I have no idea how I came across your site. Probably after reading the wikipedia Chiptunes page and searching around a bit (since you don't seem to be linked on there... go add yourself!). I had the contents of your Chiptunes page on my ipod for a while before I really listened to it a lot. The first song I downloaded and listened to a lot was the thriller cover, which I thought was just so cheesy to be brilliant. I used it to test a Mac audio editing application I was working on this summer, SoundFarmer. Check it out:
http://donovanpreston.slide.com/c/SoundFarmer
Specifically:
I didn't really listen to much of the other stuff from the chiptunes page or thriller for a while. Then, I was at the gym yesterday on the treadmill, sorta in the zone, just closing my eyes and concentrating fully on what I was hearing. I think it was in the middle of "blastoff", right about 1:08, where the progression slams right through the fucking roof and the chorus kicks in and breaks it down and then the next section starts slicing microthin shavings through your brain with the distorted guitar and then here we go up and up and up and arpeggio and staccato and tension hold and release and OH FUCK YEAH bring it back around to the chorus again!!! I was almost in tears. I actually had chills. Goosebumps. (All while sweating my ass off at the gym!) I am not shitting you.
Anyway, I went and downloaded every other single mp3 I could find on your site earlier this morning (say hi to your server logs for me ;-) and was digging the gameboy choons but it wasn't until I got to MC Nachbar that I realized that you are a fucking GENIUS. GEE-NEE-USSSSSS. A fucking polymath. So I wanted to mail you and let you know. You made my year.
Nostalgia and speculation on the nature of human creativity follows:
When I was in highschool, I found a copy of SoundTrecker (a Mac mod tracker) and a few mods somewhere. Pretty soon I was downloading mods from boards as fast as I could. At one point I had an entire syquest 44 cart filled up with em. Pretty amazing over a 9600 baud modem! I remember when I eventually had a 28.8 and I could download mods faster than I could listen to them... that was quite an epiphany (I had the same epiphany when I discovered mp3 ftp servers a few years later when I worked at the state of michigan, which had a T3. I have not yet had that epiphany with movie torrents yet, but I have a feeling we're close. I also don't really like video as a media). Then when I was in college I found my favorite song ever... FOOP.MOD, a brilliant breakbeat choon that I still love to this day. I was also buying CDs at the time from various random techno acts of the day, but with the exception of Aphex Twin, Luke Vibert, and Mike Paradinas, I was continually disappointed. There was just something about the raw emotion and uncut feel of mods that compelled me much more than some random crappy-ass major label release.
There is a psychic difference between the product that one creates for love versus money. When someone really, truly loves something and does their absolute best, it bleeds out between the lines, oozes all over your hands and sticks to you and won't wash off. I work at slide because I love programming, and the fact that I get paid is a pleasurable side effect. It is this raw hot plasma passion that fuels the internet, the blogs-versus-journalists and mp3-versus-record-mafia battles. The 9 to 5 work week and the boss-employee fiction is a recent creation in human evolution. The creative drive of which I speak is not. It may not happen tomorrow, but the politcal and social fads of the day will fade. They will be replaced with new social customs and norms. Each step of the way humanity will delude itself into thinking this custom is "natural" and has somehow always existed. But the only thing that has always existed is the creative big bang. God. The Universe. Order from chaos, strange attractors in the cellular automata. Find it, feel it, follow it, hold on.
So yeah. Thank you for who you are and for letting me see it through the magic of the internet.
If I don't post to my blog more often it is going to become a barren wasteland, so perhaps I shall begin posting on a wider range of topics like this one.
