Letters from the future...

by Dr.IRQ - May 2007

Dear C64Music! Readers,

I just came from the future and I would like to contribute with my humble point of view about the emerging 8bit electronic music sub-genre. It's a quick draft and it might not be focused towards the commodore 64 musicians in particular but anyhow here it goes.

To me, it looks quite obvious that the 8bit music genre is emerging since some chip musicians decided to take the chiptune style to the stage in the 90s, and Im not talking about the stage of a demoparty.

These musicians had the 8bit aesthetics so heavily imprinted that they couldn't follow any other option in their musical paths. It was a bleep or die situation.

The Transition to the 8bit age.

Today, we are experiencing the shock of a transition, the transition of chip music struggling to live outside the computing geek scene as a sub-genre of electronic music. The same way as we have drum&bass parties in every city, we should expect more and more 8bit parties with live acts in the future, at least in the big cities. And do not forget Circuit Benders they come in too!

At this moment, among the confusion of this transition, that many won't believe or accept as being a reality, we hear people call 8bit music with terms such as chipcore, nerdcore, chiphop, bitpunk or chiptune which is the most common one, I guess this is definitely a good sign for 8bit music when people are trying to classify it among electronic music, it means it exists for society ! Check out the adventures of Mr.Maclaren trying to make sense of all this while insinuating that he discovered this scene !

Are we actually aware of the amount of 8bit bands out there ? Anyone heard of Bud Melvin ? A gameboy and a Banjo.. dig that. With every musical genre, there was things that needed to happen before it could even be born, I guess everybody agrees with that, one of the crucial things that needed to exist is the internet and its netlabels and specialized net communities like micromusic.net, or even global ones like myspace or last.fm... Because we are experiencing this change into this new opensource way of 2.0 life, I would really compare the action of someone downloading a free creative commons licensed mp3 EP with the action of someone buying that EP... in these times its the same mental result, I mean, if someone "owns" your free EP among his music collection, this person is obviously a fan! You see the connection ? It's a whole change in the way musicians network.

Yes, It is true that they say that people care more for what they paid for, but that's where vinyls jump into the plot. I believe that the CD is not what it used to be in terms of feeling the object, everybody can burn a CD today, so in way it feels like a cassette tape again...just digital... in the near future, 8bit artists will prefer to only release the "original" recordings in vinyl. Probably a few CDs will be pressed to satisfy some demand of people who don't own a record player "yet"... but mp3s will circulate freely...

And to finish up, it couldn't be that the deep roots of the geeks wouldn't infect the music industry.. hell.. you geeks created the internet ! Why not create another form of music for the 21st century ???

8bit ! Vivaa! 8bit! Viivaa!!

//

text: Dr.IRQ
illustration: Rabenauge

more about the studies of the 8bit music genre and it's place among the music industry:
http://8bitdisertation.blogspot.com/