The Tank’s night of crush-worthy electronic music returns for a second date! A wild-at-heart, all animal line-up will make you sway wistfully to their blissful beats– Animal Style with his guitar and Game Boy and VBlank with his mastery of eclectic visuals from lo-fi to hi-fi will be coming up from Philadelphia to join NYC’s own Data Dog and the fearsome sparrow for the bimonthly music series.
Animal Style is on the artsier, R&D tip of this whole chiptunes scene. Don’t get me wrong, he’s got a good beat and you can dance to it, but he’s also pushing the envelope with things like popularizing the 8-bit fuzz pedal and developing his own Game Boy foot controller, as well as his release Game Boy Madrigals, a full album of chipmusic made with the 2-3 voice constraints of the traditional Renaissance song form.
(Both from the “Open Air” EP on 8bitpeoples.*)
Data Dog are reminiscent of Her Space Holiday with a double dose of Marc Bianchi’s vocals or a minimal cuddlegaze dance act fronted by the ghost of Eliot Smith. They’re cute and sexy, in a tragic, save-me-from-myself kind of way that girls with cardigans and glasses fetishes will likely use as the soundtrack for shy grad-school dorm room make-out sessions with their doctoral candidate TAs.
the fearsome sparrow, who apparently got together in San Diego, have fittingly moved east where their brand of melancholy, girl-meets-boy idm has two seasons in which to fit, Autumn AND Winter, instead of 365 days of sunshine. Liz Godoy’s sweet, plaintive soprano and Brenden Beu’s charmingly unsure tenor are enough to make you fall head over heels through your headphones, while glitched out, skittish electronic textures keep things from becoming cloyingly sweet.
Colossus — the fearsome sparrow
My Formative Years — the fearsome sparrow
(Both from their album shimmer, available for download here.)
*All 8bitpeoples releases are released under this Creative Commons License.
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