Payment will be a piece of art I design on a computer with the content of your choice (cf. KC Green’s early commissions). If you need proof of my artistic merit, I invite you to cast your eyes over the sublime cover for “Fuck Freddy’s Drop”.

Things That Are Important For Ringtones

• I believe in loop-based ringtones that seem to sound continuously, but don’t feel you have to fulfil this.
• If your fucking tone doesn’t resolve I may be angry with it (payment will be delivered, nonetheless).
• The “beep” sound is really cool.

Things That Are Not Important For Ringtones

• You know how the modern ringtones are all .mp3s and shit and you can have actual songs for ringtones? Well, that’s bullshit. I don’t want a song for a ringtone. Songs for ringtones are stupid because you never get to listen to the whole song before voicemail kicks in. On my current phone it takes ages to change a ringtone because the phone insists on compiling a list of every sound-file on my phone before showing me the list with “Polaris” and “Email01″ on it. I have a 16gb memory card packed full of music (well, GBA roms and music) and I get mad when I have to change ringtones.
• “Covers” and “remixes” of songs that I already know. Fuck that. When I see someone’s chip cover of “Wicked Game” by Chris Isaak I just go: “Why?”
• That stupid LSDJ glitch sound, you know the one. It happens when you legato down too far or something.

If you email them to zach@sleep500.com, I’ll upload them on the site somewhere so everyone can benefit from your blood, sweat and tears. Despite what I said up there ↑, I’m totally fine with a nicely tagged .mp3 file of your song.

If I get enough submissions (this is highly unlikely) I’ll do a compilation of them with some more mind-numbingly right artwork.

I started things off with the most down-beat performanceless charade of my life. My favourite part of my set was when I said “I had to balance how much I wanted to watch you guys watching me watch the computer screen with actually performing.” Derp, oh well. I liked the end of my chip set (which is in the video) and my last track (which isn’t).

Fauxhound was up next. Jos heckled me because I didn’t play chip off the hardware but I countered by walking over to the bar and being way too coolies. My favourite part of his set was the title of the song Drink To Forget and the super atonal build-up at the end of his last song.

Then Dove got onstage/behind the zebra-striped table and dominated everyone. My favourite part of his set was Cellular Automaton (from DNA Computing) because it has no performance so he just pressed play and stood there. Alex Mauer would have been proud.

Fionn filmed this and Jos edited it. The sound is good! Maybe all shows should be at this volume so amateur videographers and budding cell-phone video artists can post better videos to youtube.

Futurnari has released a Sega Megadrive (16-bit for the hip kids) EP entitled DNA Computing and it’s there <- for free.

The piece (I like to pretend it’s one 9:55 song) builds in intensity and complexity, climaxing with this:

While I've been away sleeping on floors and sitting in the van Futurnari has been further establishing himself in the chipmusic scene. Soon after Another Unlikely Hero was picked up by Bleep City comes Retrospective Forward Thinking.

This five-track EP is a synthesis of Atari 2600 and DMG music with a couple of field recordings. An interesting facet of this release is the hardware. Both the DMG (original 1989 brick Gameboy) and the Atari 2600 are subject to limitations in terms of polyphony, tracks, tempo and tuning. It is especially difficult to sync the tempo of the two devices as the Atari plays at several rather strange fixed tempos which are not whole integers. LSDJ (the Gameboy software) cannot exactly match these tempos so the longer a piece of music continues for the more incongruous it becomes.

However, Futurnari achieves this coupling with aplomb, mixing odd-time numbers (Retrospective Forward Thinking is in 7/8) with broken-beat robot-dancehall numbers like this track, Analyse:

Retrospective Forward Thinking is "the story of the creation of itself."

Grab the entire EP here.

Another Unlikely Hero is the debut release from Futurnari.

Futurnari is a Christchurch-based chipmusician who composes, performs and records on native, 8-bit trackers. This DMG release is a 5-track EP in the vein of Zan-zan-zawa-veia and Alex Mauer.

Download Another Unlikely Hero from Bandcamp.

8bitcollective profile/music.

Chipmusic.org profile.

Those of you who’ve been reading for a while will recognise the first two tracks and the album concept from the virtual reality essays. If anyone I worked with ever read this they’d remember this from those couple of weeks that I non-stop talked about the future.

You can find Never on 8bitcollective and chipmusic.org but unless you’ve accounts at either of those places I’d just visit the website.

Here is the last track on the release in HTML5:

Hit up never.sleep500.com and grab it.

I guess this was put together in preparation for Valentine’s day? Thankfully there are no vocals.

Download the full comp, Love Songs From The Future.

EDIT: Obviously there is meant to be a media player in this post. For some reason the player stopped working when it was updated and I haven’t fixed it yet.

EDIT #2: Fucking stopped working again so I just HTML5′d it.

I basically gave up television because I lost the ability to filter out advertising – likewise radio – in favour of the Internet where you can block whatever you want (whatever you want) and not have to reach for the ‘mute’ button every twelve or so minutes.

Now that I’m subjected to flash banner ads staying away from the Internet is starting to seem like almost a better idea. That is, staying away from the parts of the Internet that allow flash banner ads. I highly doubt there will be any ads in the Discworld MUD.

Today I was talking to some of the Chinese kids at work about the MMOs they play when one of their (not Chinese, some kind of New Zealand flavour) girlfriends turns around and goes, “Well, I doubt you’d know the game because it’s all in Chinese characters and they speak Mandarin and you wouldn’t understand it.”

WHY, THANK YOU, GIRL-I-TRIED-TALKING-TO-THIS-ONE-AWKWARD-AND-NOT-VERY-MEMORABLE-TIME. I GUESS NEXT TIME I WANT TO KNOW ABOUT ANYTHING YOU’LL ASSUME THAT I WANT TO BE AN INTRINSIC PART OF IT. MAYBE I’LL BRING UP “THE BEST WAYS TO BREAK-AND-ENTER” OR “WHERE DO YOU HIDE YOUR SPARE KEY?”

Yeah, I might do that tomorrow.

In other news, I fixed the Covox chipmusic post so the player actually plays the song now. I thought it worked before, but whatevs.

Treewave are a band who used to have a sweet site made from ASCII but now only have the files that make up the 10″ vinyl release that this song comes from. You can go there and download the whole thing, I guess!

This song sounds a bit like Health, I guess – if you like comparisons. My last chipmusic post was for Kelvin. This one is for James.

I was going to write a real post but I’m waiting for fucking an hour and three quarters of Half-Life 2 updates FUCK YOU, STEAM.

This is some pretty legit and listenable chipmusic, right here. Listen to this if you like dance music.

SHORTY K, THIS ONE IS FOR YOU:

I’m hosting this mp3 here for sampling purposes. If you object to the use of this mp3 please email me and I’ll sort it out.

I have some more thoughts relating to the virtual reality business essay so I may do a redux tomorrow or the next day depending on how soul-sucking work turns out to be. I also think I start to ramble in that essay – a byproduct of excitement, no doubt.

DO YOU LIKE MY CHIPMUSIC? I have a really good idea for a multimedia release. If you know anything about coding flash games or know any really good resources to help a n00b code flash games hit up the comments or email me.

For now instead of referring to the ubiquitous “companies” I am proposing a company by the name of “Suffice.” Suffice will be a large, multi-national affair with heaps of money. Probably some kind of product of the merger of a bunch of software, hardware and engineering firms or something convenient like that. Anyway – how the company came about is not important. Suffice will probably work with, and be subsidised by, the various governments that require Suffice’s services.

Suffice will sell realisation and will be viewed as a utility, much like a telecommunications company. To encourage realisation, the government would subsidise the cost of realisation for various things. Certain sectors of the employment industry will be the first things to be realised. Any job which is largely conducted from an office or on a computer will be prime candidate for realisation.

The company would sell most, or all, of its current real estate to Suffice (or the government, depending on who is paying for the business to be realised) and Suffice would fill this space with the computing power required to virtualise the business. In the early days this would probably consist of servers in shipping crates, much like Google’s server farms. Later, these facilities would be replaced with something more permanent.

Once realisation has become more of an everyday event, businesses will be eager to convert because they will save money by not being in the physical realm. If a business does not occupy real estate they will not pay rent. Nor do they need to conduct maintenance on their building or train their staff in basic first aid. A business that formerly occupied two floors of a large, inner city building would no longer need to pay window cleaners. Staff that exist virtually will not be as prone to physical injury in the virtual world, therefore companies will not need to train employees in first aid or have fire escape plans.

Understandably, this is seems to be a very far-fetched and imaginative idea. However, technologies exist today that could very easily be the ancestors for the future that I am examining here. Cloud computing is the process where resources are provided over the Internet. These resources are virtual and are stored on servers. The users of cloud computing access these resources through a tool like a web browser. If we take this technology to it’s conclusion, we can conceive entire companies existing virtually and being access through some kind of tool – in this case networked virtual reality.

Right now the owners of the Pirate Bay are trying to figure out a way to turn their massive, questionably legal, service into a massive, soundly legal service. They are talking to big record companies and are going to create some kind of scheme where users share their personal system resources in exchange for the Pirate Bay service. What I think this means is that the Universal Music Group are going to give people certain albums for a monthly subscription fee that is collected by the Pirate Bay. In turn, users will have the opportunity to seed these files to a large group of people consisting of other users in the Pirate Bay’s service and other people who are downloading the file from iTunes or Amazon or wherever it is they have paid for the music. The Pirate Bay will sell this pool of resources to companies and this will provide them with the resources to continue running their service.

If I understand cloud computing correctly, this will create a massive cloud of computing resources that is analogous to businesses working in realised environments: Consider the files that Pirate Bay users download and seed to be actual time a user spends on a given task. Consider the Internet to be networked virtual reality. Rather than have a user download and seed a file, have an employee complete an activity in a realised environment. Today someone might download a game and seed it to other people. Tomorrow someone might create the sequel to that game from a realised software business. The Pirate Bay provides the service for that user to seed the game today. Suffice provides the service for the development of the sequel tomorrow. Suffice will basically be turning every business it realises into clouds.

Have I done an adequate job of explaining this? I am more than happy to present examples of why I believe this is feasible. If you have lengthy thoughts on this subject, please email them to me rather than write eight-hundred words in the comment box.

Although I didn’t make it clear, the little piece of chipmusic attached to the end of the first VR essay is my debut chipmusic release. Here is my second one. They are meant to be taken in context of these essays.

But this is far into the future. Before this can happen virtual reality needs to win the hearts and minds of a young generation, who will learn to use VR for entertainment before they use it for anything functional, and their parents, who will fund the younger generation. In the same way that I started playing games on computers before learning how to use a computer to study, the younger generation will start gaming in VR before they start working in VR. My parents paid for the first computer in the house and now I pay for the computer that I use. Just like computers et al (personal mp3 players, console gaming systems) the VR product will make its way into households and handbags worldwide.

In order to get everyone throwing money at companies for VR-based products, some flagship, pioneer companies are going to need to make some pretty significant and powerful branding decisions. VR will need a catchy, easy to say and easily understandable name like, “iPod.” Apple were pretty smart when they coined the term and nothing else has really come close. I own a Sony NWA-3000 – I have for about four years – and to this day I haven’t figured out anything to call it shorter than, “mp3 player.” Generally I default to “iPod” the same way Americans call every facial tissue “Kleenex.” Different brands are going to call their different VR products different things, although this sentence is pretty vague and also fairly obvious, this will happen. What seems pretty clear to me is that the verb “virtualise” is going to be replaced.

Why? “Virtualise” is a four-syllable word. This word is too much of a mouthful to be used everyday in every situation unlike “iPod.” But before I go into that I will define what I consider “virtualise” to mean: In this context, “virtualise” is the process that an existing medium (be it television, painting, sculpture, social networking, social interaction, workplace organisation or law enforcement) goes through to become part of the world of networked virtual reality. You can say that an MMORPG like World of Warcraft or Second Life are “virtually reality” but you can not say they are “virtualised reality” if you take “virtualise” in context.

What the first few companies are going to spend billions of dollars doing is convincing the world that “virtualise” is not only one syllable too many, but that it is too literal a word for so virtual a process. I propose the verb that these companies will settle on will be “realise.” This verb is readily linked with virtual reality and it is also a verb that has many meanings. “Realise” is easy to associate with “virtual reality” as it is the verb form of the noun “reality.” In English, we already take it to mean: comprehend; make reality; make realistic; to obtain and; to achieve. One could realise that by realising an ambition to realise a realisation of Victorian society one can realise a great sum of money and subsequently realise a dream of realising wealth. Understand?

In the same way we accept this word has many meanings we will accept the new meaning. Once we have assimilated the language our realisation will be complete.

The message of the future is:

“Realise Your Dreams.”

Sure, those are fairly legitimate concerns. BUT if you haven’t given any chipmusic a listen yet, give these guys a try:

Firebrand Boy

Doesn’t just use a gameboy or whatever. Commodore 64 and some non-8-bit stuff in the mix. Some really great pop music in here. Some killer vocals in the track below. MAKE SURE YOU DOWNLOAD THIS ONE. (A+++ would trade again)

EDIT: Their site is down right now back up!!!
Release: Songs For Cake
Outstanding Track: Famous

David E. Sugar

Uses some nice distorted vocals. Smooth instrumentation – more chip than Firebrand, but doesn’t restrict himself to solely chips. Pop as. Make sure you check out “Ode To London Transport” which is on the release below.

EDIT: Their site is down right now back up!!!
Release: Fresh Off The Chip
Outstanding Track: Totally On

Chur to True Chip Till Death for blogging this waaay before I did.

In this little package is something I’ve been waiting for for what seems like the gestation period of a manatee but is more like three weeks or something. IN THIS PACKAGE was my very own USB BleepBloop cart, courtesy of my bank account and the 8 bit community.

These carts are fully sweet as. Before these carts (so, like, two months ago) peeps had to use this gross transferrer thing that connected to the printer serial ports and was pretty unstable and generally shitty to flash Little Sound Disc Jockey to their carts. In the future (now) we can use USB, which is super fast, super stable and super not fucking printer serial ports.

FOR LIFE.

little-scale (intentional lower case) is an Australian chiptune composer who does hardcore stuff with electronics.. I guess he is on the cutting edge of obsolete hardware. On top of being a whizzkid with a soldering iron he also creates some really great music.

You Can’t Change The World is a ~15 minute bunch of music created on the ATARI with the POKEY chip. The day I got it I listened to it three times back to back. This is a great piece of music. You can get it from milkcrate.com.au.

Five Step Plan is an older release from little-scale that is also a great bunch of chiptune. Most of the tracks on this are great. My favourite is probably the opener, “Dallas, Four AM.” I guess the most accessible track on this very accessible release is “Boundaries.” It is probably the most “pop” track. Also download at milkcrate.com.au.

Boundaries – little-scale

Today he released another EP thing which he says will be good for fans of Five Step Plan. It’s called Third Laser. When I get somewhere with a big bandwidth limit I’ll be all over that but for now all I can do is dream. Get it from milkcrate.com.au as well.

Highlights include:

Screens: I’m pretty excited about what this song is going to sound like outside of the 8 bit realm.

Red, White Or Blue I’ve decided this isn’t really a highlight because it isn’t such a great 8 bit song.

I Can’t Stop Being Foolish: The percussion on this track is pretty interesting. There has been fairly minimal filtering of the noise channel to produce those percussion sounds. The percussion sounds on the other tracks are much more filtered than these drums. Thankfully, they work really well. The bleep-bleep arpeggios in the verse are really cool.

“Anti-Tiger” The 8 bit translation of this song is fun!

The bridge of “Crazy? Yes! Dumb? No!” is really good, I think. I’m not too sure about the rest of the song. I suppose it highlights the unconventional way The Mint Chicks arrange verses and such, but I don’t think that this song works that well as 8 bit. The bridge is cool, though. I guess I put it in here for the “then again, what’s so …” section.

It is pretty good for a band who normally play instruments. If you want to hear a really good 8bit EP by 8bit musicians, download Star Maker by Hidden Village. You can download the whole EP here.

What I really enjoy about 8bit music is how restricting the medium is. If you have any interest in 8 bit music I think you will love this EP. I have listened to it three four times in the last twenty-four hours and I believe it is worth the download.

I think this is the standout track from the EP:

03 The Year 2999 – Hidden Village

EDIT: Two strikeouts in one post? I edited this while I was drunk. Hopefully it isn’t too shit.