Gadgetory

well we started blip festival about six years ago and before that I was running a non-profit performing art space here in New York called the tank and at the tank I was booking in all sorts of different electronic music and some of the guys who started coming around with people that were involved with chip music which I'd never heard of before I started booking it as that sort of picked up steam and got bigger and bigger we hit a point where it made sense to sort of do sort of one big annual thing where we could bring this whole community together and now was the first blip festival back in two thousand six the festival has evolved a lot I mean just technically every year it's gotten bigger and better I think every time you do it it just just kick it up a notch I wanted to make chiptune before I knew what chiptune was there are a few different ways that people come into the chips and I think there are people who enter in as you know I grew up going video games and I love this nostalgic factor there are a lot of people that come in from an electronic music perspective I think chiptune and video games are two separate worlds and it's interesting to see where they intersect I think for a lot of people video games is a very like strong entry point to a chiptune but I think that they'll be surprised that where they wind up obviously they're using retro hardware right this is stuff that a lot of us grew up you know I grew up with playing on a gameboy or playing with an Atari and but what's interesting is that a lot of the people that are on the scene right now didn't write in your hit a point where there are people who are you know 18 19 20 years old who are doing this stuff that never grew up with this stuff they grew up at a time when this was like already the sort of the ancient past nostalgia definitely plays a part in chip music but to me it's so much more fun when I have a fan who's 16 years old and like loves the game boy sound that never played an NES game or has never played a game boy game and nostalgia is no part of that and to me what that says is this sound palette is robust enough and cool enough and has enough character on its own to really stand by itself and it's not just nostalgia driving if there's a legitimacy to it a very important part of the blip festival is showing that it's not just chiptune music it's a lot of different things coming from a lot of different people lista that we're doing is informed by chiptune and it's an element of what we're doing but is not like the entire picture we're just trying to recontextualize what it is these sounds are kind of like becoming popular in pop music like you literally hear on like pop radio samples of these sorts of things I personally would like it to stay my own little niche seen forever but I think it will it will grow I think the inclusion of chip music in mainstream music is actually a really good thing I just went on tour I played a bunch of shows i was an opening act and most of the people who were watching me had never heard chip music or maybe they've only heard like a song or two and there's so many different genres that people are making within the chip music scene that you know there's something really for everyone six years ago I had no idea what chiptune was I think most people didn't know and now I can have a conversation with someone who I met on the street who actually knows what your team is I've seen a lot of other electronic music genres and there's lots of amazing people in all of them but this scene is is particularly embracing and open and supported and I think that's what's helped the community grow because people who show up as an audience member one day or you know a year later they're playing and they're like oh an active part of the scene this is actually my first year performing a blip festival but last year I attended as a fan and I actually walked away extremely inspired they have such a wide variety of artists that they get here and it shows how diverse and expansive that music scene is