gwEm

Chiptography: How did chiptune find you? 

gwEm: Back when I was in my late teens I was really into drum and bass and hardcore rave stuff. I was DJing out in smaller nightclubs and it was going fairly well but somehow I wasn't quite satisfied with it. 

Chiptography: You said you were a teenager at this point? 

gwEm: I was 17 when I first started to DJ and I bought my first decks and records. A friend of mine at university asked, "Are you into Aphex Twin?" and I was like, "No, who's he?" His stuff is really good and was similar to the stuff I was DJing at the time. Aphex Twin had a record label called Rephlex Records and there was a release on that label called Maxi German Rave Blast Hits 3 by a German duo called Bodenständig 2000. It was completely amazing to me and I listened to it constantly. I got in touch with one of the members, a guy who goes by the name Drx. He was extremely friendly and he told me about this website called Micromusic.net. I eventually met him and he gave me a disc for my Atari with the music software that he used. I thought, "Wow, what a friendly guy." Normally in the drum and bass scene, it's a little bit competitive. No one really wants to help you out. His attitude was completely the opposite so I thought, maybe this is the new thing I've been looking for. I transitioned from DJing into making chiptune and being part of this early community on Micromusic.net. 

Chiptography: Were you DJing as gwEm? 

gwEm: No, I had a few different DJ names, none of which I was happy with. The first one I came up with was Merlin. 

Chiptography: Like the wizard?

gwEm: Like the wizard, yeah. I thought, "Let's set the dance floors burnin'. It's the one they call Merlin." I mean, come on, I was 17. That was pretty cheesy, I thought. My first car was a Vauxhall Nova so another DJ name was NovaNova1 because I thought that was old school techno-y kind of sounding. The thing is, at University my nickname was Gwem. Everyone was calling me that. 

Chiptography: Why?

gwEm: It's not a very good story. Basically, we were having some drinks and we were laughing at how English nobility has these double-barrel names with lots of middle names so we kind of added names to our own. Mine was Gareth William Edward Morris which I'm not called. Everyone was like, “That's Gwem.” I was like, “That sounds awful. Don't call me Gwem.” Obviously everyone called me Gwem even more. 

Chiptography: You're wrong- that's an amazing story. 

gwEm: The name kind of stuck. Anyway, when I started the chiptune stuff I thought, well, I need a new name. The drum and bass thing is over now. Everyone's calling me Gwem so I might as well go with that. I don't like it that much, even now. But I don't know, people say it suits me and it's too late to change it again. It sounds kind of cute and that's nice. It would be nice if it sounded a bit tougher. Merlin and NovaNova1 they were kind of more like, "Bang, yeah." Gwem, it's nice. People like it.  

Chiptography: I met you at a Blip Festival. Was the first blip festival you played in New York also with Bodenständig 2000? 

gwEm: Yeah, it was 2007, that's right. 

Chiptography: How was it to perform with the group that inspired you to get into chiptune at such a significant event? 

gwEm: Well actually, my first chiptune show in London was with them as well. Obviously I was super into it. It was really exciting. Those guys are really cool and we get on like a house on fire. They're not so active these days which is a shame but they've gone to other interesting things. I think Bern worked a bit with Björk and Dragan is now a professor of computer art. One of their songs was featured on an advert. 

Chiptography: How long was it from when you first discovered chiptune to when you were actually making chiptune? 

gwEm: A matter of months probably. I got the Maxi German Rave Blast Hits album and I went to my first chiptune show which was near Spitalfield Market in London. That's where I met Dragan and he gave me the disk. I think I tried it the next day or it might have been two days after. I've still got it actually. He customized the disk with Tipp-Ex and he painted a smiley face and he wrote “Micromusic present” on there. I've still got it somewhere. I started making my first tunes with that. I had an Atari ST when I was a kid so when I heard this album, I could clearly hear that that was the same kind of sound that I was used to with the ST. I knew that that computer was very popular in Germany as well. I got the Atari out and had a go with it. I still have that one. I don't use it to play live though. I've been through several Ataris through the years because they're not really designed for being smashed across the world in a suitcase but they last fairly well. They're quite reliable considering; after a couple of years of gigging they start to break. 

Chiptography: What will you do when you run out of Ataris? 

gwEm: They're starting to get quite expensive on eBay. I've been lucky in that some people have donated their Ataris in order for me to play. Actually, particularly on the demo scene, they do that. I guess they're happy to see them being used in a constructive way. I'll make things with it. It's not going to sit in some collection. So maybe they like that about it but it's kind of like a contribution to the scene. I'm managing to keep it going. I have had shows where one of them is broken. Instead of having two I'd just have to do the show with one Atari. If it's a guitar based show I quite often just play from my iPhone so that's more reliable. There's a moment in sound check where I take a deep breath and plug it in and hope that it switches on because there's a very real chance that they won't work. At that point, I envy Game Boy musicians because they're cheap and plentiful and you can protect them a lot better because they're smaller and there will be someone you can borrow one from. 

Chiptography: Have you ever made music on a Game Boy?

gwEm: Yeah, I did actually. In the Micromusic era. Johan Kotlinski was a friend of mine and so I bought his Little Sound Dj and I wrote some songs on it. I even did one live show which was the Relaxed Beat party in a Paris squat. That was the only party I used a Game Boy live. In the end I stopped just because I didn't like the sound of it. I preferred the Atari so I went back to that. There are some people doing amazing things with a Game Boy but it's just not for me. I like it but the Atari keeps on giving. I have all these other things in my studio. I play them but then go and make music on the Atari. 

Chiptography: When did you integrate your guitar playing? 

gwEm: While all this was going on there was also the Electroclash scene. Bands like ADULT, Fischerspooner and The Martini Brothers. I was quite into that as well so I thought maybe I'll have a stab at doing an electro song. I had this melody in my head and I wrote the lyrics down as well. It was completely different to the way I work now. I never normally have an idea just appear in my head. That song was called Fuck You Management Wanker which I still play live now. I sent it to Dragan. I said, "I've done this. It's not really chiptune but what do you reckon?" And he said "If you don't upload this to Micromusic I'm going to make an account and do it for you." I think that was my third upload to Micromusic. The two before that, one of them was called Tune 4 My Broken Atari which was actually a fake-bit song. I sampled my Atari and assembled it into a track. Later I remade the song on my Atari because there's no reason why I couldn't have, but I wasn't quite comfortable with the tracker at that point. The second one was a song called Full On! which I sometimes DJ. I find the drums a little bit weak. Maybe I should do a remix. That was a techno-y kind of thing. Then the third one was Fuck You Management Wanker and that was a very popular track. Even though I saw it as more of an electropunk song I thought, well this guitar is now a thing. I only learned and bought the guitar so I could perform that song. 

Gwem "FYMW" dir. A. Singh USA/2003/5:45 Introduced by a blatantly shoe-horned Lemmy live in concert and dedicated to IT managers everywhere, "FYMW" - Fuck Yo...

Chiptography: Really? You didn't know how to play guitar before that? 

gwEm: No, I never touched it before. I knew the song needed a guitar 'cause it's electropunk and I knew I wanted to have a Flying V. When we were kids at school we would always draw Flying Vs in our school books. I walked into a shop in Guildford and there was a second hand Flying V there and I thought, “perfect.” 

Chiptography: It was waiting for you. 

gwEm: Yeah, so I bought that and then I thought well I better learn to play this thing. Actually, when I put Fuck You Management Wanker together I still couldn't really play so I was playing individual notes, sampling them, and assembling them in the tracker. I couldn't actually play it but then I was booked for my first gig and I had to learn how to play it properly very quickly. Even the guitar solo is individual notes which I cut up in the tracker and sequenced because I didn't know what I was doing basically. That is actually the only solo that I can play note for note the same as the record because I had to sit down and really learn it for that gig. 

Chiptography: It's so surprising because it comes off as if you were playing for years. You have so many guitars now. 

gwEm: I have 49 guitars now which is a bit embarrassing. 

Chiptography: Why?

gwEm: I don't need that many. I like them as objects. I'd like to give some away to musicians who want to have a guitar and maybe can't afford one. 

Chiptography: To me, it just shows your passion for it. 

gwEm: Yeah, well I love it and there's nothing more glorious than putting your foot on the monitor and throwing down a big solo. I feel like I could be a much better guitarist than I am though. 

Chiptography: You're self-taught, yes? 

gwEm: I never had a guitar lesson. Actually that's not true. I had one really weird guitar lesson. 

Chiptography: Why was it weird? 

gwEm: The original guitarist in this band called The Scorpions was a guy called Uli Jon Roth. He is inspired by Hendrix and he's kind of a hippie. He has all these weird ideas about music. I thought his guitar playing was fantastic because it was very melodic, quite classical, and a bit chiptune actually. I became completely obsessed with him. I saw he did this thing called the Sky Academy where he teaches you. I went and it was a bit disappointing. We didn't actually get to play any guitar. I thought he was going to show me some hot licks and that kind of thing but he was explaining that he sees music as a journey and every time he plays a solo he goes into a meditative state and tries to imagine the guitar solos as different colors. 

Chiptography: Wow, that's very far out. 

gwEm: It is. He even believes that the different notes of the scale have positive and negative charges so the following note is attracted by the previous note. That was a little esoteric for me. I kind of see what he's getting at. Obviously it works for him. I don't really have the capacity to meditate like that on stage. You still have to be in control and be coordinated. He did give me a couple of good tips. You can consciously slow down your breathing when you play a solo. Before I was just like, "Oh, the solo- I need to play really fast now." He was like, "just try to breathe slowly if you can't meditate and that will give you the control that you're looking for." I thought that was a good tip but he said, "To be honest the only way you're going to progress is if you start meditation." So yeah, that was the only guitar lesson I had. Interesting one. 

Chiptography: Very unexpected.

gwEm: Yeah, totally unexpected but he's still my favorite guitarist. I think he always will be. He's not one people talk about a lot but I think if you listen to what he's playing, you'll like it straight away. He also introduced me to the Fender Stratocaster. He used to play a Strat in the Scorpions and it has a different sound to it. It kind of sounds like it's singing, like a bell. I decided to take a leaf out of his book and I did play a Strat for a couple of gigs. The problem is once you start playing the Flying V, it's such a visual impact, everyone's like "Where's the Flying V gwEm? We've paid to see it. We haven't paid to see you play a Strat. Come on, man! Where's the V?" I can never not play the V now. 

Chiptography: You can't get away from that guitar just like you can't get away from your name.

gwEm: I can't get away from it but I did put a strat pick up in the neck position of the V to give me kind of the Uli Jon Roth sound for when I'm soloing. The Flying V is played by Rudolf and Michael Schenker in the Scorpions as well so there's another German influence. 

Chiptography: Speaking of German influences, you and I have something in common in that we have German ancestors. 

gwEm: That's right. My grandmother on my mother's side is German and her parents came over in between the first and second world wars. What I understand was that they were traveling musicians and they moved from Germany to London to start a new life here. It's quite interesting because my own parents aren't particularly musical but I was stoked to find out that in the distant past, members of my family were professional musicians and came from Germany. 

Chiptography: Was it the grandmother that got you the Atari? 

gwEm: That's right.

Chiptography: That's really special actually.

gwEm: Yeah, it is. I've always felt an affinity with the German approach to music because it's quite mathematical and it also has a kind of sideways looking sense of humor about it that appeals to me. I also just really like German people, German food, and culture. I signed a couple of tracks to a German record label as well. It's probably the place where I've played the most from any other country. I have lots of very good friends there as a result of playing there. I'm really happy about that. 

Chiptography: Kannst du Deutsch sprechen? (Can you speak German?)

gwEm: Ja, ein bisschen. (Yes, a little.) I'm super rusty. I was engaged to a German girl for five or six years. I did learn quite a bit but the problem is, unless you use it, you get quite rusty after a while and I was never that good anyway. I like speaking it even in a little way by ordering food, getting around and talking about football. These are things I can do. I tried to get a job in Berlin after I finished my Ph.D. I think that was around 2003 or 2004. There are lots of different freelancers and English speaking people now but back then you needed to speak it properly. The kind of overly familiar German that I knew wasn't really good enough to get a job there. I also spent six months in Munich while I was at university. 

Chiptography: Did you go to school there? 

gwEm: Kind of. We called it a sandwich year. You study for three years and then you do a sandwich year before you finish off by doing a masters. Part of my sandwich year was in Germany. I worked for a German company in Munich. I didn't learn any German there though because there was an Australian bar close to where I was staying. I was probably only 19 so I just went there. I completely missed the opportunity to speak German properly. 

Chiptography: What type of work were you doing? 

gwEm: It was the same kind of stuff I do now. It's microchip design, specifically these chips called FPGAs where you can reconfigure the logic on them each time you switch it on. I came across these chips kind of around the same time that I was discovering chiptune actually. I thought it was such a cool concept. It's an electronic circuit but you can change it around however you want. I got super into that and that's what I do professionally now. I did a Ph.D. using them and then after I finished that I had a series of different jobs all doing FPGA related work. 

Chiptography: I thought you were in the financial field.

gwEm: That's right. Generally in the UK, if you want to do electronics the jobs aren't in London. They tend to be in places you don't want to live like Slough or Cambridge maybe. I wanted to live in London because that's where all the music is. That leads you on very nicely to finance because they are using these chips. When I first finished my Ph.D. it was the first dawn of financial corporations using this technology for their trading. My Ph.D. was in looking at different ways to perform arithmetic and maths on the device. That mapped perfectly onto what trading firms do which is financial modeling. I got in on that on the ground floor so to speak and that's been quite interesting as well. I quite like the maths and it is very cutting edge as well. It's kind of something like the demoscene, because you have to continually optimize and get faster and faster. Competitors aren't getting any slower. It's intellectually challenging. I work with a great bunch of guys as well. We're always looking at ways to improve it, to get some kind of edge. 

Chiptography: It's nice to have a job that challenges you like that. 

gwEm: Yeah, it's good. I don't even know if I'd rather make my money entirely from music. That was my dream when I was DJing drum and bass when I was 17/18/19. There's nothing I wouldn't have liked more than to be a pro drum and bass DJ but now I'm not so sure. I think because I'm not dependent on music financially, I can do whatever I like and make weird gwEm music and not worry about if people are going to like it or not. Music is a massive money hole so I need a job to support my music habit. 

gwEm on a photo walk.

Chiptography: I find you to be one of those people that has such a great balance of left brain, right brain. You're very artistic but you're also very scientific and equally brilliant on both sides of that spectrum. Speaking of which, I always really enjoyed your photography which is also equal parts art and science. You're working with a machine, chemicals, technology and understanding how light works but you're also making artistic choices in framing, depth of field, and when you release your shutter. 

gwEm: I do like photography. There is very much a scientific process involved because you're effectively changing the chemistry of the film by exposing it to light and then it forms an image. It's like magic when you see it happening in the darkroom. When you get film it's completely opaque, it's nearly black. Then you expose it to light and put some chemicals on it and suddenly there's a negative there and it's like, how did that happen? That's very cool. I like to get to the bottom of things. I wasn't really happy taking it to the pharmacy to be developed. I did that with the first couple of rolls but then I got super into it and started making my own developers and developing every film and scanning them myself. I do believe that the process guides the art to an extent as well. 

Chiptography: There's a lot of decision making both in the time of shooting and exposing that film with how much light you want to allow in the camera. Do you want a shallow depth of field or a wide one? When you process it, you have more decision making as to how you work with the chemicals. It's an art and at the same time a personal choice with every single image. I always have such a good time looking at your work on Instagram. 

gwEm: There is a relationship between photography and music. If you want to make music, the best way is to listen to other people's music and then figure out how it works and apply science and a bit of creativity to that. I think it's the same with photography. 

Chiptography: Yeah, I agree with that. 

gwEm: When I was first introduced to street photography and the work of the big names like William Eggleston or Moriyama or guys like that I thought it was interesting geometrically but it has a social commentary as well and sometimes a little bit of a sense of humor. You quickly learn stuff that you don't like. Someone like Bruce Gilden is great but I find him quite aggressive in the way he takes pictures. I like it to be a bit more candid, trying to capture people as they are hopefully in some interesting situation. It's just the same with my music in a way. I wrote my own music software and live performance software and I think if you have developed something like that or you understand the science behind what you're doing you can turn that around and use that to your advantage. It can make the end product a bit stronger and more part of you. There's nothing like developing a picture and knowing that you've done the whole process. Maybe you haven't made the film but you made the developer and you developed and printed it. Actually I kind of wanted to make my own film but I got sucked back into music. 

Part of gwEm’s lens collection including several vintage lenses.

Chiptography: The equipment you use is pretty impressive. 

gwEm: Yeah, it is but it's only because I'm a gearhead. You see amazing stuff even shot on an iPhone if you know what you're doing with it. Essentially you can deconstruct photography and you're literally just pressing a button if you want to be super meta about it. In terms of DJing you can say, a DJ’s job is to choose the next song. So again, you're just pressing play. Clearly there's more to it than that. There is something that has that moment of capturing the decisive moment like Cartier-Bresson. He's another big favorite of mine. He knew exactly when to press the shutter. I wouldn't say I consider myself a photographer your level or definitely not someone like Eggleston or Cartier-Bresson because they devoted their whole lives to it as you're doing. I'm just experimenting with it for a few years. 

Chiptography: I think of you as a musician but  you're not just a musician. Photography is such a perfect visual medium for you because it is a mixture of a technology, science and art. 

gwEm: I totally agree with you. I love the blend of science with art. I know it's very renaissance but it's perfect. I'm an engineer, musician, chemist and a photographer. They go together so perfectly. Obviously, subscribers to my Instagram may not be aware that it was a byproduct of a relationship I was in at the time with a Polish photographer. I found I almost had to because we would be out and about doing boyfriend-girlfriend things and I thought she was alongside me but in fact, she was 100 yards back taking a picture of something. I realized the only way I could be with her was to be doing the same thing and then obviously I got completely obsessed by it. 

Chiptography: When artists become involved with other artists, their art starts to blend in a very natural way. You can see the world in a different way because art is a way of communicating. When you're speaking through your lens, your camera, your film or your speaking through guitar or electronic beats and music, it's a different way of relating to the world. 

gwEm: It is kind of like being in a relationship with another person in a way. If you're in a couple you do change as a person and I think you learn a different way of seeing and appreciating the world that we're in. I certainly find that different girlfriends that I was lucky enough to be with have always lead me to produce different work. Each time I'm slightly reborn into being a different person than the previous incarnation if you like. Whenever you break up it's like a terrible traumatic reboot. You're never quite the same afterward. 

Chiptography: I find that there's a part of my past partners that stays with me. There's a part of them that becomes me even though they're gone, it's still there. 

gwEm: I think that's true. I'm not really in touch with any of my former loves. I find it quite painful. By the same token, I still like them and they're all very talented but you get feelings of regret and how it didn't work out and you kind of really wanted it to. I guess these things end for a reason at the end of the day and you learn and evolve as a person. 

Chiptography: You have two awards from True Chip Till Death. Can you tell me the story about how you got those? 

gwEm: I keep them by my bed so clearly they mean a lot. The first one is an award for Best Chip Software and it goes to maxYMiser which I'm very happy about because maxYMiser was a fuckload of effort. I was working constantly on the first version for about a year. I played very few shows that year because I was focused just on that. I bought myself a very small IBM ThinkPad and I was coding all the time like at airports, at home, on the train. Whenever I had a free moment I was working on maxYMiser. I also got an award for maxYMiser from VORC.org, Hally's website.

Chiptography: Tell me more about maxYMiser. Why did you decide to make your own software?

gwEm: maxYMiser was started after I went to my first demoparty in 2004 and the first version was released to the public in 2005. At that time there were a few good Atari trackers, but they all had different features. My idea was to combine the best of all the trackers into one. The main challenge I faced was not knowing assembly language very well when I started the project, but I was reasonable at the end.

Chiptography: Your software is one of the staple softwares in chiptune today. Who uses your software to make chiptune? How does it feel to see other artists take your software and make their work? 

gwEm: Some of the artists using maxYMiser are Dma-Sc, UltraSyd, Xyno and 505. In fact I would say all of the chip musicians working on Atari ST use my software in some way. I’m always delighted to listen to a really good tune done in maxYMiser.

Chiptography: What was your second True Chip Till Death award for?

gwEm: The second award I got from True Chip Till Death was for Artist of the Year. I'm also happy about it because I normally don't win awards like this. I sometimes find that my music can be a bit of an acquired taste. Not everyone likes mechanistic guitar playing and some nerdy guy angrily shouting over the top. I was quite chuffed to get artist of the year. That was really cool. I don't always see myself in the top tier of popular artists like Goto80 or Bit Shifter or someone like that. That year evidently, True Chip Till Death did consider me to be part of that echelon so that's kind of cool. 

Chiptography: Is there a chiptune story or a moment that was really special to you? 

gwEm: I did a show in India once. 

Chiptography: What?!? 

gwEm: I went there on business and I was staying at The Grand in Bangalore which is kind of like an average business hotel. There was a hotel bar so I went in there and there was some guy with a Casio keyboard and another guy with a guitar. They were just jamming covers but the covers they were playing were a little bit strange. He played a Deep Purple song and then he played The Mexican by Babe Ruth. I turned around and I was like, "You guys have some serious musical taste." They had a little break and I got talking to them and they asked if I could play. I had some tracks on my phone and I borrowed the guy's guitar and I did a little set there in the hotel bar. 

Chiptography: What did they think about your set? 

gwEm: They were quite keen. I don't know why they had the Casio. Maybe they couldn't afford a different thing or maybe they liked the sound? I think they appreciated the qualities that it had and the musicality of it. They clearly knew a lot about music so that was nice that they trusted me to do a show. I assumed maybe I was doing their job for them and they just wanted to have a quiet beer for a minute but it was fun. There wasn't really anyone else in the bar. There were some business people and they didn't really look up much. They just accepted it and so I had this weird Indian guitar with this shit amp. I plugged my phone into where the casio was and just did a little set for a half an hour or so. That was a pretty awesome moment.

Listen to gwEm’s music on Bandcamp and Soundcloud.

Follow gwEm on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Find more information on gwEm’s music software maxYMiser.

Photos by Chiptography © 2020.

2xAA

Chiptography: I'm sitting in London with Sam Wray, who is a chiptune musician under the name 2xAA and also visual artist under the name NO_SIGNAL. How did chiptune find you? 

2xAA: It's a funny story really. I moved between primary and secondary school, like age 11/12, so I had to get into a new friend group in the new school. That took a while initially, so I spent a lot of my lunchtimes and breaks in the computer rooms on the internet. I think when I was age 13 or 14 I stumbled across chip music online. I saw a video or something and I was like, "Ah, that's a sound that I don't really recognize. That sounds cool." It wasn't video game music, it was chiptune. I never had an old 8-bit console when I was a kid. My first console was a Game Boy Advance when I was 12. I delved deeper and found 8bitpeoples, then I found more communities online. I stumbled across it by accident really. I took my mp3 player which had a slide-out usb connector and plugged it in the school computers, downloaded all the chip music and listened to it on my way home and to school and just all the time really. 

Chiptography: Do you remember some of the first artists you were listening to? 

2xAA: The first one that ever stood out to me was gwEm actually. I really liked Green Day and My Chemical Romance when I was in my early teens so gwEm stood out to me 'cause he's got a really punky vibe. It was actually "Live From Hell" with him and Counter Reset. If you haven't heard it, it's really good. Years later I spoke to gwEm backstage at Superbyte 2012 and said to him, "That's the album that got me into chiptune. It's so cool that we can finally talk." He said, "That was a university project from one of my friends." I was like, "What do you mean?" He was like, "All of the crowd is completely fake on that." That blew my mind because at age 13/14, I listened to this album and I thought, "Wow- that's chiptune. This roaring crowd- wow!" 

Chiptography: You had this image in your mind with gwEm playing to this big crowd but it was all digitized and fabricated. 

2xAA: Absolutely. Coupling that with Blip Festival videos and the larger festivals around that time, I thought that's how it goes. That's chiptune. I hadn't been to a proper chiptune gig before Superbyte 2012. That was my first big one. 

Chiptography:  When did you start making music? 

2xAA: I was around 14 or 15 years old. I got into it quite quickly. I was fiddling around with stuff from the DS, some homebrew applications like NitroTracker. I bugged my parents, "Can I get this LSDj cartridge for my birthday?" My dad was like, "No, I don't know what that is. It looks dodgy." We didn't have broadband at home so my parents were very much, “let's not buy stuff from online.” I convinced them and got a cartridge. 

Left: White-shelled Game Boy modded by Joe Bleeps. Right: Glass Game Boy diorama, a specially commissioned graduation present from Sam’s mum.

Chiptography: Were you playing music before that? Did you study instruments?

2xAA: I was studying guitar from age 9 and keyboard from even earlier than that. I was in a youth music group of about 80 people in my hometown. It's a charity funded local council-run thing called Plymouth Musical Activities Club, PMAC for short. I did that from age 9-18 and stayed on as staff afterward when I got to be too old to be in the group. 

Chiptography: Were you doing your own compositions as well? 

2xAA: Not really until I got into trackers and the Game Boy stuff. It has a low barrier of entry. At the time, Game Boys weren't too hard to find or that expensive to buy. They're still not too expensive but I think I probably picked up my first Game Boy to use as a musical instrument for £20 or maybe less. One with a case and all the accessories, that might be harder to find now. I put in the pro-sound mod myself, so it was relatively inexpensive to get a portable music tracker. My parents would drive me around quite a lot for school or if we're going away somewhere. We were always in the car. Having a portable music workstation in the back of the car when you don't have to think about where you're going, you can just go for it. That's how I started writing stuff.

Chiptography: When did you get into doing visuals? 

2xAA: This one is quite a different story. I started doing visuals in a hack week for young people across the UK, called Young Rewired State. It was a small, week-long hackathon across the UK. If you're between ages 9 and 18, you were either mentored or worked with people that were designers or software engineers and over the week learn to code or build something within a team. At the end of that week, everybody gathered at one main center and presented their work. It was a bit of a competition, very fun. I was a participant in 2012 and then I went back the following two years as a mentor. The second year, they asked me to put on a gig at the end of the week in the main center, which was my hometown, Plymouth. They wanted some music Friday night when everyone was arriving. I organized the gig and realized there was a projection screen but we didn't have any visuals. At the time, I didn't know any visualist that would be able to get down to Plymouth on short notice so I started experimenting during the week and hacked together my own visual software, just in the browser. 

Chiptography: Was this the birth of your software, modV? 

2xAA: Pretty much, yes. It definitely got me inspired to use the browser as a medium to create a platform for audio reactive visuals. There’s a video online somewhere where I say to “watch out for the web for generative art” as I thought it was going to be big. Another big influence was seeing Dario, as Lazersausage, perform his visuals at AnalogAttack in London, also in 2014.

Chiptography: What made you think to include visuals? 

2xAA: They sent me the specifications of the stage and they had a really nice projection screen. One of the acts that I booked was one of my lecturers at university, Mike Blow and his wife, Kayoko. I knew they were going to do an AV performance and I thought well, we don't have any visuals for the rest of it and I'd see people do visuals before. It can't be that hard. 

Chiptography: I love that attitude, honestly! 

2xAA: I used the technologies that I knew and started throwing some stuff together. In the end, it turned out to be something more actually. I thought that the young people may not be into the music. They’d had a really long week meeting new people, hacking together and they've traveled a long way to Plymouth. Plymouth is not easy to get to. It's in the southwest and the only way to get there cheaply is by bus. There's one train line but it was the furthest point away from the rest of the centers during the hack week. Everyone was tired when they got there. I thought, let's make a little remote control for the visuals so they can interact with the gig. If you connect with your phone, every 30 seconds or so, someone else would have control of the visuals. The visuals were still audio-reactive but you could change what was going on the screen. It was in a big hall and loads of kids sat down, chatted with their friends, worked on their projects or ate food. They didn't really want to get up and dance. They were too tired but a lot of them were on their phone messing with the visuals. They were still part of the event and it didn't seem like, “oh there's something going on over there but I'm not really part of that.” They could still interact with it and be included. 

Chiptography: Was the music electronic or chiptune? 

2xAA: The first act was an experimental AV piece but the rest was chiptune stuff. I called upon my chiptune friends because the event also was paying for accommodation and travel for all the artists. That's the dream- have money and put on a show. That was the first show that I put on so that was the gold standard right there. That was awesome. We had MizKai, J3WEL, The Virus Empire and myself. 

2xAA in his London neighborhood.

Chiptography: Since then, you’ve performed quite a lot, haven’t you? 

2xAA: Actually, I have a list on my music website. 

Chiptography: Are these all chip shows?

2xAA: These are anywhere that I've played music or done visuals so far but I'm probably going to move the visuals to a separate site at some point. I kind of split the 2xAA and NO_SIGNAL up a bit. 

Chiptography: When did that happen? 

2xAA: Just recently actually. This past year (2019), I wanted to keep them a bit more separate. I put out two albums on Data Airlines in the past couple of years. They asked me if I had anything. That was before I was doing any of the new Nanoloop stuff or any of the heavier bits. I was doing some LSDj stuff but in my opinion, it was just ok. There were much more interesting artists out there doing much cooler stuff. I was just kind of plodding along doing whatever I wanted with music stuff. But then Data Airlines was like, "We think you can do something. Send some stuff over when you have it." That was a nice vote of confidence. I pretty much love every single artist this label works with and it was a really nice thing that they did, asking me to send something. They pushed me along. I put out two albums with them and I'm very happy with those two. I kind of want to keep the 2xAA just music because that was what it was for a long time. The visuals came along and I feel it's a different project now. 

Chiptography: Tell me more about your visual software, modV. Is it available for artists to use? Would you recommend it for people who are just beginning to get into visuals or is it for advanced users?

2xAA: modV is free and open source, meaning people can see how I built it and can contribute changes back. It’s probably okay for people who know their way around a command-line but I’m working to fix that. That’s the biggest stumbling block with it right now. But, once you’re in the software, I think it’s pretty straightforward for beginners or advanced users. I’ve let people at shows have a go on it, held a workshop this year (2019) and I’ve had great feedback so far.

Chiptography: Tell me about the story behind the name 2xAA. 

2xAA: It's just batteries. 2 “AA” batteries. I might have had a Game Boy color before I had an Advance. I'm not sure but... What the name is about- just batteries. 

Chiptography: What?!? That's cool! I love it! What's the story behind NO_SIGNAL? 

2xAA: You know when you haven't plugged anything into a projector and it comes up with "no signal"? That's it. 

Chiptography: Both of your artist names have something to do with power and connection. 

2xAA: I hadn't really thought of that. I just thought NO_SIGNAL was really funny actually. I played Hypernight, a small show in London. It was nothing chiptune at all. It's kind of an anime-inspired kind of music gig. The projector there just kept cutting out the whole time. The HDMI cable wasn't long enough and it was bent out of shape so it wasn't connecting properly. The projector kept displaying in huge letters, "NO SIGNAL" and I was the only person doing visuals all night. People were just shouting at me, “NO SIGNAL!” I joked about it saying I was going to change my name, and then I did. 

The first time I photographed 2xAA at the SuperByte 2015 Preparty.

Chiptography: There you go. I think that’s the first time a shotty cable made history! When we met at SuperByte 2015, you were about to go to University. What did you study? 

2xAA: I studied a course called "Digital Arts and Technology" which is a combination of computer science and art theory. It had a lot of interactive programming, interactive installations, and a lot of thinking about where technology will take us in the future. I studied how fictional works impact our daily lives as in how it pushes us to create those works of fiction in real life. For example, one which we weren't allowed to talk about ever because it came up so often was Minority Report with the crazy panels and stuff like that. Those are a thing now. Another one which came up a lot was the PADDs in Star Trek. We have phones and iPads now. We looked at transhumanism and how technology will affect biology as well. It was very much an art and technology course because we had the programing parts but we always had to link it to the theory somehow and make sure one complimented the other. 

Chiptography: It makes me think of the movie, Her. It was about the future of technology but also about the future of human relationships and mental health and our relationship to technology. That ties in a lot with what you were studying. 

2xAA: Absolutely, I love that film. I have a Google Home upstairs. When I say, "Hey Google, I'm leaving," it's like "Have a good day!" It's really weird, you kind of get into a relationship. It's a daily routine just talking to this object. 

Chiptography: Now that I'm traveling, I miss Alexa because she kept me posted on the weather, current events and she told me jokes. I could always ask her something if I was lonely and I love her sense of humor. It’s as if she has a genuine personality and mind of her own. Tell me about your current job. What are you up to these days?

2xAA: I'm an experience technologist at an agency called POKE. I work with creative technology and installations. They’re usually quite large projects. I can't talk about the details of my current project but it’s been intense and we've made really good progress towards our deadline. 

Chiptography: It sounds interesting because you get to work on different projects and exercise your brain since it's not the same kind of tasks every day. You're using so many of the skills you developed in university to execute these different projects but there's still a lot of creativity and research involved. 

2xAA: Totally. I pull a lot from what I studied because we were always looking to future technologies and edge technologies. There's a lot of planning and trying to find the right people as well to get it all done in by the deadline. There's only two experience technologist in our agency at the moment. We're looking to grow the team but the thing is we can't build all the things all the time. If there's a huge build we'll probably work with someone else to get it done but we still need to build an internal prototype, do the research to make sure that we can actually do this in the time that we have and be able to sell that to our clients. If someone comes to us and they say, "Can you make this in-store hologram which people can interact with using controllers in another store across the UK?" Yeah, we probably can but we need a bit of research time and then we'll figure out how we do this. We'll still do it and take control over the project and make it work but we might have to bring in extra people just ‘cause we have other stuff going on at the same time. 

Chiptography: This blows my mind.  

2xAA: Thank you. This is the job that I've been looking for since graduating in 2016. 

Chiptography: So this is your dream job? 

2xAA: Pretty much. The only way it could get better would be if we could work with clients that helped people instead of just developing something to promote the client even further. They're mostly brands which don't require any extra recognition. Not to say the work isn’t fun, I’m learning a lot and the team is absolutely fantastic! It satisfies my urge to learn and create experiences.

Chiptography: There may be an opportunity at some point in the future to engage your company in giving back by working with the community. I’m so happy you already have an eye out for that. It sounds like a challenging job but I feel like you need that because ever since you were a kid you were exploring things on the internet, researching and taking it to the next level. You found chiptune and all of a sudden you were making chiptune and then you were playing shows and then you were organizing shows. You are someone who sees something, gets intensely involved and then just blows it up. So you grew up in Plymouth. Were you born there? 

2xAA: Yeah. 

Chiptography: One of your parents actually bought a photograph of mine. 

2xAA: It was my mum. I actually have that upstairs. My mum framed it up. 

My photograph that 2xAA’s mum printed and framed for him.

Chiptography: Do your parents still live in Plymouth? 

2xAA: My mum does. So my parents split up when I was 9 and my dad died when I was 15. I'm pretty open about it these days. It was around the time that I got into chiptune and I think a lot of that carried me on with chiptune 'cause they both happened around the same time. 

Chiptography: I don't know what it feels like to lose a parent but I have experience with friends and family members who have and it seems completely… devastating isn't even the right word because the world is different. 

2xAA: That's a good way to put it, the world is different. I understood what was going on but your mind does a few tricks to get you through stuff, to block stuff out and make sure that you're ok. 

Chiptography: You were also very young. You don't really expect it, as a teenager. It's a constant that your parents are there. 

2xAA: My mum and dad only split up a few years before. There was a lot of change around that time because that was final exam time in school as well. I kind of switched off around that time in terms of school. I wasn't super into school anyway and I just got into programming and music. Looking back, obviously it's a sad time but at the same point I feel like I have some really good skills now. It's a real double-edged sword. It's something that I thought about quite a lot and I talked to a lot of people about.

Chiptography: It's very natural for people to get deeper into their work when they're coping with an emotional state of pain. I've had that experience when I had severe depression as a teenager and throughout college and even today. There's a lot of insecurities that go with that. 

2xAA: It's hard to kind of, like justify it in a way. I don't know. It's odd. It's very odd. 

Chiptography: It's an odd experience because it can be so uncomfortable and it's something that you don't necessarily want to talk about or share with the world. When I'm going through a rough patch I turn off. It seems like Marjorie's just doing her normal thing but... 

2xAA: There are times where I close up completely. Even now if I'm going through a very busy period or I'm stressed or something, I close off quite heavily sometimes. It's one of those things in which you learn and try not to do. 

Chiptography: It takes time to get to that point. Thank you for sharing that with me. 

2xAA: It's just cool that I'm at a point where I can talk about it comfortably. 

Chiptography: Do you have a chiptune story as far as something that happened at a show or with an artist that made an impact on you? 

2xAA: It was 2015. I went on a three-day tour in Russia with Henry Homesweet. He was booked already and Forest Booking, the people in Russia doing tours there, were looking to get another artist. I met Tom, Henry Homesweet, at SuperByte that year when I did some visuals. He was quite impressed because he does web development and all of my visual software is in the browser. He asked if they could get me along for the Russia tour as well. That was my first time traveling alone. It was really a scary kind of thing since I was 21. 

Chiptography: I can imagine!

2xAA’s Gameboy Advance and Nanoloop cartridge.

2xAA: That was the first time I saw him play live properly. At the time I was using LSDj with my Game Boy and then I saw him play his nanoloop set on the Game Boy Advance. I heard the sound and was like, "Wow- that is incredible. How do you do that?" He said, "yeah, it's just nanoloop two." I saved up money over a few months and bought a Nanoloop One cartridge and a Nanoloop Two cartridge. I barely touched Nanoloop One. It's literally in that drawer there. It's underneath all this stuff. For the kind of dancy, more house stuff that I've been getting into, the nanoloop two software and the way that it handles audio is really cool. He changed my whole workflow for making music just from seeing him play a couple of gigs. I've told him that as well and he's like, "oh yeah, I didn't do that." And I'm like, "yes you did." 

Chiptography: Incredible. Tell me more about your Russia tour.

2xAA: I flew into Moscow and then I traveled to St. Petersburg. We played a gig there and then went back to Moscow together to play a gig. We then went to a town south of Moscow called Tula. The three venues were very different actually. The one in St. Petersburg felt like more of a standard music venue. There was this backstage area that was triangular-shaped. It literally went into a corner. It had a toilet on one side and then a shower hanging off the wall on the other side. 

Chiptography: What was that about?

2xAA: I don't know. It was just really funny. For some reason that stuck out to me. I think all the walls were painted black as well. The rest of the venue was totally fine, it was just that one room. When everything else feels very normal and one thing sticks out, that's the one thing you're going to remember. The venue was cool but it had a weird bathroom. The crowd there was pretty nice but I think they were expecting more general music kind of stuff rather than chiptune. The Moscow gig, they were expecting chiptune there for sure and that was like a pub kind of situation with multiple levels. The bar was upstairs and there was a balcony which you can see down onto the stage. The stage was in this middle area. There wasn't a middle area where you could sit though. There was only a downwards area. People would be below the stage and the stage would be in the middle of the bottom and the top levels. 

Chiptography: So the stage itself was on its own level?

2xAA: Yeah, and there were stairs on one side which you could get to the stage. If you weren't doing anything on the stage you continue down into the lower area. That was a weird layout but it actually worked really well. That was a cool gig. I met BalloonBear for the first time there. If you don't know BalloonBear he's a chiptune artist from Russia. The Tula one for me that was the best one because people were really into the show. The age range there was ridiculous. There must have been people from like age 13 to whatever age, it doesn't matter. There were a few older people in the crowd. It felt like a pop up space for gigs. The walls were painted and I think they plastered over the walls before we got there as well so it was really fresh. They dressed up this whole hall. They made this giant space invader cardboard cutout in front of this light and there was a controller for the light behind it on the side. It looked really cool! There was a little area before that with cardboard cut out video game characters. There was a Pacman, there was a Super Mario photo booth with a red hat and you could get behind these pipes. They painted everything just for the gig, just for one day. It was really cool. Everyone I met, they were also really nice people. I did a little video documentary as we were going through it.

The last day of the Henry Homesweet & 2xAA Russian tour in Tula! Perfomers in order: Gamegate - https://gamegate.bandcamp.com/ 2xAA (me) - https://2xAA.bandc...

Chiptography: It sounds like a really big party! 

2xAA: Yeah it was! I don't know how many people were there, probably 150 at least. That gig was funny though 'cause one of the organizers, Alex from Forest Bookings, he's quite a well built kind of guy.  I was doing the visuals on the side for Henry Homesweet and he just picked me up at some point. He's like "Yeah, you're going in the crowd." He literally picked me up and threw me into the crowd. I grabbed my camera literally off the side, hit record, and recorded myself on top of the crowd. It was really fun. It was probably some of the best bigs I ever played actually. Going to Russia was quite the experience. That was the first time I played internationally. I feel really good about that. It was awesome. Every time I see Tom, Henry Homesweet, we're like, "Wasn't Russia kind of crazy?" but in a good way. 

Chiptography: We're going to walk down to the River Thames in a bit. Why do you want to be photographed there?

2xAA: I grew up around water. Plymouth is called the "Ocean City." It's in the southwest and it faces the channel. We have the Plymouth Sound which is a big cove with a tiny island in the middle. Most of my time, especially as a teenager hanging out with friends, we would go to the waterfront. We would sit there and talk and hang out and look out into the sea. It just reminds me of a calm place to be, hanging out with friends and looking back on those moments. This area that I live in now is Popular and it's part of the docklands in East London, so there's actually quite a lot of different pockets of water around here. I live pretty close to the Thames. The Thames is a tidal river so it's got a little bit of the sea in there at least, but it’s not really the same. Occasionally, if I have the time, I'll go down to the waterfront and walk along the Thames and it reminds me a lot of being calm and close to home. It's a nice place to be. 

Chiptography: I remember that when we met at SuperByte you gave me a µCollective (Micro Collective) pin. What is µCollective and what’s going on with it since then?

2xAA: µCollective was an online community for chiptune artists, very much like chipmusic.org. It's an online forum where you can talk about chip music or chiptune, the topics around it and share information, music and image uploads. It was very much in the vein of 8-bit Collective. I used to be a forum admin for 8-bit Collective in it's later years. The guy that ran it kind of just let it die basically. I'm not entirely sure of the exact circumstances but I think it was either money or time or effort or something. I think 8-bit Collective was around for about 7 years so that's a lot of content to lose. I don't know if there's a back up of all of the forums, wikiposts, image uploads, music uploads. Having that community online was super special. This was before facebook groups were a real big thing. I think people used reddit a lot but for what the scene needed to do, sharing music and ideas and to be able to find those in an accessible way, (searching a forum or a wiki) 8-bit Collective was invaluable. When it died, I was still an active admin and I was a bit annoyed really that there were no backups of seven years of content. I think there were over four thousand users or something. It's just like, "Wow, where did all this stuff go?" I come from an archival background as well. I worked in a film archive for a long time and I like the preservation and conservation of ideas and media.

Chiptography: A lot of online interaction like social media is about this moment. It's about now. Every once in a while you'll scroll through someone's Instagram feed and look at their old pictures but for the most part you see what's new, what's fresh. As a photo documentarian I also really agree with you that there is a lot of value in saving things for posterity. 

2xAA: Especially when it's a whole community.

Chiptography: It's culture. It's history.

2xAA: Yeah, it is history. Anyway, I just got a bit annoyed really, I think pissed off would be the right term, at the guy running the thing. He probably had a good reason why it collapsed or didn't have time to back it up. Around the same time I was learning to code websites. I was really getting into it so I thought I would build my own forum and online community called µCollective to replace the void that 8-bit Collective left. It went through a couple of iterations for a few years. I got asked by SuperByte to put a big advertisement on the front page to let people know that SuperByte was happening. I ran a competition on the site where you could submit a poster design, or a pin design or a piece of music and I’d get them made. There was a voting system where you had to log in and vote them up. Whoever got the highest vote on the pin design, the poster design and the music upload would all be included and printed, we made a CD also. I really wanted to make this a big community thing and drive people's creativity. But that was before getting into university. University took a lot of my time and then µCollective stagnated a bit as I had different projects coming up like my visual software, modV. The whole shift between forums and Facebook was happening at the same time. In fact, it probably happened before µCollective was a thing anyway. A lot of people gravitated towards Facebook groups for the place to connect and share ideas. Facebook groups, even now don't really do the job to replace forums. I think the functionality is much better now but searching for stuff in Facebook groups is always terrible. It was always about the now. That was the problem. It just felt a little bit more like a show. It was like "This is what I've been doing recently" instead of "ah- here's a cool idea." 

Chiptography: It's not a place you can go and research and go down the rabbit hole of information. It’s not a useful tool in that sense. 

2xAA: It's also not searchable and not linkable unless you're a Facebook user so you have to have an account to see group content, as far as I know at least. Maybe some groups can be open now. I don't like the idea of it all being on Facebook. There's something about that that screams NO to me. I took down the main forums on µCollective but I still have all the data. That's all heavily backed up. I don't want to have a repeat of what happened with previous projects. I built a holding page for the site so you can listen to the music uploaded. It's like a random radio. You just click through and listen and you can see the comments and favorites on a track and how many plays it had before the site was put on hold. You can still access the media there at least in some form. Eventually, I'll swing back around to it and build it up as another online forum but maybe try to do it in a different way. Maybe more like an app. It's a difficult one because it is just me on the project and I would love some help but it's finding the people with the right abilities and time. I don't want to just make µCollective as a drop-in kind of like "This is now our forums" kind of thing. I want it to be fairly custom, something to be built to do the job. I coded the first site, all of the back-end functionality, all of the forum functionality. I don't want to skimp out on different features. I want to put a lot of effort into it but in the past few years I haven't had the time or motivation to do it, because of the big shift between forums and Facebook basically. It's kind of put a downer on things for me. 

Chiptography: I feel that. The world and technology is also always changing. 

2xAA: Absolutely yeah. 

Chiptography: Myspace was really hot for a while and now it's dead. There will potentially be a time when Facebook is dead. Who knows what the next big thing is going to be. Instagram is really big right now. 

2xAA: But Instagram has it's own flaws. Like I want to show a post from 2016, let's wait five minutes while I scroll back. There's no easy way to jump to a point on your timeline as such. People love the app itself but actually, from like a historical perspective, even just searching the thing or even backing stuff up on it, it's way more difficult. 

Chiptography:  I think you made a smart choice to put it on hold until you figure out what you want it to be and figure out its relevance in the modern internet world. 

2xAA: Thanks. At the moment I'm trying to build up the real world gigs again. I put on µCollective gigs under the name µChip (MicroChip). I’ve done five of those so far. Visualist, Antonio Roberts (HelloCatFood) helped me on the third one and he managed to get lottery arts funding. Having a budget for that one was really nice. I feel like that's something that can return especially with the Hyperwave pairing as of recently. Mikey (Shirobon) and I joined forces because we both want the same thing. We both want to put on good chiptune nights. We can support each other in terms of effort and financially. It's a very different way of putting on gigs now because we can take a little bit longer but put on a better show. 

Chiptography: I like that you're taking µCollective and building on it. It's not just an online forum to connect and to archive, it's also a physical event. You organize shows where people can come together and share their ideas, music and visuals. 

2xAA: It's really nice that it can be fluid and it can be in the real world. 

Chiptography: That's fantastic! I'm really excited to see where it goes and how it grows. I'm excited to experience it in the early days. 

2xAA: It's going to be good. 

Listen to 2xAA’s music on Bandcamp and Soundcloud.

Follow 2xAA on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Follow NO_SIGNAL on Twitter and Instagram.

Follow µCollective on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Learn more about Sam Wray on his website.

Photos by Chiptography © 2020.

Claire Kwong

Chiptography: We met in New York City several years ago but you moved to London last year. Why did you move to London? 

Claire Kwong: I’ve always wanted to move abroad, and they speak English here. About eight years ago when I was in college I had a dream of going to Goldsmiths. They have a good creative computer art program and I wanted to do it when I was in undergrad but I didn't get to because scheduling didn't work out. I don't think I was at that point in my life when I was 20 to just move to a different country.

Chiptography: How did you find the transition?  

Claire Kwong: There are a lot of little things that are different that threw me for a loop. On the surface, they're very similar but people walk really slowly. Well not slowly, but we're from New York and I'm like, "Get out of the way!" And also, decide whether you walk on the right or the left. Right? 

Claire Kwong at the entrance of her school, Goldsmiths.

Chiptography: That is something that I've also been confused with because the traffic flows on the left side but then sometimes when you're in the Underground, you're walking on the right side. 

Claire Kwong: The sign will tell you walk right or left. There are tourists who don't know what they're doing and I don't know what I'm doing. 

Chiptography: It's not consistent. 

Claire Kwong: Food is worse so I've had to learn to cook some more. I've met a lot of people from all over Europe which I really appreciate, a lot of different diverse backgrounds. 

Chiptography: I came to know you through the chip scene because you are a visual artist. How did chiptune find you as far as making your work? 

Claire Kwong: When I was 20 I took a semester off of school. I was like, I want to be an artist in New York City. That's all I had. So I moved there for a semester. 

Chiptography: Where did you move from? 

Claire Kwong: I moved from Providence, Rhode Island from Brown University. When I was in New York I interned for Harvestworks and that's where I met Haeyoung Kim, Bubblyfish.

Chiptography: What type of company is Harvestworks and what did you do for them?

Claire Kwong: Harvestworks is a center for digital media art. It runs a residency program where artists develop new work and can get help from technicians. I was one of those technicians and I helped artists with code. I was assigned to help Haeyoung on this project, Moori. It’s this really cool interactive art performance. I did some coding for her and one day when we were sitting in my basement room she was like, “Let me show you this thing I'm working on for this Devo compilation of chiptune” and she played Love Without Anger and I was like, what is this? It was chiptune. It sounded so raw and aggressive but really good. I really enjoyed it and that was a side of her that I hadn't seen before. It was cool to see a different side of her. It was also really important for me to see an Asian woman doing that stuff. 

Chiptography: She must have been someone who you could identify with in a lot of ways. 

Claire Kwong: She still is a role model for me. I went back to school for one semester and I came back to NYC the following summer. Then I went to my first Pulsewave. It was Ladies Night.

Chiptography: That was your FIRST Pulsewave?! That was one of my all-time favorite Pulsewaves. 

Claire Kwong: It was so good! It made me feel so welcome. I'm a shy person. I'm really anxious and I always feel the patriarchy but it felt so good. It felt really amazing. It was all Asian women on stage.

Chiptography: Right, it was Drum Machine Dating Service, Bubblyfish, Corset Lore with visuals by CHiKA. It was probably very misleading. 

Claire Kwong: Yes, actually it was. It was super misleading!

Chiptography: When did you start to actually perform as a visual artist? 

Claire Kwong: I think my first one was in 2015 with bryface and Mega Ran. It was meaningful for me to be part of a racially diverse lineup. I met Jessen through ITP camp which is at NYU. Jessen had seen me do stuff with Glitch Cake, my previous band. I knew our friend, Kat Tingum, from Harvestworks. I would try out all sorts of experimental things that would project on her face and things like that, doing stuff with her body. I really enjoyed that and I think Jessen might have seen one of the shows and so he asked me to do visuals for his show, I/O Chip Music. 

Chiptography: Since then, have you been involved in the chip scene here in London? 

Claire Kwong: I've gone to a few shows but I’ve only performed once. I think it's less frequent than in New York. I find it's a little bit harder to break into as an outsider. I find it's harder to sell yourself as a visualist. What I do is very integrated into the live show. You have to watch the visuals and how it interacts with the artist. That's very important to me.

Chiptography: For me, the visual element of a show is 50% of what makes a good show. A lot of people go there because of who’s playing but if there were no visuals the show's not the same. It really is a 50/50 thing for me. I don't know if a lot of people realize how important the visual element is. 

Claire Kwong: Yes, absolutely. You have to find out what works with an artist and complement their music. 

Chiptography: I really appreciate that. I photographed you once at WordHack. The performance was quite different from the work you make for chip shows. 

Claire Kwong: WordHack is a monthly night of words and technology. It's run by Todd Anderson. The whole thing is trying to mix words, literature, and technology in any way possible so it's very broad. I performed at WordHack three times. It's a really great community. It's almost like the chiptune scene but people are less... they don't move as much. 

Chiptography: It's not a show you go to to dance. It's more performance art. 

Claire Kwong: I did performance art but other people will show work in their browser or they'll read things. It's kind of like a poetry reading or slam poetry but with words projected on your mouth.

Chiptography: What was your piece about? Describe it for me. 

Claire Kwong: The performance was called Voice. I took phrases from my journals and projected them on my mouth one word at a time, like Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries. Todd called it Young-Hae Chang Dental Industries. I love the textural possibilities of projection, especially on a body. I especially love it inside a mouth. It's so intimate and unexpected.

Photography of Claire Kwong’s performance at WordHack in 2017.

Claire Kwong: I find that my art practice has split. I was thinking about that when I was working on my website for public presentation so people can look at me and get me a job. I split my website into artwork and visuals. 

Chiptography: I saw some photos of your final project. Can you tell me about that? 

Claire Kwong: It's called Light Touches Skin and it's a play area with a floor projection. People can go in and the goal is to make different shapes with your body to fill out some shapes like triangles. The projection will be on your body. I aim for it to feel very textural and visceral, so like bumps on your skin moving and crawling. I wanted to make an unnatural experience that will bring people closer together. Touch is very hard. People in London go out of their way to avoid touching each other, which is reasonable. They did that even in my installation. Obviously, it's very loaded with unwanted touching and all that but I wanted to push the boundaries of my art and create social situations where people must cooperate in order to win. It's a game in that way. They'll find themselves making strange movements and touching each other and everyone always laughs a lot. They take selfies a lot. 

A game that uses projection to move peoples’ bodies.

Chiptography: That would be really interesting to bring it to different parts of the world and see how your piece changes with different cultures.

Claire Kwong: I think that's interesting. Thinking back on my own touch phobia, given that my family is from Hong Kong which is densely populated and touch averse, they're like, "None of that." They have a big house now and they're not very touchy-feely people. For me, I wasn't a very touchy person but when I moved to New York, people were huggers. After every show they always want to hug you at the end, especially if you collaborated on visuals. I like hugging. I grew to like it. I grew to give really tight hugs. 

Chiptography: I have to really trust and like someone to feel comfortable hugging. 

Claire Kwong: People will assume you want to 'cause they're hugging everybody else and you're a woman. It's assumptions like that. Maybe I started coping with it by embracing hugging and also trying to question it in my work. I am a little touch phobic. 

Chiptography: Tell me more about your family. Do you have any brothers or sisters? 

Claire Kwong: Yeah, a younger sister and a younger brother. 

Chiptography: You're the oldest of three? Me too! Was there an expectation from being the eldest in your family?

Claire Kwong: I think so. I've always been very independent. I've always tried to figure things out for myself. I moved the furthest away obviously. I always held myself to a higher standard like achieving stuff academically or being together emotionally which is a hard standard to live up to. I never wanted to depend on my parents. I know that Asian parents have high expectations but they also are a bit of a helicopter. Even though they have good intentions, it's a different kind of relationship than we have with kids in Hong Kong. 

Chiptography: Tell me about where you grew up.

Claire Kwong: I grew up in Rockville, Maryland. Well, I was born in LA, in Pasadena, but I only lived there for three years. Do you know the Rodney King Riots? 

Chiptography: Yeah.

Claire Kwong: My dad didn't feel safe anymore. That was when I was a baby. We moved to where his family was in Maryland. My mom's family was in California but they had moved by that point to San Francisco or Sacramento. My parents immigrated to the US from Hong Kong separately when they were 16. They didn't know each other before.

Chiptography: So they met here, in the States? 

Claire Kwong: They met in Los Angeles. It was cute. After the riots happened, my dad left his job. He was an engineer at LADWP, LA Department of Water and Power. There was a labor strike and a picket took out his car light. I don't know all the details but he didn't feel safe. He didn't want us to grow up like that and there was smog everywhere. My dad's three older sisters and his parents were in DC so we moved to Rockville, Maryland. It's a suburb of DC, about 30 minutes outside. A lot of people worked for the government. Everyone there is either a doctor, lawyer or engineer which is the Asian parent's dream, right? My dad was an engineer for a company for 15 years until he made his own company which was very inspiring to me. As an engineer focused on energy efficiency and things like that to make the environment better. 

Chiptography: That was his own company?  

Claire Kwong: Yes, it's just him as an employee but he made it work. He just didn't want to have a boss which is relatable. 

Chiptography: Does he still work in that industry? 

Claire Kwong: He does. He's doing good for the world which is all I want in my career. I don't want to just make other people money. My mom works for a public school system as a counselor for students who come from other countries. They're often very troubled. She actually learned Spanish to help all the kids who came from Central America. She helps Chinese and Spanish speaking students. It's very noble work. It's very difficult work. 

Chiptography: It must be an emotional career too. You're dealing with children who potentially don't feel safe. They had to move from dangerous environments. 

Claire Kwong: There's a lot of trauma there. My mom has kids who literally walked from Honduras. Literally. Just thinking about that, my God... Through that we've all become very sympathetic to immigrants. I mean, my parents are immigrants, right? But a different wave. My grandpa wanted a better life for his daughters. My mom’s family immigrated to the San Francisco Bay Area when she was 16 but soon her parents went back to Hong Kong to work, leaving her there with her sisters. They were floundering around. There are funny stories but also not all funny. It was a bit traumatizing too because she was 16. 

Chiptography: Trying to figure things out at such a young age is difficult. I can't imagine if I was going to a foreign country. I mean, even you coming to an English speaking country, you didn't feel comfortable until you were a little older. 

Claire Kwong: Yeah. I think my comfort level is a bit higher. Well in different ways higher and lower than my parents. But yeah, Rockville, Maryland. There are a lot of Asian immigrants. The majority of the friends I made in school were Asian. We even had our own clique called "The Asian Angle."  It was so dumb. 

Chiptography: No! I like it! So why angle?

Claire Kwong: In high school at lunch, we would sit at an angle, a corner. We had a lot in common because we all had the stereotypical Asian parents. They're very demanding. My friends were all very academically driven. I felt a lot of pressure. I wanted to get away from that. I really felt a strong pull to not be the typical Asian person. That might not be totally true for everybody but I didn’t want to be the person who becomes the lawyer, engineer or doctor and doesn't really have interests. That's the stereotype and that's what Asian parents might want you to be. 

Chiptography: Even if you do have a drive towards art, it's often expected that you put that to the side and make that hobby. 

Claire Kwong: Right. It took my parents a long time to come around to my art. 

Chiptography: Have they come around?

Claire Kwong: I think they're trying. They like it but they still don't understand it. They didn't like me going to New York to be an artist when I was 20. I took a semester off. That's not the way to do things really but I was being a rebel and I was being an artist. 

Chiptography: Do you feel like it had to do with the fact that you had this very strong internal identity of being an artist but you were being told to go on this different path? 

Claire Kwong: Yes. I majored in computer science and also modern culture and media which is like art and technology but I always felt pressured into doing computer science because it was marketable and it could get me a job. That's what my parents wanted me to do. It's been useful. It's good to know how to code but I did not want to be just like that in my life. I wanted to be an artist. 

Chiptography: When did you first know you wanted to be an artist and did you have anyone in your family or childhood that exposed you to art and nurtured you?

Claire Kwong: I've always been creative. I wrote stories all throughout my childhood. I also made websites as a teenager – girly sites where you drag and drop clothes onto dolls. My parents were always supportive but a little bemused because they aren't creative themselves. I never really thought of it as art until I went to college and took a class about digital art. That class inspired me to use the tools from my computer science classes towards weird, counterproductive, artistic ends.

Chiptography: It's inspiring for me to know someone like yourself who has that innate talent. With computer science, you can go and take classes. With art, there's a lot of internal intuition and sensibility.

Claire Kwong: There is. I've often felt like there's a lot of self-mythologizing with artists in that we have to put our own personal lives into our art at all times. I tried to do that for a while but it got really exhausting and hard. Now I try to strike a balance. That's why I try to involve other people in interactive installations, like making other people touch each other. 

Chiptography: It still relates to a personal experience for you. Your personal experience can also be relatable for so many other people. 

Claire Kwong: Absolutely. I often find that art, it's one of the ways that I reach out to people. I'm such a shy person. I never talk to people. 

Chiptography: Outside of your art, what are your interests and passions?

Claire Kwong: In a way, being an artist is so much part of my identity so a lot of what I do is related to art. I like to go to art museums. I love going to upstate New York to see Dia:Beacon. I had a tradition for a while where I would go there for my birthday. It's in January and I loved seeing the frozen Hudson River on the train for two hours and then just going inside and taking a selfie of myself in front of the same artwork and seeing how much I changed. 

Chiptography: Which artwork would you always photograph yourself with?

Claire Kwong: On Kawara's Today series, a collection of paintings spanning over 40 years that each just show the date the painting was made. At Dia:Beacon there's a gallery of them in chronological order. I always posed next to the painting from 1992, the year I was born. That's what I like, being on the train by myself and listening to chiptune. The last birthday I did that I was listening to the Depreciation Guild. It's very emotional chiptune. I was thinking about my life. If there's no WiFi then it's great because you can just think about things. There are only a few places in this world without WiFi like the shower and the train. Those are the places that are the most introspective to me. 

Chiptography: You are the first woman that I'm interviewing for my project. Tell me about your experience as a woman in chiptune. I know that you said your first chiptune experience was an all-female lineup which as we said was pretty deceiving.  

Claire Kwong: I remember feeling really welcomed in that room. I remember seeing women I knew like Nicole Carroll. She was my boss at Harvestworks. I saw that she knew Haeyoung and I was seeing this beautiful network of women who knew each other and supported each other. I really liked that. Maybe that was part of why I came back to New York. As a woman in the chiptune scene, I do sometimes feel tokenized as a one-person diversity ad but I do not want that to be the only reason I'm there. I want my work to speak for itself. There were so many times I've been the only woman. I try to bring a bit of a feminine perspective to my visuals. I try to include a lot of pink and blue and more red, soft things like body parts, eyes, mouths. I was doing visuals for Trash80 for Magfest and FreqFest. His work is very emotional to me and it resonated with me even before I knew him. For Missing You, I remember putting on a pair of lips but then it would fade away and glitch and overlay with some shapes. It was all hot pink. I tried to do something that not only resonated with the music but also brought a feminine visual perspective to the stage.  

Chiptography: If you had any superpower, what would it be and why?

Claire Kwong: I've always wanted to fly! It's not that practical since we have airplanes, but every time I dream about it I crave the sensation in the morning. That's all I want, the sensation. That's the instinctive side of me. But if I actually could have any superpower, I would probably do a ton of research and make a spreadsheet to find the most practical one. I'd never be able to decide.

Chiptography: Did you have a favorite chiptune memory? 

Claire Kwong: It was Glenn Graeber’s farewell party before he joined the navy. 

Chiptography: Glenn is a staple behind the scenes guy who helped 8static with technical operations. He’s a goofy guy who genuinely cares about his friends and family.

Claire Kwong: It was such a good party. It was in Allister’s (SKGB) kitchen in Philly. Mike Goodman (DIY_Destruction) had to leave early so Glenn switched us around and I ended up doing visuals for Ap0c. I didn't have anything prepared for him but at the last minute he suggested, why don't you just go on the internet and browse and that will be my visuals. It was hilarious.

Chiptography: What did you browse? 

Claire Kwong: I went to Facebook and I browsed my feed.  

Chiptography: That's so personal! 

Claire Kwong: Yeah! It felt very personal but I also felt comfortable. It was so funny at the time. Allister had a tapestry on the wall and Mike took a picture of it and posted it on Facebook. I scrolled on my feed and saw the tapestry on the projection. It was so amazing. I loved it. Everyone was screaming out words for me to Google. Everyone was so happy. 

Chiptography: This is one of those times when you take it to the next level with your artwork. It seems like a simple concept but your visuals are layered, smart and interactive.

Claire Kwong: Another set I did with Ap0c was at 8static when I was first starting. It was also very funny. I think he's a conceptual thinker like me. He was making these memes about the SoundCloud orange ball so he told me he was going to bring these orange ping pong balls and throw them at the audience. You know the ball you get when you get an alert? So I made a fountain of SoundCloud balls on his site. It was hilarious. I love when I can bring conceptual art but also when I can bring humor into visuals. That's my favorite. 

View Claire Kwong’s work on her website and Vimeo.

Follow Claire Kwong on Twitter, and Instagram.

Photos by Chiptography © 2020.