The Pop Aesthetic

Last weekend marked the fifth Blip Festival right here in New York City. For those unfamiliar, the Blip Festival is the largest international showcase for chip music – music that is composed with or inspired by videogame hardware, most commonly the Nintendo Game Boy, Nintendo Famicom, and Commodore 64. While the Blip Festival originated in New York, sprung out of the monthly Pulsewave concert series and co-organized by experimental music venue The Tank and chip music label 8bitPeoples, the brand expanded in 2010 with Blip Festival Europe and Blip Festival Tokyo. 2011 marked the return home to NYC, and what a glorious return it was.

Performers and enthusiasts came from around the world: Sweden, Germany, Australia, even Detroit! We thought about documenting the performances, but then we realized out friends at Bytejacker and 2 Player Productions were already doing a great job of that. We did, however, put together this montage of some of our favorite performance moments from across the three days:

Absolutely everybody had a camera. You can watch any of the performances in near entirety at this Youtube channel. We did take just a few photos, including some 3D shots with the Nintendo 3DS:

As an extra treat, we attended the True Chip Till Death Awards the night before Blip Fest started. When the time came to announce the nominees for Best Song, MC Bud Melvin and house band SHRIMPS decided to maintain the universal tradition of award shows everywhere and do a live medley of all seven nominees:

All in all, Blip Fest 2011 was another wonderful explosion of energy. The chip music scene never ceases to be full of surprises and delight, and we wholeheartedly look forward to our next get-together.