Beepity Beep And Other Foolish Things - Chiptunes!

I have for some reason had in my life an attraction to chiptunes, those devilish things, and to 8-bit music in general; unfortunately for you, whomsoever you may be, you will probably hear about this attraction every once in a while.

Chiptunes are music that has been created in the vain of classic video game music, often using hardware to create this effect, rather then software. They vary greatly from individual from individual; one of the best repositories I have found of chiptunes is the rather magnificent 8bitpeoples, and it is also a great example of how they vary. My first experience with the genre was while playing the rather graphically magnificent and conceptually stimulating game 'Darwinia', which takes place entirely inside a graphic representation of a computer network gone themepark; for the soundtrack, Introversion grabbed a few tunes from the rather magnificent electronic musician Tim Lamb, stage names trash80 and tresk. Now as one quickly discovers, his tunes are not usually hardcore chiptune, but rather an amalgamation of electronica and chiptunes, but they're easily a gateway to the harder stuff, such as the just as if not more magnificent Anamanaguchi (and now, seriously, if you haven't clicked on a single link yet, that one is the one that you should) and Bit Shifter (again, worth checking out).

I have had many debates with people about this genre of music; the classical musicians, especially, tend to argue that chiptunes lack expressiveness or feeling, to which I say you have obviously never heard True Fidelity by Twilight Electric; within it there is an expressiveness of a sort that I have never heard elsewhere. Chiptunes have a sort of purity about them; they harken back to a more innocent age when video games didn't have to have majestic scores behind them, sounding all too much like Pirates of the Caribbean (for those of you not in the know, I'm talking about the score to Oblivion- during the title screen I've literally had people wandering into the room going 'PIRATES! OOooo... oh... nevermind...') Instead, you had a simple 8-bit soundtrack coming through a tiny speaker, which still evoked emotions of joy, and when the inevitable speeding hi-hat combo came along to signify a boss, dread.

Chiptunes have a strange sort of power over a certain selection of us; they transcend analog, and are a thing of the purely digital realm, for they are nigh impossible to recreate with analog. Oh, you can play them on a guitar or a keyboard, but they then aren't truly chiptunes. Here is one of the few bastions in the musical world where the digital vs. analog argument has no footholds, because it is a thing of such purity and clarity, and yes, because it is only digital. I'm not saying that analog has no business anywhere, and some people even combine the two (such as Anamanaguchi) but for some of us, the realm of the purely digital is a nice place to vacation every once in a while.