People can carp about the current pop landscape, but it would be churlish to complain about music as inventive, energetic, confident, and good-humored as this. All these themes are present in the video for “Meow,” the first single from “Endless Fantasy.” Because the sounds it uses are based in video games, the music plays off themes of competition, fun, risk, and reward. The band’s music seems less like a reflection of inner states than actions taken in response to those inner states. But, for a band as brightly colored as Anamanaguchi, it’s the absence of audible humanity that makes them appear genuinely human. In some cases, those organic touches can also expose the electronics as artificial. The title track of Henry Homesweet’s “Palm Trance” has a melody line that sounds like aimless morning humming, and what’s more human than that? And “Disaster Hearts,” by I Fight Dragons, is a straightforward ballad that uses eight-bit only sparingly. None of this means that the band can’t jump out like a jack-in-the-box (“John Hughes” is a perfectly titled anthem that recalls various aspects of New Wave, and “In the Basement” is so sunny and open that its title seems like a mistake, or a joke), only that jumping is now one strategy among many.Ĭritics-and by critics, I mean people who have listened to the music when I have played it for them and wrinkled their noses in disapproval-say there’s no human element in chiptune. “Viridian Genesis” has a gentle ambient foundation, and “Prom Night” builds slowly but surely. “Endless Fantasy” is more subdued, or at least more considered: the songs are longer, with most over three minutes, and the title track running almost to six. Most of its Scott Pilgrim tracks clock in at under two minutes, and to call them brisk is an understatement: the song “Party Stronger” moves almost like a rag in places, like Super Mario collaborated with Scott Joplin. In the past, Anamanaguchi has worked at sprint speeds. credentials on tour to lessons in chiptune creation the top pledge level, of ten thousand dollars, which went unclaimed, was attached to a prize that included the band driving its van to a fan’s house, playing a show, and then leaving the van behind. Donors were promised everything from special V.I.P. And then, a little while after that, I read that the band was finishing that album, “Endless Fantasy,” with help from a fifty-thousand-dollar Kickstarter campaign. Anamanaguchi seemed connected not only to chiptune but to the tradition of high-energy pop bands like Pizzicato Five and Go! Team: sugar-rush music.Ībout a month after I returned to chiptune, I read that Anamanaguchi was scheduled to release a new LP in 2013. The band’s Scott Pilgrim game soundtrack was filled with brief, pyrotechnic pop songs overstuffed with hooks. the World”-not to be confused with the original graphic novel, or the film starring Michael Cera. Since 2006, the New York-based group has released a number of singles and EPs, along with one full-length album and the soundtrack to the video-game version of “Scott Pilgrim vs. There were artists who canted toward electronica, and others who canted toward acoustica, and others who canted toward industrial, and others who canted toward novelty.Īnd, finally, there was Anamanaguchi, whom I discovered last but who quickly claimed a share of the lead. There were bands like I Fight Dragons, a Chicago-based group that specializes in straightforward alternative rock with occasional chiptune accents: a five-piece with an eight-bit spine. There were acts like She, the brainchild of the Swedish-based Polish producer Lain Trzaska, who creates moody Japanese-flavored pop, often with female vocals. Henry Homesweet moved me backward through a range of chiptune artists. Some songs, like “Escape From IP1,” were swirling and insistent, the aural equivalent of spin art. The songs burbled and bleeped like aliens desperately trying to get a message through. Last summer, for some reason I started to play it again, along with a Henry Homesweet LP called “Palm Trance.” Four years on, something about the music hooked me immediately.
I listened to “Pocket Monster” a few times, not dismissively but glancingly, and set it aside.
I first got interested in chiptune about five years ago via “Pocket Monster,” an EP by a British act named Henry Homesweet. Chiptune is a genre of pop music that uses eight-bit sounds, sometimes from old video-game consoles, sometimes from synthesizers set to emulate those consoles, as the primary elements in the creation of new songs.
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