any of these games as a kid, and have in fact never touched a Gameboy or Famicom. Still, these sounds are familiar as part of an overall geek subcultural heritage like D&D, even though I only played the red box once as a kid, before returning to my real gateway game Advanced Fighting Fantasy. So that's part of it, but most of all, it's just good electronic music that makes me want to dance.
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You can watch this video on www.livejournal.com
I haven't been as big into chiptunes as I have other kinds of geek music, but I've been on an electronic music kick recently and a number of the artists in the film caught my fancy.
A cover of Kraftwerk's 'Computer Love' by Covox:
And an original by the same artist:
8bitpeoples: a chiptune label.
Starpause has a lot of links to various media, his EP, AKID is on bandcamp.
Random (formerly Randomizer?), not to be confused with the hip hop artist of the same name has a ton of tracks available, including this bad ass version of the Mortal Kombat theme (that's a link to an mp3).
This Jeroen Tel track is much closer to the videogame roots of the genre:
Part of the genre's appeal rests on nostalgia, certainly, but that's not the appeal for me. I didn't play any of these games as a kid, and have in fact never touched a Gameboy or Famicom. Still, these sounds are familiar as part of an overall geek subcultural heritage like D&D, even though I only played the red box once as a kid, before returning to my real gateway game Advanced Fighting Fantasy. So that's part of it, but most of all, it's just good electronic music that makes me want to dance.
363