The team behind last year’s “Blip Festival Australia” and regular Melbourne chipmusic night “SoundBytes” haven’t wasted any time in 2013 in getting Asia-Pacific chip music fans excited about their first festival under the new “Square Sounds” brand. The team today announced the remainder of their huge line up of 17 audio and 4 visual artists over two days – February 15th and 16th at the Evelyn Hotel in Fitzroy, Victoria.
A brief definition of Chip Music: Electronic music produced with the sound chips of vintage computers, video game consoles, and arcade machines. While it has been a mostly underground genre, chip music has had periodic and until now transient popularity since the 1980s when an over population of abandoned consoles and arcade machines were re-claimed to create sound and art.
Back to the festival....The artists appearing at Square Sounds are generally working with old video game consoles – or influenced by them. They come from all over the world representing Asia, Europe, the Americas and, of course, Australasia. “Some of these guys are very well known not only within the chipmusic scene, but by wider audiences too” says one of the organisers, Kristy Dossor.
The line up features a mix of artists but focusses heavily on showcasing internationals with a strong showing from local talent. Aussie based artists on the line up include Elliot, A_Art and Pselodux as well as visualist iLKke. Co-organiser Eugene Davoren-Britton mentions “We’ve also brought back one of the standouts from last year - 7bit Hero – this time under their more widely known Hunz alias. We had people pick up the Hunz EP at the merch table last year and be blown away by it so there should be some very happy fans. No doubt that will also be the case for the many fans who asked us whether trash80 would be back on the bill this year. So many so that we just had to make it happen.”
“There’s also a strong contingent coming from Japan again this year – even though most of them aren’t Japanese” jokes Dossor “In addition to previously announced Cheapshot and Omodaka, we also have Minikomi – who’s actually an Aussie and Aliceffekt – who’s Canadian. At least m7jkenji – one of the visualists - is actually Japanese!”
The remaining artists, Huf and Ralp are both playing in Australia for the first time and in Huf’s case, SSM will be their first show outside of New Zealand and like many of the fans, they’ll be taking the opportunity to take in the satellite events that are part of the festival, and include an open mic, DIY workshops and an after party co-presented by net radio show ‘Not Even’ and featuring DJ sets from artists well known to the chipmusic scene.
Further details including the satellite events, artist bios, timetable and more are available at http://melbourne.squaresoundsfestival.com.
If it's anything, chip music is cleverly recycling yesterdays trash to create todays treasure. It's not necessarily gonna be your cup of tea, but it's a cool concept nevertheless.
