One of the most surprising films in the sort of "Holy crap? What the heck?! This is cool!" vein to come out of SXSW film festival earlier this year was Blip Festival: Reformat The Planet. It's all about chiptune music and the performers, and is beautifully shot. It's hard to imagine Nintendo thinking people would be hacking into their Game Boys in order to create full-fledged concerts, concerts that would one day spark a feature documentary and an entire genre of music.
For one week, you can watch the impressive documentary at Pitchfork.tv. It's even broken up into bite-sized chapters for you. Give it a looksee and you'll find yourself toe-tapping along to the addictive 8-bit music throughout the film. It's beaten Wizard Rock as our current favorite geek music of choice.
[Thanks, Eliot]
Reader Comments (15)
Posted: Aug 20th 2008 4:17AM Taedirk said
Not trying to blogspam or anything, but take a look at 8bitpeoples. It's a homegrown label of a bunch of chiptune artists releasing their stuff under CC license. Joshua Davis (Bit Shifter from the first part of the documentary) is one of the people running it and has some of his stuff on there. Last time I checked, they're up to almost 90 albums with all but the oldest few listed for free on the site.
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Posted: Aug 20th 2008 1:11PM (Unverified) said
I've been a fan of 8bitpeoples for a while now. Chiptunes are amazing, and they make up a fair amount of my listening. Those guys can make very limited hardware do amazing things.
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Posted: Aug 21st 2008 7:10PM Ninjanun said
Well my personal favourite chiptune artist is Sabrepulse (http://www.myspace.com/sabrepulse) Cant get enough of chip really, nothing better than fast,heart racing bleeps and bloops while fraggin n00bs in COD4. If your in the UK hes touring soon aswell
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Posted: Aug 20th 2008 6:47AM aMac said
I watched this last week when it was on pitchfork.tv and it was a really good documentary.
I freakin' love Chiptunes too (but I must confess to favouring C64 tunes over NES/Gameboy ones) and have been considering flying out for this year's Blip Fest. The only things holding me back are the costs from the UK, and being surrounded by lots of nerds trying to dance, as evidenced in this video! Uuuurgh
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I freakin' love Chiptunes too (but I must confess to favouring C64 tunes over NES/Gameboy ones) and have been considering flying out for this year's Blip Fest. The only things holding me back are the costs from the UK, and being surrounded by lots of nerds trying to dance, as evidenced in this video! Uuuurgh
Posted: Aug 20th 2008 9:57AM Gimpeyjoe said
Teehee, I'm in a bunch of those crowd shots (the film opening performance and the outdoor Nullsleep performance off the top of my head). It's one of the upsides of living in the city.
Blipfest 2006 and 2007 were badass, made good contacts, finally got a few copies of LSDJ for my gameboys (as well as a copy of Pushpin, which enables me to controll the gameboy sound chip with a midi keyboard or controller if I can ever build the gamelink to midi conversion box correctly).
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Blipfest 2006 and 2007 were badass, made good contacts, finally got a few copies of LSDJ for my gameboys (as well as a copy of Pushpin, which enables me to controll the gameboy sound chip with a midi keyboard or controller if I can ever build the gamelink to midi conversion box correctly).
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