Reformat The Planet

It’s amazing how music can, out of nowhere, take you down like a Bengali Tiger, wrestle with your consciousness, absorb you, engulf you with obsession and then flee you in the night. How a friend can say “Hey Douchebag, check out this old Italian 70’s synth-psych horror soundtrack that I found down the back of a couch at my local bric-a-brac shop”, and then for the next 2 weeks all you can think about is Italo-synth-horror-psych, spending all your time online, diggin’ amongst the pixels for every last scrap that you can get your filthy meat hooks on. Then another friend shatters your frenzy with “wait ‘til you hear this industrial dancehall record that the guy from Napalm Death is making under the name ‘The Bug’, your shells are gonna Bllllllllleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed!” Goodbye Italo-psych and hello to doing the boggle in a disused Berlin warehouse at 4am on a school night!

Anyway, this happened to me around a year ago when a colleague sent me a link to a music doc that was screening on Pitchfork TV for one week only. ‘Blip Festival: Reformat The Planet’ was the first time I’d ever heard Chiptune. Sure, I remember Malcolm McLaren declaring that computer game music was the new punk back in the early 90’s, but who was going to let that manchild of privilege swindle them again?

Chiptune turned out to be a scene packed with computer geeks who revel in making banging choon’s from within the 8 Bit boundaries of old consoles like the Nes, Atari and Gameboy (their Stratocaster). Sound’s gimmicky right? Well initially it is, but as this enthrallingly charming documentary unfolds the history and international reach of the genre, you start to get wrapped up in the good clean fun and nerdy exuberance of the Chiptune faithful.

The film is mainly based in New York City, where players like Bitshifter and Glomag have found a venue called The Tank, to hold regular Chipmusic nights, with some excellent background visuals adding to the club feel of the place. We then get to see what the Chiptune kids in Scandanavia and (of course) Japan are doing with the genre, developing its style out of the glitch technobeat towards more progressive leanings. These International musicians along with Chiptune enthusiasts descend on The Tank for the first annual Blip Festival, a pixelated love-in of geektastic proportions. Check out the trailer and yes, that is the Neverending Story theme!

As the doc progresses you get feeling that having started as a gimmick, Chiptune has developed a true DIY spirit, encompassing punk’s inter-community values alongside artrock’s experimentation, but with a childlike beauty that banishes the snobbish demons that haunt the houses of the aforementioned genres. Plus, you can’t help but get behind these loveable poindexters, their world is one of beauty and innocence.

After watching ‘Reformat The Planet’, I instantly hit the information superhighway to find out where I could catch my first Chiptune show. Within 2 weeks I was 200 miles away from my homestead, standing in the dingy downstairs room of The Fly on Oxford St, watching the likes of British Chiptuner’s Sabrepulse, Henry Homesweet and Syphus tear it up on the Chiptune Alliance Tour. Sure, I looked like Methuselah amongst all the fresh faces and New Era Caps, but it was worth the trip to see a real underground genre spreading it’s wings across the land to the welcoming ears and hearts of kids unaffected by the tainted commercial legacies of former youth explosions like punk and rave, even though Chiptune owes a heavy debt to both.

For the blasting of the cobwebs that my dalliance into the world of Chipmusic provided, I’m still unable to put my finger on how, 9 months on, I’m only just remembering about it now. Could it be the old adage that the best pop music should be both vital and immediately disposable? Or did someone mention Industrial Dancehall to me?