Blip Festival 2009: Music and Gaming Combine To Rock Brooklyn’s Bell House

December 18, 2009 by Chris Gampat
Filed under: Gaming Culture 

The Crowd Loves Failotron at the Blip Festival

For anyone that loves gaming and music, but never really found a way to merge the two perfectly, Blip Festival 2009 will probably be your scene. Coming from the world of professional gaming and being a bassist/guitarist/vocalist for a number of different bands, the world of chiptunes and the Blip Festival is something that I encourage all geeks to experience. If it isn’t something considered critical to our culture now, it will be soon.

Author’s Note: All photos by Chris Gampat. I encourage you to use the photos, but if you’d like to use/republish them on your website, please click on the photo and link back to its original page and cite me as the photographer.

Battle Gear

Chiptunes are compositions crafted on old gaming consoles like the Commodore 64, Game Boy, or NES. Additionally, you mix in some electronica, psychedelic, 80’s pop, new wave and perhaps some punk in there and you have an exciting sound. The Blip Festival is like the Woodstock of chiptunes.

Silent Requiem At the Blip Festival

The first night of the event featured  Silent Requiem, Failotron, Leeni, and a slew of creative musicians that merged the old with the new.

Leeni at the Blip Festival

Each artist is unique and blends their love of old school gaming with their own music background. Additionally, they may all have their own get-up of some sort. Some, like Leeni (above), has a Blondie-like sound. Failotron (down below) is from Budapest and uses the guitar to channel his energy inside of him and uses it as a catalyst to move the crowd.

Failotron at the Blip Festival

Chiptunes works in different ways. You can insert a special gameboy cartridge (loaded up with your personal music) into a gameboy and hook it up to a deafening sound system, or use your laptop. Just like rock, you can combine all that with different pedals, turntables, and mixers for different effects. This means you can get some nice reverb, chorus, whammy, etc. There seems to be a preference for using analogue tech vs digital, but then again it seems like a total fusion of both worlds. That’s what makes the old school meets modern clash turn into beautiful music. This isn’t all indie either. There are entire music labels for this stuff. So like all things geeky, it’s best to get it while it’s still underground.

Leeni Works the Crowd at the Blip Festival

These things get pretty packed. This year it was held at the Bell House in Brooklyn, NY. The atmosphere, scene and crowd really catered well to what the Blip Festival is all about.

Silent Req Has a Crowd at the Blip Festival

In addition to the music though, there is lots of background visual effects that go with each music performance. This makes for a much more awesome show as it can help the artist to concentrate on making the music better and matching/manipulating the crowd’s feelings.

More about the festival can be found here. And if you’re in the NYC area, the show’s not over. The schedule can be seen here.


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Comments

4 Comments on Blip Festival 2009: Music and Gaming Combine To Rock Brooklyn’s Bell House

  1. Drigg on Fri, 18th Dec 2009 2:20 pm

    2. Story added…

    Your story was featured in Drigg! Here is the link to vote it up and promote it: http://www.gamekicker.com/Gaming-News/Blip-Fertival-2009-Brings-Bleeps-and-Bloops-to-NYC...

  2. Tweets that mention Blip Festival 2009: Music and Gaming Combine To Rock Brooklyn's Bell House | 2D-X -- Topsy.com on Fri, 18th Dec 2009 3:15 pm

    3. [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Chris Gampat, Chris Gampat. Chris Gampat said: Blip Festival 2009: #Music and #Gaming Combine To Rock Brooklyn’s Bell House http://tinyurl.com/ydaaktv #photography [...]

  3. dweebhead on Sun, 20th Dec 2009 3:40 pm

    4. From everything I’ve heard, the show was awesome. I wish the event was longer, like a SXSW.

  4. Chris Gampat on Sun, 20th Dec 2009 8:04 pm

    5. It was. I just wish the snow had held off until Sunday afternoon.

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