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

Gaming Culture — By Chris Gampat on December 18, 2009 at 2:16 pm

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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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More 2D-X News, Features, and Reviews:

1. Blip Festival 2009 Rocks NYC Dec 17-19
2. Pulsewave: Modulation brings fresh chiptunes to NYC
3. PAX East 2010: The music preview
4. 2D-X talks nerdy happenings on Hey, Brooklyn
5. Review: 8-bit Left 4 Dead

Tags: 8-bit, Blip Festival, blip festival 2009, brooklyn, chiptunes, festival, gaming, geeks, Music, nyc