Blip Festival Showcases Music Made On Game Boys, Commodore 64s
If names like Alex Mauer, No Carrier, Gijs Gieskes and Neil Voss don’t ring any bells, don’t worry. I had no clue who they were either. Before Thursday night, I had no clue what the Blip Festival was.
Probably the niche of all niches, the Blip Festival is a four-day audio and visual experience taking place in New York City from November 29 through December 2. According to the festival’s Web site, “the Blip Festival showcases artists adopting and repurposing familiar but forgotten hardware — such as the Commodore 64, the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Atari game console and home computer line, and the Nintendo Game Boy — exploring their untapped potential and unique aesthetic character.”
I was skeptical at first about the whole event. The Blip Festival wasn’t your typical concert. Instead of a stage crew setting up the band’s instruments or a DJ spinning records, artists literally brought Game Boys to hook up to a mixer. I wasn’t sure that they would be able to create much of a show.
Granted, creating music with a Game Boy or an NES is impressive, but I wasn’t sure it would be aesthetically pleasing. Alex Mauer didn’t do much to change my thoughts.
He timidly approached the microphone and said, “Hi, my name is Alex and I am going to play music now.” Armed with a keyboard and a red iPod Shuffle, Mauer didn’t rock the place. He was more involved with his keyboard than the crowd, and he didn’t look comfortable playing that either.
He introduced his songs by the system they were created with. He listed off the Sega Genesis, Commodore 64 and Game Gear, among others. And they sounded like they were created with one too. His set was more about his ability to make the music than the actual music.
Neil Voss and 8GB seemed to right the ship. Voss followed Mauer, and there was an immediate difference in the place’s atmosphere. Audience members began to move and nod their heads. Although armed with a Game Boy, his stuff sounded more like music rather than cut-and-pasted 8-bit sounds.
8GB (pronounced “eight gee bee”) really set things off. This was the Argentinean artist’s first time in the U.S., and he made a great first impression. He was really into his set nodding his head and dancing around. The audience began to rave and embrace the sound. His music sounded like European electro-hop. In fact, you almost forgot that he was doing this with just a Game Boy.
Check out all of Steven Roberts’ uploads at yourhere.mtv.com…
December 2nd, 2007 at 8:00 am
very off-base comments about alex mauer. he has written more music than almost anybody in our scene with more chipsets. you were half correct in saying that his music is more about the ability to make it with certain platforms, but by saying this and taking it a step further, you discount the music itself simply because you didnt ‘get it’. i have been friends with alex for a long time, even making an alex mauer remixer cd with rock versions of his songs which is available at http://www.iimusic.net. his music lends to a rock edged style better than anybody else’s music in the scene. if these names didnt ring a bell to you when you went to the show, you should have found someone to take with you who would tell you what to expect. you also discounted the music as a whole by bringing up the aspect of ‘people using gameboys’, which is a stereotypical thing to say, on top of it being implied. neil voss has written music for actual video games, no carrier is one of the best visual artists that does projections for these types of events. very simple information that shows me with a lackluster review that you didnt do your homework and didnt seem to care all that much about what you were lucky enough to see.
December 3rd, 2007 at 12:38 pm
First off, We’re you at the show? I was reviewing the show. If you were at the show you would have seen the same thing I saw, which was Mauer focused mainly on his keyboard. The crowd was extremely standoff-ish, and had no energy. I didn’t say anything to discredit what your friend has done in the field. I reviewed his set and found it was boring.
Second, how is stereotypical to say that they were using Gameboys, when both Voss and 8GB were using Gameboys. This is the novelty of the scene for the person not as immersed as youself. I realize there is more to your scene than just the use of Gameboys, but I was drawing the parrelell
Third, I said nothing to discredit Voss. I enjoyed his set. He brought far more energy than Mauer, and better music.
December 3rd, 2007 at 1:32 pm
*I realize there is more to your scene than just the use of Gameboys, but I was drawing the parallel between that of a regular musical act.
Sorry about above.
December 3rd, 2007 at 9:07 pm
The name “Alex Mauer” may not ring a bell unless you search for “Alex Mauer” and “mtv” on Google and you see the review written by one of your peers about one of my albums:
http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2007/08/01/the-hottest-music-for-your-nes-vegavox/
December 4th, 2007 at 1:27 am
i was not at the show, but i have performed with alex before. i was working at the MIA show in baltimore. i know you guys at mtv love you some MIA, so do you blame me? i understood what you were getting at regardless.
i didnt think there was any reason for you to write two paragraphs about alex mauer when you didnt mention the visual artists, the people that were there that were selling stuff, or even the crowd, most of which came there from all parts of the world.
it seems more like you were focusing less on reviweing the festival as a whole, and more on reviewing alex mauer’s performance. i wouldnt have not known about this article had i not heard from someone else close to alex. combine that with the innocuous mention of no carrier (who didnt perform music, he did visuals, which you wouldnt have known from the review), but failed to mention the other 4-5 acts that were there, such as paza from sweden, and lo-bat, and im sure you would understand why i think this is an inaccurate bad review.
im not replying once again to any of this because im a friend of alex’s, im replying because i feel you wrote a review that omitted lots of pertinent information, and also gave information that was false, while trying to defend your ignorance. i wouldnt have checked back here had the same person who happened to see this interview wouldnt have told me you replied as well.
while i appreciate and appluad the fact that you cared to write a review, because when i started playing shows doing this kind of music, i was lucky to get bookings, i dont think its entirely fair to be able to publish a review that starts out with “whats this all about? i dont know. but im gonna talk about it.”. im sure alex did not say that he made the music he made with a game gear or any of the mentioned systems, yet the way you wrote your article, you gave the impression that he did.
furthermore, the fact that you seem to bear a distinction between someone who uses a gameboy and someone who uses a guitar or a drum to make music is off base. there is no distinction in a live performance enviornment as to what you use to make the music, and as long as journalists continue to approach this scene this way, we will make no headway. it will always be considered ‘the nichest of the niche’ as you say. you want to know what that would be for reference? the most niche music you could make would be if you were covering music from commercials for board games. some crossfire theme or some hungry hungry hippos. or covering casio keyboard demos. you can always become more kitsch. and there is always going to be somebody there to make that happen. just dont make us look stupid because of your own inability to understand it, barring enjoying it.
also, the way you wrote the review makes it seem to me that you didnt stick around for the other acts because of failing to mention them, which is why i said that it would have been a good idea to bring someone that was informed about what to expect. if you didnt stick around, then you missed lo-bat, who in my opinion is one of the best of the guys that make music with gameboys.
as far as ‘using gameboys to make music’ and it being a stereotypical thing to say, its simply an easy way for people who dont wish to understand how this music is made to try and explain this scene by calling it ‘gameboy music’. everybody in the scene does not specifically use gameboys to make music. not only that, a lot of people who do use gameboys dont use them solely to make the music they create because of the limitations alone. lo-bat uses a lot of effects on his gameboys, and uses two of them. some people use gameboy and laptop. some people use a gameboy, a sidstation, and a laptop. anamanaguchi uses nerd tracker, which writes to the nintendo sound file (.nsf) format. i use impulse tracker. alex uses a wide palette of different trackers to create the songs he makes, including original hardware used to create the music. this doesnt mean that he uses a genesis to make the music, it means that he uses trackers that emulate the chipset of the system in question, and also uses the original development hardware used to write the music. its really not that difficult to understand if you want to understand it.
while his delivery of explaining the style of music he makes might not be the most acute, i think its pretty unfair to focus on what you consider ‘boring’ when there were 4 or 5 other acts that you did not even mention in your review. you did not do our scene any favors in trying to cover the event by letting your own opinions dominate the article. i wouldnt even call it a one-sided review. i’d simply consider it a bad one, written by someone who doesnt understand the ethics or peripherals behind music they’re reporting about and had no idea of how to report it, on top of not being very open minded to bring out the positive aspects of the event.
by the way, i didnt say that you discredited neil voss, you seemed to take offense to that. i guess you possibly consider the caliber of people that create this type of music as second rate musicians, or maybe they’re not good enough to make music for actual games and thats why they do this? thats the only thing i can assume by the last part of your comment.
neil voss is a great musician, he wrote the music for tetrisphere for the n64, which is generally upbeat, danceable music. i enjoy it. however, the music of alex mauer and the music of neil voss are worlds apart in the aspect that alex writes more thoroughly and more from the heart. if you think his music is better, thats your opinion and you’re entitled to it. but the fact of the matter is that alex spends more time on it on the whole and pure more of his soul in it, which is what inspired me to remix some of his music. this scene that we are working to create is something that i have invested the past 10 years in, playing clubs and basements with a guitar and busted 286 computers with memory held in with guitar picks to get a little more memory, bouncing sets off of clubs to see what works. alex has not had that luxury. that doesnt give you or any other journalist free reign to bring up his shortcomings in an attempt to downplay the effect this scene and this culture has had on the people that enjoy it, which has happened twice now from mtv. dont get me wrong, you cared enough to show up, and i would hope that others from mtv would do so in the future. but simply put, first and foremost, this music is less about the constraints and more about writing music that invokes or forces feelings that wouldnt commonly be there from other music. if you didnt feel that from alex mauer, who in my opinion is one of the best at doing this, then i dont know if you would ever understand it.
December 4th, 2007 at 8:47 am
hey - you all know that this is a fan-written site, right?