Extended traveling, 8-bit music festivals, and holiday planning have kept me away from a keyboard recently, but I hope to post more soon.

Stay tuned…

Blip Festival 2008 from Mark M on Vimeo.

I also shot some photos of the event, most are available on flickr.  Here are a few of my favorites.

Warning, MySpace links ahead.  Shields up!

Cheap Dinosaurs making his Gameboy sing:

Bit Shifter, one of the major forces behind the 8bitpeoples label:

USK, performing with Anamanaguchi:

Blip Festival 2008 was awesome and we’ll definitely be looking forward to 2009!

The full lineup and schedule for the 2008 Blip Festival is now available.  The festival takes place in NYC a little over a week from now, on December 4th-7th.

From the festival site:

Highlighting the chipmusic phenomenon and its related disciplines, the festival aims to showcase emerging creative niches involving the use of legacy video game & home computer hardware as modern artistic instrumentation. Devices such as the Nintendo Entertainment System, Commodore 64, Atari ST, Nintendo Game Boy and others are repurposed into the service of original, low-res, high-impact electronic music and visuals — sidestepping game culture and instead exploring the technology’s untapped potential and distinctive intrinsic character.

The Blip Festival assembles nearly 40 practitioners selected from the chip music movement’s expansive global underground, taking care to represent as many as possible of the genre’s surprisingly diverse styles, geographical and technical scenes, communities, and traditions. The festival’s concert program will be supplemented by daytime events to be announced, including workshops, presentations, and screenings. The Blip Festival’s intended result is to provide a cross-section of a movement currently in explosive flux, teeming with artistic exploration, and poised at the cusp of global awareness.

What is so cool about 8-bit music and the Blip Festival?

As a child of the 80s, I was exposed to the 8-bit sound first through video games on the Commodore 64 and the Nintendo Entertainment System, and much later through the vibrant chiptune scene that surrounded the Commodore Amiga computer.  I distinctly remember loading games on my C64 just to hear the music – it wasn’t unusual for a game to have music than graphics or gameplay.  Years later, I’m not sure if it’s because 8-bit music was ahead of it’s time or that electronic music today is embracing a more raw low-fidelity sound, but I still find the 8-bit sound fresh and interesting.  Certainly it does have something to do with the many talented chiptune artists that have chosen to exploit the 8-bit sound in ways that remind me of the old but are also completely original and new.

(By the way, the C64 is even now playing a hidden role in popular music – see the Timbalands controversy and the Sidstation, used most notably in Fischerspooner’s Emerge and Kernkraft 400′s Zombie Nation.)

If you can’t make it to the Blip Festival, one of the best introductions to 8-bit music is the 8-Bit Operators album.  The album features 15 covers of Kraftwerk by 8-bit artists and gives you a taste of a few very different approaches to the 8-bit sound.  Also check out the Gamewave Podcast, which often features artists that have performed at the Blip Festival in previous years, many of which will return in December.

Archaic game and home computer hardware is recast into the unlikely role of musical instrument and motion graphics workstation in the BLIP FESTIVAL 2008, a four-day event showcasing nearly 40 musicians and visual artists occupying the international low-res cutting edge. The Blip Festival takes place DECEMBER 4 – 7 2008 at The Bell House, and is presented by Manhattan art organization THE TANK and NYC artist collective 8BITPEOPLES.

Several new artists have been announced, including Meneo, m-.-n, and Lissajou.

The full list is here.

Tickets and schedule (still TBD).

Alex Mauer performing at Blip ’07.

Blip Festival 2008: The Promo from Richard Alexander Caraballo on Vimeo.

Blip Festival 2008 is coming up in just a few weeks, on December 4-7th, in Brooklyn, New York.  The Blip Festival is a yearly event in NYC promoted by The Tank, a performing arts space in lower Manhattan.  Last year was truly epic and featured many prominent artists in the 8-bit/lo-fi music scene, including Alex Mauer, Bitshifter, and my new favorite 8-bit artist, Markus Schrodt.

Here’s a direct link to Markus Schrodt’s latest release, i amar prestar aen.  All of his music is available for download here.

Buy your tickets now, make travel reservations, and I’ll see you in December at Blip!

• Hardware hacking is getting a lot of attention and there is a lot of interest in microcontrollers including new design and reverse engineering off the shelf hardware like RFID.
• Local community based physical spaces for hacking are booming.  Hackerspaces like NYC Resistor and the Hacktory are becoming a very big part of the scene, and new hackerspaces are popping up all over the world.  Each space has their own unique interests, but common themes seem to be microcontroller hacking (especially Arduino), fabrication (like Reprap and Fab@Home) and other more physical projects instead of just writing code.  There was even a new wiki announced at the show that is devoted to tracking hackerspaces and helping start new ones at hackerspaces.org.
• There was an awesome talk about Biohacking by Chris Seidel (I wish I could find a link) that makes me wonder if we will see more of this in the future as Bioengineering becomes more accessible to the masses.  The parallels Chris identified between biological processes and electrical circuits were spooky.

It was announced during the closing ceremonies that the Hotel Pennsylvania will not be demolished as was previously announced, and that there will indeed be another HOPE in 2010.

NYC Resistor has some info about the 3D Wiremap demo, one of my favorite exhibits, shown below.

I’m at The Last HOPE in NYC this weekend, checking out lots of cool talks about hacking both hardware and software.  I took a few pictures today and put them up on flickr.

Club-Mate is a very popular beverage this year, a shipment arrived from Germany yesterday and bottles are on sale at the 2600 store on the Mezzanine.  Based on my experience, I have to agree with their motto, which is “You get used to it!”  The flavor is something like prune juice (!) crossed with tea and honey.  But honestly, are people drinking it for the flavor?

I’ll be at the con all weekend and should have an update soon.