Tag: nullsleep

TV On The Radio in the newspaper over the internet

Tuesday, January 20th, 2009

Bubblyfish

At PopMatters, a review of Blipfest 2008, the largest chiptune show of the year.

I’ve fiddled with the programming enough to know that this stuff doesn’t come easily. There’s a certain sameness to a lot of it on the surface—all lo-fi electronic music in 4/4 with house-derived “drum” sequences which rely on filtered white noise—but after taking in a couple of sets, the differences between the artists become more readily apparent. Bucket-headed spaz-dancer Sulumi’s restless melodies were a fantastic highlight, skipping across the room like so many chips of shale across a Mario 2-2 swimming level, but geek-chic Asian chick Bubblyfish had the most depth, with an enthralling opener which expertly transitioned from jovial Katamari plinks to ominous Metroid gloom over the course of ten minutes.
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Pazz and Jop 2008 Cover

In the Village Voice, Pazz and Jop 2008, the long-running annual music roundup in which I was invited to be a small blip myself.

Nullsleep live review

Wednesday, October 29th, 2008

Nullsleep

Jeremiah Johnson makes lo-fi techno using video game hardware, and you’d be astonished at how competent it is.

The assumption that Johnson is mixing together sets of different video game soundtracks is a pretty common mistake. The guts of this process are actually considerably more interesting, though: Specific timbres and pitch sequences are programmed using special cartridges—some homebrew software burns on blank cartridges made with expensive proprietary writers, others imported from Europe thanks to an industrious German—and are then sent through an amplifier several hundred times larger than the carts they start on. But it’s not quite that simple—first, the signals have to pass through Johnson himself.
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