Happy June, folks!
This month on the blog, I display to you all a modest delayed reaction on a spring release that I enjoyed recently. ‘workplace ergonomics’ was released on April 23rd, 2018 by Philly based musician, visual artist, and coder, nmlstyl. While I was shocked that it hadn’t already been reviewed here, there were absolutely no surprises on my end as to how gorgeous this record turned out to be.
Artwork for ‘workplace ergonomics’, courtesy of Bandcamp.
Greetings and salutations friends! It’s that time once again for a massive postmortem on PAX East. This year, I’m joined by bory of geekbeatradio who was the head of the MAGFest Jamspace this year and also responsible for booking all of our amazing acts. As this article does traditionally cover both the music and gaming portions of PAX East, bory will be covering the music and I will be covering the games – and as per usual, you can navarkigate to each portion by searching #MUSIC or #GAMES. This time around we’ve got a big article for ya, so don’t hesitate to use those to jump around.
Happy December, folks!
Back in November of 2015, I had the pleasure of talking with Joshua Faulkner and Daniel Romero of the Salt Lake City super synth duo known as Conquer Monster. Their album, ‘Metatransit‘, had just been released the previous month in October, and on top of being incredibly sound design savvy with a variety of instruments, synthesizers, and a C64 on their album the group also performs live and focuses a good portion of their time on reeling listeners in with visuals. Debuting on December 11, 2017, the group has taken one of their tracks ‘Posthuman’ from ‘Metatransit’ and created a retro video featuring the artists in a 90s point-and-click inspired video game.
If you’re a twenty-something in America like myself, you’ve probably never been to a demoparty unless you’ve got the money to fly to Europe. (If you do have the money to fly to Europe for a demoparty, well…take me with you?) While I’d heard tales of these events where nerds huddle together around ancient computers and make music videos that fit on floppy disks, I never thought I’d get the chance to go to one myself – which is why when Inverse Phase asked if anyone wanted to go with him to Demosplash in Pittsburgh, PA, I jumped at the opportunity. What follows is a postmortem of my time at the event. Join me, won’t you?
Hello beautiful people and thank you for reading The ChipWIN Blog! Today let’s steer clear from technobabble, we’re here to burst Techno Bubbles together with the Marvellous Mizkai! Hailing from her northern homeland in Wales, Mizkai has been sort of a missing link between Japan and the Isles for a few years now, channelling Japanese and Internet hardcore-sugar-pop culture into her stage alter-ego, and distilling it into the strongest, sweetest cuppa teas ever brewed on this side of the globe.
Even though Mizkai has been around in the scene for quite some time already, dishing out some truly tasty jams on her SoundCloud, she never was much of a fan of “big” or “official” releases, nor did she seem to need it to ascertain her musical and visual identity as an artist. ‘Kiss/Corrupt/Kill’ is an updated, enhanced and somewhat more mature version of her EP ‘Nintendork’, previously published on Bandcamp and sadly, no longer available.
But long before these releases already, Mizkai had been a driving force in the UK Chiptune scene, and where she shone the brightest was live. Quite literally so, might I add. Having had the pleasure of sharing a stage with her and witnessing her awe-inspiring, relentless performance, I was very excited when I heard about this EP. As you know, good jams go well with toast, so I had to be the one to review it. Here’s a selection of my personal favourite tracks.
Actual real-life portrait of Mizkai, by Mizkai.
By the time you read this, everyone should be home and happy, well rested, without the MAGFlu and otherwise readjusted to real life. While I’m WRITING it, however, I’m drowning in posts from people in transit back to the dark corners of the world they crawled from so that they can go heal themselves. While this year’s MAGFest might have been the biggest one so far, it also seems to have taken the most from us in terms of bodily health, but only because everyone was incapable of having any degree of chill. Everyone basically just kept going until they were physically unable to go anymore, and even then they just kinda propped their bodies up in chairs so they could at least look like they were still going like some kind of knock-off ‘Weekend at Bernie’s.’ It was amazing. But enough talk – let’s have at this highlight reel!