What Happened to Chiptune‪?‬ Space Town

This episode features Alex Yabsley, otherwise known as dot.AY. Alex is a musician and event organizer based in Melbourne, Australia, whose music is a raw and intense collage of various bass music styles filtered through the Nintendo Gameboy. He’s been involved in organizing shows in Brisbane and Melbourne, helping to organize the Square Sounds Melbourne and Melbourne Chiptune Academy event series. We get into the landscape of music in Brisbane, Melbourne and Australia more broadly, as well as the rise of the Melbourne chiptune scene and Square Sounds Melbourne.

Today’s episode features Michael Raisner, aka Nestrogen. Nestrogen is a musician and recording engineer based in Florida, whose musical work deals with the harsher side of chiptune. While I’m most familiar with harsh chiptune through the chipthrash subgenre, Nestrogen takes a more traditional approach combining live vocals and instrumentation with high-speed Gameboy parts to create a punk and hardcore inspired chiptune sound. In this episode we get into the influence of Nestrogen’s prior musical history on his chiptune work, bridging the gap between the digital and physical scenes of chiptune, and the effect that growing up has on one’s desire to remain in the chiptune scene.

This episode features Liz Ryerson, a musician, game designer and writer. She made Problem Attic, a challenging and thought-provoking game about problematic systems and the ways we navigate through them, and also is the host of the Experimental Games Workshop at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Liz’s work has been foundational in the way I think about art and creativity, and I was so glad to have her on the podcast to talk about her experiences in the chiptune-adjacent OCRemix scene and how those experiences mirror mine in the chiptune scene. Along the way we touch on music scenes more broadly, the shared trajectories of the indie game scene and chiptune, and the role of digital communities in our lives.

Today's episode features Emi Spicer, aka uglymachine. Emi is a photographer, event organizer, and producer based in NYC and has played different roles in many different chiptune spaces throughout both NYC and the world. Her photography work has been featured in numerous venues around the world and she was also an event organizer for the Pulsewave event series. We've known each other for a long time ever since I played (some could say "crashed") a birthday party for her all the way back in the early '10s and we've spoken to each other about many topics in and out of chiptune since then. We get into the triumphs and challenges of organizing Pulsewave, the concept of "waves" of chiptune, and what it looks and feels like to burn out of a music scene. We also get into some sensitive topics such as sexual harassment and abuse so if you're particularly sensitive to topics such as those, listen with caution.

This episode features Michael Bradley, aka Boaconstructor. Boaconstructor is a musician based out of Seattle, Washington that makes chipmusic styled after many different modern dance and hip hop genres such as footwork, techno, juke and trap music. I’ve always been a big fan of Boa’s work as he was never very interested in the videogame aspect of chiptune but rather was very focused on taking these small devices and trying to get them into club spaces, often making music that was indistinguishable from music made on non-chiptune devices. We get into the Seattle scene, the hardships of being a musician focused on club sounds, and the attachment that many chiptune artists and fans had to the videogame aspect of the scene and the effects it had on the community as a whole.

This episode features Frans Twisk and Rocco Wouters, organizers of the Dutch chiptune event series EINDBAAS. Frans Twisk is primarily an event organizer while Rocco Wouters is both a musician and organizer of EINDBAAS. EINDBAAS is the premier chiptune event in the Netherlands and has featured both local and international artists across more than 20 editions. In this episode, we get into the landscape of chiptune in the Netherlands, the highs and lows of organizing an event series, and the relationship between the Dutch scene and the international scene.

Frans Twisk can be found at: https://franstwisk.nl/
RoccoW can be found at: https://roccow.bandcamp.com/