Two of the biggest players in the contemporary “chiptunes” scene are coming to Portland tomorrow night to drop a 20-megaton nostalgia bomb.
Anamanaguchi are arguably the current kings of this relatively obscure genre, but in order for this to sound impressive, you must know the brief roots of chiptunes, which go back a lot further than you might think.
Two of the biggest players in the contemporary “chiptunes” scene are coming to Portland tomorrow night to drop a 20-megaton nostalgia bomb.
Anamanaguchi are arguably the current kings of this relatively obscure genre, but in order for this to sound impressive, you must know the brief roots of chiptunes, which go back a lot further than you might think.
A sub-subgenre of electronic music, chiptunes technically started in the early ’80s, when Robert Yannes of the Ensoniq synthesizer company engineered the Commodore 64’s 6581 SID sound chip. Because Yannes had a background in synthesizer work, he saw the SID as a chance for the Commodore 64 to have a “professional” sound array that could become user-exploitable.
Fast forward to the late ’90s when the Elektron synthesizer company released the SIDstation, a programmable synthesizer with an old stock SID chip at its heart. Later, in 2000, Johan Kotlinski designed LSDJ, a Game Boy cartridge. As the first Game Boy software produced in years, LSDJ transformed the Game Boy into a pocket-sized synthesizer and a sure-fire way to extract vintage sounds on the fly.
The release of these two items gave rise to popular chiptunes artists like 8-Bit Weapon, Bitshifter and Nullsleep. A chiptunes-specific label formed (8bitpeoples) and chiptunes officially became a legitimate genre.
Later, chiptunes became increasingly legitimized when international electro-pop sensation Crystal Castles was sued for illegally oversampling chiptune tracks—Covox’ “Sunday” and Lo-bat’s “My Little Droid Needs a Hand.”
Arguably and somewhat understandingly, chiptunes has been relegated to the sidelines of the convoluted electronic genre umbrella in favor of more lucrative, more club-friendly subgenres like house, dubstep and minimal techno, or electronic’s hipper side—ambient, noise and IDM.
Chiptunes is mostly considered “nerd music” in the contemporary electronic scene, with a lot of its acts playing at highly specialized music events or video game conventions. However, one band is looking to change that, and that band is Anamanaguchi.
Hailing from New York, Anamanaguchi is a four-piece band that uses an actual Nintendo Entertainment System as an instrument. Of course, the NES is the device that most people associate with the lo-fi bleeps and bloops that constitute the bulk of chiptunes’ sounds, so this all works out nicely for the nostalgia factor.
Billing themselves as “loud, fast music with a hacked NES from 1985,” Anamanaguchi deviates from the chiptune blueprint on the equipment front, as they employ a full band sans vocalist. However, the NES plays such an integral role in the music that one would be hard pressed to label them a “regular band with a Nintendo.” Conversely, one would instead call them a “Nintendo band with guitar, bass and drums.”
Anamanaguchi’s 2009 record, Dawn Metropolis, was a breakthrough for the band, as it saw a strangely immense popularity from realms outside the chiptunes box. Several music publications praised it, and it even found its way onto many Top 10 of 2009 lists. Anamanaguchi began touring the country on the strength of this record and their popularity continues today.
Anamanaguchi’s first Portland show was on the teeny-tiny stage of Ground Kontrol (before they took it out) and their second was at the now-defunct Berbati’s Pan. As the capacity of the Pan is about six times that of Ground Kontrol, it’s safe to say that their popularity and draw have risen exponentially. This show will be at Branx.
The band Starscream will be playing alongside Anamanaguchi on this tour. Like Anamanaguchi, Starscream released an excellent record in 2009, the somewhat nihilistically titled Future, and It Doesn’t Work. The record features plenty of eight-bit swagger and live drums, and contains “Kepler’s Star Catalog,” in this writer’s opinion, one of the best chiptunes tracks ever written (second maybe to Anamanaguchi’s “Jetpack Blues and Sunset Hues” or eight-bit Weapon’s “Crazy Comets”). This is their first trip to the west coast.
If you’re looking to make all the nerds on the dance floor look like even bigger nerds, this show is one not to be missed.
