I don’t post about music very much anymore, not because I’m not listening to anything, but because I feel like since I hit my mid-thirties, I’m always (at best) a few months behind everyone else. Oh well, I’ll thrown caution to the wind and talk a little bit about a genre of music that I’ve been getting into lately — chiptunes, or electronic music that is largely based around the set of sounds produced by old 8-bit gaming systems (e.g., the original Gameboy, the NES, etc.)

I’ve been interested in this stuff for a few years, ever since my friend Dave gave me a copy of this 8-bit peoples comp:

That led me to a great short piece in Wired by Malcolm McLaren from way back in 2003 called “8-bit punk,” and I’ve since tried to track down the documentary Reformat the Planet, about a recent Blip Festival, but have yet to find a working streaming version. There used to be one up here at pitchfork.tv, but it doesn’t load for me. Regardless, here’s a trailer for the documentary:

I’m not sure if my attraction to this kind of music is because it’s repurposing old technologies or repuposing games specifically. I study games, but I’m too old to entertain the same degree of nostalgia for the NES/Famicom/Gameboy that these dudes clearly hold — these games systems were played by me sporadically during college, not obsessively during my childhood. Perhaps I’m interested in all of this because they’re unique and interesting sounds in a musical landscape which has been, for a long, long time now, full of very tired, boring music. It’s made me excited about electronic music again for the first time in years.

At any rate, the record I’ve lately been spinning (er, MP3s I’ve been streaming?) the most has been Adventure’s self-titled, which came out last summer:

Adventure, aka Benny Boeldt, crafts epic, almost orchestral tunes out of these 8-bit palettes (using MIDI instead of the actual old game systems). Here’s a video for the excellent tune “Poison Diamonds”:

It’s interesting to read interviews with the guy — he’s only 23-ish, it seems? — so, while I hear lots of similarities to old New Order, he labels them “cheesy.” Sure, I guess that’s somewhat accurate, but it’s amusing to me to hear kids reinventing the musical wheel in fun and interesting ways without fully understanding the debt they have to the music that came before them.

I downloaded his album from emusic (the best of the paid MP3 sites, in my opinion). Give it a shot.