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GBA Chiptunist Gets New York Times Mention
Bitboxer DJ Scotch Egg got a little face-time in the New York Times Arts section over the weekend thanks to his ability to blend the 8-bit sounds of the Gameboy with "noise music."
Says the New York Times:
D.J. Scotch Egg is Shige Ishihara, a Japanese producer based in Brighton, England; his club specialty is gabber, a fast-and-hard, tooth-loosening kind of techno. A few years ago he got into making tracks with Nintendo Game Boy sounds, and on “Drumized†(Load) he sticks to the concept for a full album. (This is not to be confused with the microculture of bands like the NESKimos and the Advantage, who perform live versions of Nintendo game songs.) He takes the little sounds out of context — the junior researchers in my home tell me that the sound sources lean heavily toward Mario games — maneuvering and repeating them and pitch-shifting them into song. Sometimes he relies on the tiny blippy noises for percussion, but in places he uses a drummer as well, playing thrashing solos over the electronics.
What chiptune music still getting relegated to brief mentions in the New York Times playlist? Poor Malcolm McLaren, he's still wrong.
Folk in Death-Metal, Nintendo in Techno [New York Times]
There's supposedly an Easter Egg in the Halo 3 E3 trailer. Although we like the Halo series loads and have even read the Eric S. Nylund books (although covertly position within the spine of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being), we have to admit that we're not quite fanatic enough to spot what the easter egg actually is. The Bungie.net forums hint that it may be the wobbling road sign, which is a Grunt Crossing sign (implying perhaps that Earth has made piece with the Covenant), or that Cortana's voice has been mixed with some Gravemind sampling. Anyone else got any better theories?
