Archive for the 'Chiptunes' Category

We’re Having a Birthday Party– And You’re All Invited!

It’s been four years already?! How is that even possible? Since 2005, we’ve been bringing you our favorite new music from around the world and across the internet, and it’s been amazing how you have responded. Our readership went from a handful of our friends, on to people who hated us for Shaun’s only-slightly-disparaging Panic at the Disco live show review, to Hacks’ Remix Post faithful to more than 500,000 of you and 2,000,000 hits a month.

Now we’re taking our love of new music off of the screen and into the real world. On April 11th, to celebrate our 4th birthday, we’re launching a series of monthly events dedicated to bringing you up and coming live acts. Every month, Shaun, Hacks, and myself will each pick an artist and bring you a show with no genre restrictions, true to our eclectic Resonator M.O. To tie it all together, we’ll each play short intro DJ sets for our chosen artist, guiding you from one sound to the next: essentially, think of it as dancing and drinking inside a lovingly crafted mixed tape.

April’s party, REStart is all about beginnings– celebrating our birthday, Shaun’s arrival in New York (and with it, the first time the Res staff have all lived in the same city since the year we started), and a new look to the website which will launch in conjunction with the party. Here’s the details:

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Resonator Presents: REStart
ALL AGES!

When: April 11th, 2009 @ 8:00 pm

Where: The Tank
354 West 45th Street
New York, NY 10036

Who:
8:00 - Shaun Bateman (Resonatormag.com)
8:30 - Ivana XL (Brooklyn)
Red Red Sun - Ivana XL

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9:00 - Trixie (Resonatormag.com)
9:30 - SoundMatrix (Liverpool)
Sophea - SoundMatrix

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10:00 - Hacks (Resonatormag.com)
10:30 - Last Year’s Model (New York)
Dancing With Myself - Last Year’s Model

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How much: $10

What else: FREE Champagne and Cupcake Happy Hour from 8:00 - 9:00* with booze from Gnarly Vines and tasty treats from Spatula Factory.

Presale tickets are available through Brown Paper Tickets. As a special offer to our readers, we’ve added a discount that gets you half price tickets if you buy in advance (these won’t be available at the door!). Enter discount code 4MOREYEARS and tickets are only $5 (plus a small service fee– but Brown Paper Tickets donates some of it to charity, and you get to choose where it goes!).

Keep posted for reminders and updates as we get closer to the event. We hope to see you all there!

*While supplies last.





Reformat the Planet– The Movie Available Online at Pitchfork

So, it’s not often that we actually have anything positive to say about Pitchdork here at Res, but since we were hot and bothered for this back when SXSW happened and the guys over at that other website were too busy taking pictures of freak folk acts and fresh up-and-comers like Michael Stipe, we’ll let their bandwidth get sucked and brag on ourselves for once again knowing what was cool WAY before they did.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the definitive (ok, and only) documentary on the New York chiptunes scene and The Blip Festival (so far) can be watched, in its entirety, here.

Congratulations to 2 Player Productions and we’re looking forward to that demo scene doc at which you’ve hinted!

A few of my favorite tracks from artists featured in the film:

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Spontaneous Devotion — Random from “Bad Joke EP”* (if you are still wondering what this whole “chiptunes” thing is about, this is the answer– this recording is a gorgeous piece of electronic music, whether you think you like lo-bit music or not.)

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Disorder (Joy Division Cover) — Glomag (this song is one of my favorite things ever to listen to on a sunny morning after some hardcore rain– it has that cinematic, end of movie hopefulness and the lyrics take on a whole different meaning in this version than the original.)

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Nautilus — The Depreciation Guild from their album In Her Gentle Jaws (the Catherine Wheel of chipmusic– beautiful washes of guitars, dreamy rock songs, and… game systems? Definitely worth a listen and cued up in anticipation of sweater weather in my Autumn play list.)

*All 8bitpeoples releases are released under this Creative Commons License.





Much Praised Chiptunes “Artist”, Laromlab, Outed As Plagiarist

It’s always sad when an artist lifts part of someone else’s track without acknowledging them, but when an “artist” steals all of his music (ALL OF IT) wholesale from other artists, gets signed with it to a label, and then tours on it, it’s downright disgusting. How utter asshole Laromlab managed to get away with passing off the great tracks of YM Rockerz for so long is appalling.

His former label, Mushpot Records, has pulled “his” record from sales and he’s been outed by CMJ, but it comes as quite a shock that I haven’t seen any information about this on too many other blogs, especially one of our favorites, Missingtoof, who posted some of his ripped off tracks just a few months ago and are normally so on top of stuff.

Laromlab has issued a deluded apology claiming that it takes guts to own up to doing something wrong, but the guy didn’t own up to anything. He was caught red handed and then lied again to a collaborator, claiming that the one track he used with Kentucky Prophet was actually his when it wasn’t.

Mushpot records has posted a list of the artists who ACTUALLY made the music. Might I recommend a little Crazy Q to start your weekend off right?