Of Lo-Fi, 8Bit, and the Circuit-Bent…

As a newly minted editor of PublicSpacesLab, I suppose I should take a moment to introduce myself. My name is Mr. Bitterness.

Okay, enough of that shit.

I wanted to talk about some of the more low-tech corners of the electronic music world. I’ve been a musician for about 25 years, since I was 12 (that makes me 37 in case you were stuck on the math). At 16, I started taking the Electronic Music course at the local community college. Our main synths in our “studio” was the brand new Korg M1, the Yamaha DX7, a Roland D10 and an Alesis drum machine. I knew those synths like the back of my hand.

I knew that the strings on the Korg were on patch 7 (symphonic) and that there was a piano on 41 (I think). There was a lot of power for those days, but things were somewhat accessible, you knew where to go, how to get there, and could flesh out an idea pretty quickly. I’ve spent the years since then being on the bleeding edge of technology (in my day job doing server support and development) and in being a frustrated, undiscovered singer-songwriter.

Things have progressed to more and more impressive quality, power, fidelity, and with the advent of VST’s and a new breed of MIDI controllers, there is virtually nothing you can’t do on your slightly better than average home computer. That’s fantastic! It’s also the problem.

You can now musically masturbate for hours on end, trying to find the perfect bass and snare combination. Five hours of screwing around later, you have a headache, you’ve totally lost the idea that you sat down with, and you realize that the entire time you’ve been sitting in front of an open window without any pants. I digress.

I find myself these days drawn to the 8bit/Circuit-Bent scene because of it’s low-tech, hands-on immediacy. In some ways all this power has made things too abstract. While I was among the first to embrace the power of “in the box”, I more recently find myself enjoying taking a childs toy, plugging it into a mixer and seeing what I can accomplish.

The other thing I really love, and the main point I wanted to make with this post, is that many of us who grew up with this technology, riding the wave as it matured, have become the status-quo. While we were downloading 100′s of “FREE VST’s” (a four-letter word if ever there was one), a bunch of kids and other technological ne’er do-wells picked up the technology we discarded years ago and started doing some amazing things with it.

With Gameboys and Speak-n-Spells and Atari 2600′s that have been modded and hacked, they are creating music that doesn’t sound perfect, that isn’t perfectly recorded and multi-sampled, and thank fucking god for that! (I pick no particular god here, so choose whichever god on whose behalf you would like to be offended).

While there is nothing at all wrong with pursuing the cleanest, purest engineering/recording, there is something oddly exciting about the sound of broken machines and electricity run amok. By way of example, I was pleasantly surprised by an odd-sound I came across playing with a Commodore 64 emulator (okay, technically a VST but with a lo-fi sound) and tried to create something interesting out of it. (You can hear the results here.)

Amongst other things, in future columns I hope to highlight some of the musicians and scenes I’ve stumbled across while looking for inspiration anew after so many years of pursuing my muse.

Thanks for the space, PublicSpacesLab!