All These Moments

All These Moments

Random ramblings in writing.

Friday, April 03, 2009

The Overdue Data Pop Entry

So, two weeks ago I mostly stayed in Austin for Spring Break. (I also had a two-day visit to Sea World.) During the break I went to some awesome SXSW stuff like Screen Burn and the AMoDA Showcase. However, the best event at Spring Break was not a SXSW event, it was Data Pop 2009. It was awesome.

Data Pop was a chiptune concert. If you are not familiar with this genre do not despair. Chiptune is nay one of those douchey terms that hipsters will judge you for not being familiar with, rather it is the complete opposite. If you don't know what chiptune music is it just means you're not a nerd. (You are missing out, by the way.) Chiptune music is music composed using sound chips from game systems. The most popular choice is the Game Boy, which has had the most extensive cartridge development for artists and is featured on the logo for 8-bit Collective. A good, quick explanation and demonstration of 8-bit music is the trailer for Blip Festival: Reformat the Planet, a documentary about chiptune music.


There were tons of good acts at Data Pop. The first band was the favorite act for two of my friends. The band was called 8-bit OK, and we talked to them later and found out this was their first ever performance! They're real new and don't even have a website yet. Anamanaguchi was awesome too, and I actually spent $10 on their new album Radiant Dawn. (So worth it.) The two closing acts were Bit Shifter and Nullsleep, who are two enormous names in chiptune music. If you see them perform it becomes pretty clear why; those guys are amazing.

We were right up by the stage for most of the performance, so I got some amazingly good concert footage. In fact, Anamanaguchi put one of my videos of them in a blog entry. Awesome! Here is the link to their blog entry, and my video is below. (In their blog entry they say I took the video from onstage, but that is not true. Now I wish I had gone on stage since it seems they wouldn't have cared.)


I have more videos on my youtube page of Bit Shifter, Nullsleep, and a few other artists from the show if you want to check it out.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

i've never heard of this but i LOVE it!!!

5:03 PM  

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My name is Jared and I'm an English major at UT. Politically I'm a mix of libertarian and neocon with a heavy dose of sarcasm. Otherwise I'm just a typical nerd.

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