A Kiss on the Blips

On to the past: Blip Festival 2008
12/12/2008 7:14 PM | 2 Comments | Page 1 of 3

We were walking down a desolate, darkened 7th Street in Brooklyn, the biting wind making me want to get back on the F train towards civilization. The lights in the row houses around us were all off and we were the only ones on the sidewalk. Was the Bell House just a code word for someone's basement? I was suddenly less confident that the four-day Blip Festival 2008 was, in reality, as much a festival as suggested in minusbaby's promo video -- not to mention the stirring trailer for "Blip Festival: Reformat the Planet," a recent documentary about the annual party in which chiptune musicians and video artists from all over the world converge to play their hacked Game Boys to a crowd of pixel freaks.

People who learned how to run and jump on the Nintendo Entertainment System in the '80s might hear modern-day chiptune music first as an oddity ("Um, this sounds like videogame music..."), then a charming novelty ("I didn't know people still made stuff like this, how cool and weird"), and then perhaps something else. Perhaps it's a foolproof way for them to reconnect to the fantasies of their childhood/adolescence, or a way out of the overproduced quagmire of pop music that's equally catchy and several degrees fresher.

Chiptunes, originally composed for games using the primitive sound chips on the NES, Atari systems, Commodore 64, Amiga and more (remember the Mario, Zelda, Mega Man, Final Fantasy and countless other themes), are still made with those tools, and their scratchy drum sounds and neon melodies still sound just like videogame music -- in other words, like nothing else. As Kyle Orland said in our feature on the Game Trust's favorite classic game tunes, game music once "actually had a distinctive character that was exclusive to the medium."

"You've got to be really good with circuit-bending," says one kid to another in the line at the food truck. My friend and fellow Crispy-ite Matt Zerbo and I have reached the Bell House at the end of the quiet block. It's a converted industrial warehouse where a modest-sized crowd has flocked, eager to get out of the cold and into the Blip Fest. We can hear faint reverberations of bass, but we're hungry, so we think to get Salvadoran food from the conveniently placed truck across the street before heading inside.

"Sometimes they take the controller out and they play it on the controller," the kid says.

"So awesome," muses his friend. I notice that today's nerds -- I mean bona-fide nasal-voiced and pimply-faced nerds, not mere enthusiasts -- wear skinny jeans and Vans. (It could just be the nerds in Brooklyn.)

We've waited too long in the cold with no sign of placing an order, so we join the line at the door. "I'm not even gonna check my coat," Zerbo says. "It's going to be freezing in there, too." I'm still worried that the event's going to be dead. I'm already running through excuses in my head: "It really sounds a lot better on laptop speakers." "You never can tell what people are doing onstage at electronic music shows, can you?" "Well, a lot of the music is free, anyway."

The merchandise tables are decked out with 8-bit paraphernalia: modified blue- and red-screen Game Boys; albums on NES cartridges and 3.5" floppy disks (plus CDs); T-shirts adorned with pixel art; flashing little devices that I can't identify but must make music.

The performance space is dungeon-dark, and it's crowded, too. The imposing, heavyset guy onstage is just pounding the last few blips, bloops and blurps into his set. People chant his name: "Low-Gain! Low-Gain! Low-Gain!" Big red and white blocks light up the screen behind him like Mario under a microscope. I'm feeling in between worlds at this point, still thinking about the F train back home but ready to get lost in the dungeon.

"One thing about this that makes me happy is that everyone's as bad at dancing as I am," Zerbo says wryly, breaking the ice but also bringing me crashing back into reality. Am I going to dance? "If we had a competition to see who was the most clean-shaven person here, I'd definitely win." I'm very glad he is humoring me so far.