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.

Droid-ON

Chiptography: I met you for the first time last year at Square Sounds Tokyo 2018 and you opened the entire festival. I really enjoyed your performance. I was fascinated to hear that you are from Brazil and now you live in Tokyo. 

Droid-ON: It's the Toyko border. It's Saitama, a province north of Tokyo. It's very close to Tokyo.

Chiptography: Where in Brazil are you from? 

Droid-ON: Well, I'm from a small city called Uberaba. It's in the Minas Gerais state but I did not grow up there. My parents already lived in Brasília which is the capital of Brazil, so it's schizophrenic stuff when people ask where I'm from. Sometimes I say Brasília 'cause I grew up there and it's where I was made. My whole person, what I do, began there. So that's it. Brasília. I'm going to stick with it. 

Chiptography: What was life like growing up there? 

Droid-ON: Although it's the capital of Brazil, it's not that big of a city. It's a very beautiful city, very calm. We have huge grass fields and wide roads to drive a car. The public transportation sucks so you have to have a car. It's a very nice place to grow up where you can develop yourself. You can do whatever you want 'cause there's space and a kind of liberty. Sometimes Brasília can get a little bit boring 'cause it's not like New York or even São Paulo.

Chiptography: Is that creatively or more professionally speaking?

Droid-ON: Both. If you work with publicity stuff like editing, audio, or video for commercials, there are not many companies there. It's a state city. There are a lot of public jobs. 

Chiptography: Did you go to college there?

Droid-ON: Yes, I graduated with a degree in psychology. It's a hard profession. It's almost as hard as a musician which was the first thing that I started to do in Brasília. My first job was with music. I was 17 years old and I already loved heavy metal music, grunge, Nirvana, all that stuff. I got a job with a rehearsal studio and I was so proud. I thought, My God, I'm 17 and working with music. 

Chiptography: Was that more like checking artists in and making sure the studio was clean and that type of role? 

Droid-ON: Yes, like receiving the bands, accommodating them, showing them how the amplifier works, adjusting the mic so people can sing. You do all the maintenance of the equipment and you take care of it. It was not a recording studio which is something more professional. I got to learn how the sound table works, how to mix and how to get it to sound good. Is the music coming out good or is it bad? Can I hear the keytar? Voice? Sometimes the drums can get too loud in a small place so all these details are cool to know. And then it was my first experience with some kind of job and responsibility. In that time I was playing guitar and I had so many bands, I can't even remember. We had cover bands playing Rage Against the Machine. I also had a Deftones cover band and it was fun. It was not hard at all. I just go out with friends and play some music and drink some beer. Get together, it was a fun time. 

Chiptography: This was before college, correct?

Droid-ON: Yes! I finished high school when I was 18 so I was still choosing what I was going to do, which profession to follow and I said, you know what, I'm going to stick with music for some time before I go to college. I delayed college for almost three years. 

Chiptography: You were having a lot of fun!

Droid-ON: Yes 'cause the demand was increasing. I was working in the rehearsal studio and everybody wants to call you to play in a band. So at that time, I was in like five bands. Some bands were ending so I would get into another band. Some bands I would just play a few shows and that was it. But there were a few bands that I stayed on. There was a heavy metal band, Quadrum inspired by Meshuggah. It's like a meth metal, complex metal band. I was proud of being in it because everyone was older than me in the band. It was a nice experience for me to learn how to properly tune your guitar and play some riffs and being professional at gigs and so everything kind of started there. There was another band which was the most professional one but I did not play the guitar. I was playing the drums. I became a drummer randomly 'cause it was my best friends band called Nancy. It was a very common name. It was a bad choice. He called me and said, "Dred," cause I used to have dreadlocks....

Chiptography: So that was your nickname, Dred? 

Droid-ON: Yes, even here in Japan, the nickname came with me. It's a cozy name with close friends. People used to call me it in bands because it was appealing to them. They would say, "He has Bob Marley hair but he plays heavy music. That's kind of cool, no?"

Chiptography: You can just walk up and down the stage and flip your hair around and people will come for that. 

Droid-ON: The girls go wild. So there was this band, Nancy, which was the important one with my best friend, Jon Paulo. He lives in New York now. The band was important because we tried to go out on the newspapers, doing TV shows and some interviews. And that's when I visited New York, your city. We managed to go to South by Southwest  in Austin, TX. It's a big place, the whole city. It's prepared for the festival. All the parks in the city are accommodated to give food and music in a nice open place but if you want to see a famous act you have to be stuck in a box and it's kind of annoying. Sometimes you get in the line and it's over, it's sold out and crowded and nobody can get in. That was our experience touring outside of Brazil.

Chiptography:  So you were playing drums in this band this genre was it closer to rock or metal?

Droid-ON: It was an indie-rock band but it was a kind of experimental. That's why he called me to be the drummer because he was experimenting on me. I didn’t know how to play it. In the beginning it came out strange but it's so fun that you want to keep practicing. It was hard 'cause you have to keep the tempo of the BPM. In electronic music, you don't have to worry. You just set up whatever you're playing and the sync is automatic. When you play live drums, my god, I am the machine. I was kind of sloppy. I was playing with Nancy for like ten years. 

Chiptography: Was this after college? 

Droid-ON: I was in the band before I went to college and I decided that music was a hard place to be if you want to get a stable income and the rehearsal studio didn't pay a lot. It was a part-time job. In 2001, I got into psychology school. 

Chiptography: Why did you choose psychology? 

Droid-ON: I think I got used to living with deranged people in the music universe. Lots of guys who come to play music, sometimes they do it because they have a difficult background. I learned that. 

Chiptography: I think that's true for most creatives. There's a lot of trying to develop a coping mechanism for dealing with your own internal demons. I don't have to explain psychology to you but I find it a very fascinating profession. 

Droid-ON: Sometimes you're parents are going through a divorce, somebody in your family died and you don't have the support that you need and music can be there for you either if you're just listening to some artist that you like, looking at visual art, or playing it which is I think the most therapeutic way to go through your feelings. 

Chiptography: I was dealing with a lot of depression in my teen years. I had a guitar and I learned all the Cranberries songs. 

Droid-ON: Oh my god, that's good. 

Chiptography: It helped to express feelings of loneliness or sadness and I wouldn't say that it made me happier or made those things go away but it was definitely something that I could do to help me cope with it. I think music taps into a part of my brain and it's hard to verbalize what it does. I don't play music anymore. When I started going to concerts, I was able to tap into those internal spots. At chiptune shows, sometimes I'll just stop and something will hit me. It will strike an emotional tone where I'll either feel incredibly elated and joyous or I'll feel incredibly emotional and sad. Music is one of those interesting artistic phenomena that can really move people. And to speak to the psychology of it, it puts the musician in control of all those sounds. 

Droid-ON: Sometimes, yes, you pay more attention to it. You know that when you're listening to something that it will make you emotional. They even have some music scales that make you more emotional. They use it in movies. Like the Avengers, sometimes that music tone makes you like, "Oh my god, that is so sad." Just for a brief moment. 

Chiptography: Of even think about the movie, Psycho, in the shower scene. If you put it on mute, it's not as scary. 

Droid-ON: It's laughable, "Oh my god, that girl."

Chiptography: But with that music and the jarring tones that they use I start to sweat because the music was so dramatic and scary. But back to psychology, did you finish your degree there and then start working in that field?

Droid-ON: I finished my degree in 2007. I got delayed 'cause I changed my university. I started going to one that was closer to home. I did an internship while I was at the university in some cool places, like government places such as the ministry of education. 

Chiptography: And that was working with people? 

Droid-ON: It was a different kind of psychology. At first, it was in the training field. It's almost like human resources where you accommodate people to their new job. You try to see where the person fits better. You train them to use a new tool like a new computer operating system. It was for a brief time. Then I went to the Ministry of Justice where I was rating the television content of Brazil. Everything that was broadcast, it has to go through the rating system. You have to watch TV all day and you have to describe it, point by point, typing what happens on the computer. It was cool at first. I got to watch TV shows and Brazilian novellas and get paid for it. Sometimes we would rate games also. It was a cool job for adolescent people. That's why they pay so little. It was worse than the rehearsal studio. It was cool for a year or so but I want to work with clinical psychology. I worked in a friend's clinic. She used to work in a poorer section of Brasília so it was hard to pay for the maintenance of it. It was kind of harsh. I was only there for a few months. There is this fight between doctors from orthodox medicine and psychology. Which is easier? To have a doctor to give you some medication or going to a psychologist to stay there for months and talk about yourself? It's a deeper work with the person. While this was happening, the bands were still going on. I was playing with Nancy a lot. Again, I came to a crossroads and again I had to choose. Am I going to keep searching for an actual psychology job or should I pursue the musical path and stay focused on the band and try to make it happen. I said I'm going to leave the psychology there. I already have the certificate. It was cool for some time because we got to play a lot. After playing a few gigs in São Paulo the international tour happened. We were invited to play at SXSW and we decided to go through the east coast of the US. We played in Washington DC, New York, and Pennsylvania. 

Chiptography: So at this point, you're a professional musician. This is your main source of income. 

Droid-ON: The salary wouldn't pay for everybody in the band. There were 6 members. We would play for promotion so we can put ourselves out there but we had a lot of fun more than anything else. We lost a lot of money there. We were a small band going to another country. People didn’t know us. All the traveling expenses added up like... we bought a drum set there. 

Chiptography: Oh wow! 

Droid-ON: It was so much fun because we learned how to play for nobody like when we went to Pennsylvania. There was nobody at all. The venue owner would give us free beer. That kind of small stuff was nice. So we drove all the way to Washington D.C. and then took a plane to Austin, TX. It was amazing to watch the acts and to play there with Bad Brains. They had these big, famous bands and also very small bands. It was an honor. The US is such a nice place for music. At the time I was already listening to some VGM stuff at home and when I went to SXSW festival I managed to see an act from a guy called Adventure. He's very old school, like 2008/2009. He is from Baltimore I think and he got to play at the festival. I thought, "Oh my god, this is so amazing." He played video game music with a computer and a keyboard.

Chiptography: Was this your first experience with chiptune?

Droid-ON: Watching a live act, yes. In 2008 I was in on 8-bit Collective. It was so cool 'cause people would listen to it and say, "Oh, that's cool." or "Oh, that's shit."

Chiptography: Did you start your project of Droid-ON at this point?

Droid-ON: Kind of. At the end of 2008 when I was listening to some video game music, I started searching for people who would play video game music by any means. First I found The Advantage which has members from Hella, an instrumental band. Then I start searching for ways to make music with the video game sound. I got the cheapest and lightest sequencer to work on my computer. When I started using it I did some stuff and I thought, "That's cool. I think I'm going to post it." I was already doing just music in my life. I put aside psychology. It was a way to do something alone at all times, anytime I want. 

Chiptography: You didn't rely on five other bandmates to come together. You could pick it up and drop it off and do it whenever the creative spark came. 

Droid-ON: Exactly. I could dedicate myself fully anytime at home. I could increase the amount of material I have. I can post it online. At the time, we had Myspace. The internet was very receptive to that kind of thing. The 8bitcollective is where I met many artists like Ralp from Spain. I think he was the one that I listened to and I thought to myself, "This is something I want to make." They weren't the usual kind of songs with a beginning, start and end. It was all messed up, sounds everywhere and new kinds of layers. When I searched Google for video game music, Nullsleep was the first that appeared with tutorials for trackers. And then it was my first experience with FamiTracker. It was the first video game music sequencer that I got into. It was free and very small, like 1 megabyte of size. You don't need any installation so it was very welcoming for me. I didn't have a very good computer at home. It was a computer made of spare parts that my brother helped me to build. It was very limited. Chiptune was the perfect way to get into electronic music. I thought to myself, I can download this free software and I can make music. Putting myself out there online brought me some good things like I met some good friends. The first guy I saw was Pulselooper. He sent me a mail, saying "Oh, you also make chipmusic." He told me that he loved my songs and he wanted to do something together. 

Chiptography: As in a performance? 

Droid-ON: We had no idea. Anything. 

Chiptography: Was he close to you in Brazil? 

Droid-ON: He lived in São Paulo which by plane it's one hour and a half. It's kind of far away. I said, ok, let's keep in touch and see if anything comes up. And then he suggested that I release my songs. They were all splattered around in 8bitcollective. He suggested that I release them with the Mexican label. It was called 56KBPS Records from Chema Padilla. Pulselooper told me he already had released his first gameboy album there and then I was, "Oh my god, really?" He hooked us up. Chema is a very nice guy. He offered to make my first album cover. I suggested to make an album cover like some works from M.C. Escher.

Chiptography: M.C. Escher has a strong tie to psychology, twisting reality and perception. 

Droid-ON: He works with different forms that are there but also not there making it some kind of surrealism. It bends your mind sometimes. Chema made this drawing of pixelated artwork from M.C. Escher, the one with the birds came together. Introspective Bitdance was my first release. I was so happy.

From Introspective Dance EP (2009) 56kbps

Chiptography: At this point, are you still playing with Nancy? 

Droid-ON: Just for a little while. Right after the International tour with Nancy I came back and I wanted to do more. Pulselooper contacted me and everything started to happen a little bit fast 'cause we managed to play together in São Paulo in a chip music festival. It was promoted by a bank there, Itau Bank. It was Pulselooper, Subway Sonicbeat, and our VJ Escaphandro. We got together for a nice fancy festival with a backstage. We could ask for anything we wanted. I did not hold back. "So can I have a drum on stage." and they said "Yeah, no problem. What else?" "Do you have coffee in the backstage?" Again, "No problem. What else?" It was our first gig. Imagine how spoiled we are today. We got encouraged from it. When we got together, we started to talk about making a collective netlabel for us in Brazil. That's when Chippanze was born, playing with the words chimpanzee. It was the name that we thought, oh chiptune, chimpanzee, Brazil, monkeys...  Chippanze- perfect!

Chiptography: What's involved with running a music label?  

Droid-ON: The best thing is to discover new music. We try to release Brazilian acts and chiptune projects but there aren't so many. It was just us for a long while and the best thing to do was to put ourselves out there in the internet and we would get in contact with other artists like Ralp for example. I sent him an email and I said, "Man I love you. You're a genius. Do you want to release something with us?" It was like like that, my first experience managing the label. We set up for him to be very free with what he wants to do so he could feel comfortable and give us anything he wanted. If you want to make the album the cover, you can make it. If you want us to make it, we can make it. We don't have anything more to offer besides promotion and posting online. But it was good. Most of chiptune labels are like that I think.

Chiptography: Which album did he release under your label?

Droid-ON: He released Turboümbra in 2009. It was a very good starting point. We were more complex music, techno, IDM, strange music. Not the conventional chiptune stuff which is all good. I like it but we wanted to do something a bit different. 

Chiptography: More experimental? 

Droid-ON: We tried to make something of our own with our own identity. At the time, I was doing some part time jobs with music also. I would set up the stage for people to play. 

Chiptography: It's very interesting that you were in the music profession of setting up gigs and rehearsal space and you thought that it wouldn't be a viable income so you went and got a degree in psychology and then ended up coming back to music and it started working.

Droid-ON: That was kind of almost like a yoyo. It goes back and forth all the time. At the same time, my friend from psychology, from the university, invited me to go with him to São Paulo to study at a master's degree for Jungian psychology. It was my main field in psychology. He invited me to São Paulo to be his roommate. I thought about it and my friends from the label were also living there. I thought to myself, ok that could be good. I will study and come back to psychology. With a master degree it's easier to get a stable job.

Chiptography: It feels like the universe was bringing you to São Paulo for school but also for your music passion. 

Droid-ON: The two forces of life from psychology and music would be crashing together. I didn't know how the music part was going to play out. Then I got there and there was every kind of people calling us to play. It was the opposite from what I was thinking about doing the master degree. I went to this event called Campus Party where it's a get together of geeks and nerds and people who love technology. It's huge in Brazil. People would camp there. It was like the Woodstock of technology. I managed to do a chip music workshop there.

Chiptography: That's one way of getting more people exposed to it and you never know who's going to be that kid who's like, "Whoa this is blowing my mind" and they're the next chipstar. 

Droid-ON: That was the main thing. You can do this on a shitty computer at your home. I got lucky that some event coordinators from other events were there. It happens that the non-profit called SESC was there. They were hunting people to fill their schedule for what will happen in the year. I got lucky and they called me to make more workshops. After this point, people started calling from everywhere. There was a full schedule to play music and do workshops with a nice income. That was the point when I realized I came to do the master's degree and I'm getting money from music. 

Chiptography: Were you doing your masters at the same time of all this touring and workshops? 

Droid-ON: Yes, for a while. It didn't take too long for me to get out of the masters. I couldn't manage both. It was too much study material and too much travel. Again, I had to choose but it was a harsh choice because the master's degree was important. It was a long term thing but I couldn't lose the momentum that was happening.

Chiptography: I really respect the fact that you were able to to brave about the fact that you were going to dedicate yourself to your music because that's an incredibly scary proposition.. A master's in psychology is stable, safe, and prestigious. You were able to see that this is really coming together.

Poster design by Rafael Nascimento / escaphandro.net / chippanze.net

Droid-ON: That's kind of like it. It made it easier to stop studying 'cause I was doing this master's degree in chip music. Being a teacher and learning more about the systems, doing workshops with LSDJ for gameboy and for famitracker was exciting 'cause you can see the results of people, young people to old people, people with disabilities, girls, boys. For the next two years or I was basically working with the company that provide the workshops. Besides that, we made a Brazilian chip music festival called Nullbits. It was a brief existence, just two editions. It was amazing 'cause the first one we did we got to play with Minusbaby from New York City. He was going on a trip to Brazil to meet with some friends and we got in contact with him and asked him to play with us. There weren't many people to invite so it was the three of us, the VJ and we ended up inviting some people from the workshops. MTV from Brazil went there.

Chiptography: Wow! 

Matéria do Scrap MTV sobre a Nullbits, festa de chipmusic organizada pelos selos Chippanze e Orbe, com participação de Okiru e Minusbaby.

Droid-ON: I was a very nice run in São Paulo. I lived there for about four years. The sponsors were the main provider of my income and they told me that I couldn't play with them for a while 'cause we were starting to have an employee relationship. I could not monopolize what they were giving. I was trying to do workshops in other places, play with other kinds of people, other genres. It was a hard task. I saw that my money was running low so I came back to my parent's house in Brasília. I kept the contacts that I made, the relationships, the influences. I would go back to São Paulo to give more workshops but the frequency decreased and I was trying to make something in my hometown. I can save some money with the fewer workshops that I have and I can try to do what I was doing in São Paulo in Brasilia.

Chiptography: It must have been kind of scary.

Droid-ON: Oh yes, it was. Moving out is always hard and sometimes scary 'cause you don't know what can happen. It's going to change everything again but I was in a safe place 'cause there was my parents and my friends. 

Chiptography: That's really nice that you came back to a very supportive community. 

Droid-ON: Yes, that helped a lot 'cause they wanted to help. I worked again in the music field setting up stages, helping carry amplifiers, that kind of stuff too. I got into the craft beer business too. It was a business of a friend of mine. We would make this automated kegerators where they have a refrigerator with two kinds of beer. You use an RFID card so you can put money on it. You would tap into the sensor and your credit will appear. When you start pouring your beer it would count like a gas pump. So you would pay exactly what you consumed. 

Chiptography: That's really cool because sometimes I don't want a full beer. Sometimes I want half or a quarter or sometimes I just want a taste. Where would you install these? In restaurants or bars? 

Droid-ON: Mostly bars, sometimes at craft beer stores. We would put it outside and we would exchange the beers so there was always a new beer. 

Chiptography: Are you allowed to walk around with beer outside? 

Droid-ON: In Brazil, yes. It's like Japan, you can drink whatever you want. I tried to do the hard work of building the refrigerator, installing the systems and doing maintenance at the bars. We called the system, BrewMe. It's kind of hard to manage craft beer 'cause it's not stable as like regular beer from a can or a bottle. When you take beer that is made from different providers they can get a little messy during transport. It can get lots of foam on it. Our system didn't charge for the foam. It would only charge for the liquid. The maintenance rate was too high. Sometimes the refrigerator would forget to kick the lights on so the refrigerator would stay all night turned down. So when you turn it on again, the beer is bad. We lost lots of beer in the process. 

Chiptography: It's a really cool concept. I think the logistics sounded difficult. How long did you guys work with BrewMe? 

Droid-ON: It lasted about almost two years. It was a good run. At the time I was already planning to come to Japan. 

Chiptography: Tell me about that. I know that involves some backstory with you meeting your wife and falling in love so start from the beginning. 

Droid-ON: I met Mika, my wife, in São Paulo when I moved there in 2010.  She was born in Brazil but she was living in Japan with her sisters. She had a snowboarding accident and had to come back to her family in Brazil to have surgery. She was friends with my third-degree cousin and I met her at his house. We got together after I insisted a lot and we started dating. It was so important in this part of my life where I was getting to know a new city, new friends and it's nice to have someone by your side. 

Chiptography: You had to do a bit a courting. 

Droid-ON: Yes, it was a good training for me. 

Dred and Mika.

Chiptography: Is there a big Japanese population in Brazil? 

Droid-ON: Yes! The biggest Japanese migration is in Brazil. In the past there was a famous ship that was full of Japanese people. The second country with the biggest Japanese descent is your country.  The United States. So we are first in that. Sorry. 

Chiptography: No! Hey! That is absolutely fascinating.

Droid-ON: We traveled together for the gigs. She helped me a lot. There was a time when the workshops and the gigs were running low. I was starting to have a bad time and we separated when I was planning to go back to Brasília and she went back to Japan. We eventually got together again in 2015. She was visiting her parents and her friends in São Paulo and I was going there for workshops and gigs. She called me and said she had some gifts. I was like, "Ou, Japanese candies and snacks!" I think it's a beautiful story. I have no shame telling that. I had my bad time figuring out what to do and in the meantime, she was living in Japan and I was in Brasília. When we went back to our homes we started dating online. That was the way that we kept contact. 

Chiptography: That speaks so strongly about the connection that you two have. When things are changing in your life, of course, it's difficult to maintain those relationships and sometimes you have to lose something to understand the true value. I think you're very lucky that you got a second chance. 

Droid-ON: Me too. It was supposed to happen in a way I think. I was lucky. She always helped me with everything that I wanted to do with music. She loves to dance also. I think she's a person that understands me a lot. 

Chiptography: That's hard to find. 

Droid-ON: I realized that. So we got married on her next visit. 

Chiptography: Wow! That was it. You knew. 

Droid-ON: After our hiatus, I realized that she is the girl. Things in Brazil were not that stable for me to stay there. There was the beer business that was going sideways and there were some gigs here and there but not much. We decided to live here, in Japan. 

Chiptography: You came to Japan about a year ago, yes? That was very soon before Squaresounds. 

Droid-ON: I got the Square Sounds invitation right after I arrived here. 

Chiptography: That seems to me a very good sign that you made the right move. You're being recognized on an international stage. 

Droid-ON performing at Square Sounds Tokyo 2018 with visuals by lazerbeat.

Droid-ON: That's how I felt. It's the new Blip Festival in terms of world presentation. People see it as the place where you can find all the established artists as well as new artists and it was such an honor that James (Cheapshot) called me. I always see myself as not a chiptune artist. I’m more of a chip music artists in that I use my gear which is always portable video games to make my electronic music which can be techno, electro, noise... 

Chiptography: I feel that chip music has such a big umbrella that it does support all sorts of different sounds and methods of making them. It is not a genre. It's like saying guitar music is a genre. Guitar music could be classical, heavy metal, rock, or jazz. There are so many different sounds that an instrument can make so from my point of view, chip music is just the way of producing sound, using computer chips, technology and video game consoles or a type of sound inspired from video games.

Droid-ON: Yes, that's how I feel and how my friends at Chippanze label feels. That's why we keep calling it chip music. 

Chiptography: Not chiptune. 

Droid-ON: When you say chiptune I think in my view that people will put you in a box that you have to play hard, bang your head and dance a lot on stage, which is totally ok but sometimes it can be a rule for younger musicians.. I think they don't need to feel that they have to do this when playing with a Gameboy which is more appealing to do when you're playing a live gig. If you bang your head and make jumps, people will dance with you which is nice but sometimes you want to play some melancholic music, some noisy stuff, brainy stuff, foggy sounds and people have to understand that they can be different. Mostly for newcomers, it makes a difference. It's great nowadays that there is a range of artists. Chippanze tries to distance ourselves from the happy-chip stuff a bit and show a darker side of the diversity. Some introspective music can happen with Gameboys. I want everyone to feel comfortable even though at Chippanze we have releases that are happy-chip music, my first release and some albums that I made on FamiTracker, they have more of a 8-bit video game vibe. Some music is even happy. 

Chiptography: Now that you've been in Japan for about a year, are you still working on music full time? 

Droid-ON: Right now, I'm mostly studying the Japanese language 'cause it can help to get a better job. You have more broad options to work like using English and Japanese for example. I've been doing some part-time jobs, trying some stuff that I completely failed.

Chiptography: What types of industries? 

Droid-ON: I tried factory stuff. I'm not as strong as I thought. I would like to do it but it's very labor-intensive. I tried to load some stuff in construction where you do the light part but it's also, my God, it's very hard. I'm playing some gigs, fortunately. I met some Japanese people that play here in underground parties of electronic music, not chiptune which is kind of cool. 

Droid-ON’s desk in his home.

Chiptography: It sounds like it's a similar time in your life when you had to recreate yourself and you're right in the middle of it. It seems a little unnerving in that you're trying to figure it out all over again but, when I think about it, you've been here before. You did this when you moved to São Paulo. You did this when you moved back to Brasília and now you have a stronger foundation in that you have a steady relationship with Mika and you're established in the music scene so it's exciting to talk to you at this juncture.

Droid-ON: As you said, it's kind of a brutal change that I kind of got used to. 

Chiptography: I feel like you're not scared to jump into the deep end anymore. 

Droid-ON: After you do it the first time and then the second time, you kind of know how it feels and you can get a little more comfortable. Take your pace and learn new things. Here it's the most intense change 'cause obviously it’s another country. 

Chiptography: I’m excited to see what unfolds in your next chapter living here in Japan. 

Listen to Droid-ON’s music on Bandcamp and Soundcloud.

Follow Droid-ON on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Photos by Chiptography © 2020.

DIY_Destruction

Chiptography: When was your first experience with Chiptune? 

DIY_Destruction: I was in high school and I was really into Super Metroid so I was listening to these OG remixes and I really liked it. I never really knew they did shows or things like that. Then I went to college for two years and when I started working in computers someone at work was like “Oh can you do a memory virus where it like shifts memory in RAM and makes it all messed up?" and I was like "Oh, so like bit shifting?" and they were like "Yeah!" I googled that and I came across Bit Shifter. I listened to the music and I was like "Holy shit, ok, this is phenomenal."

Chiptography: Where were you living at the time?

DIY_Destruction: Hicksville, Long Island with my parents. The first show was the Tank on a boat. Nullsleep, Bit Shifter, and Anamanaguchi played. It was one of those party cruise things that goes around the Statue of Liberty.

Chiptography: And that was your first show?

DIY_Destruction: That was my first show and I fell on top of Josh going down the stairs. He was very nice about it. I met Tony Ness that night too. The boat starts to rock back and forth like crazy during Anamanaguchi's set.

Bit Shifter performing at DIY_Destruction’s first chip show, the Chiptune Cruise on September 14th, 2007.

Chiptography: I remember that!

DIY_Destruction: I grabbed onto him and he just grabbed onto me and he's like, "I don't know man, I might have to hold onto you but if you go overboard you can grab onto me. It was nice. I got to know his mom a lot. 

Chiptography: Oh yeah?

DIY_Destruction: Yeah, he was always using my phone to call her. After Pulsewave he would forget to call her sometimes that he's coming home so on the way home I would get a phone call and it would be her, and I'm like, "Oh yeah, Tony's on his way. Don't worry.” She’s like, "Anthony never takes this long!" And then he would come through the door and she's said, "Oh- here he is!" They would play World of Warcraft together. I don't know if you knew that. 

Chiptography: No!

DIY_Destruction: Yeah, so they would play World of Warcraft together in separate rooms on headsets. Yeah... When his mom passed away, that was rough for him. 

Chiptography: He was really upset…. heartbroken.

DIY_Destruction: Yeah. And then he was living with his aunt and uncle I think. He was a fighter though. And it was quick so. 

Chiptography: I miss Tony. We were lucky to know him. 

Wall detail with polaroid of DIY_Destruction with friends, Bit Shifter and Hedonism Bit.

DIY_Destruction: I started going to Pulsewave regularly after that. Then I met Chris Burke (Glomag) when he did a Portal cover with Kris Keyser. He tried to crowd surf but it was in the basement of The Tank so his feet hit the roof and then hit me in the head. That was how Chris and I met.

Chiptography: When was it that you started participating in the shows and started making visuals?

DIY_Destruction: Oh man, it was I think one of the first shows was Disassembler and it was at this place in Brooklyn. It was this dark bar and I don't remember the name of it. 

Chiptography: And you were creating visuals under the name Invaderbacca.

DIY_Destruction: Yeah, I was really into Invader Zim.

Chiptography: And that's where it came from?

DIY_Destruction: My name in high school was "Jewbacca" and I was like, there's no way I can use that as a name. And then in gaming I always had the call sign "Invaderbacca" and I was like, you know that's kind of fun. It's a little ominous. So I did that for a while. 

Chiptography: You went by that moniker for many years. I was actually looking at the photographs I've taken of you and I was wondering why my photos didn’t go back further. Then I remembered you were Invaderbacca. When did you change it and why?

DIY_Destruction’s circuit-bent NES.

DIY_Destruction: A lot of the ideas for Invaderbacca just came from grungy video clips, a lot of which I was taking from other people's work, like other people's video's clips, other's style, movies and things like that. It's a lot of fun and there's a place in the scene and in art for it but I could never really do the effects really that well and the machines you need to really run stuff like that professionally are so high powered. I wanted to change the type of workflow and I started to use the NES and circuit bending. A lot of it was becoming just all DIY. I couldn't afford an Edirol Mixer. I was like, "You know what? I think it has feedback effects, a multiplier, and you can fade between inputs. I can probably just code that. I can just do it myself." And I did. I did it in pure data with help from Paris and at that point, it was just so different from what I had been doing so I had to come up with some type of name. I was taking other ideas, other pieces of hardware, things that I want to buy and I just couldn't. I was just figuring out a way to code it. I just thought, "Do It Yourself Destruction." It's very basic but that's where it came from. 

Chiptography: I love it. I've always been such a fan of your work. I really enjoy the layers and the color and it just really excites my brain. 

DIY_Destruction: A lot of times with visuals, people focus on having audio cues and making sure everything is right to the tempo, beat by beat, and I've noticed if like, you keep things quick enough and have patterns in different sections of it, people will look at it and create their own pattern. They'll look at that red thing that comes up every 4th beat and they'll connect to that. The same way that they'll connect to a chorus line from a song or connect to a solo. 

Chiptography: At the moment, you live in Brooklyn. You used to live in Manhattan, in the East Village. Where were you before that?

DIY_Destruction: Queens and then before that, Ronkonkoma. An hour and a half into the city each way. 

Chiptography: Wow. 

DIY_Destruction: Yeah, I went through a lot of anime and movies. That was kind of like where some of the love interest for Invaderbacca died down from the relationship I was in and from there I moved back in with my parents and that, yeah, that threw me into a whole... 

Chiptography: That was a really dark time for you. 

DIY_Destruction: Yeah, I was unemployed for two years. Reversed my whole sleeping schedule. It was weird. I think I went through every single Star Trek, every season of the new Doctor Who, all the Stargate TV shows, every sci-fi thing I've ever wanted to watch. I digested crazy ideas and stories. I don't regret it though. It was a fucked up time.

Chiptography: Sometimes those hard times in your life, they're really painful but once you get through them you can learn a lot about yourself.

DIY_Destruction: Yeah. Something I've been learning recently is owning who you are which is has been something new. 

Chiptography: How so? 

DIY_Destruction: I've spent so much time in relationships with people and you start to build your own personality around that person and your habits and the life that you build with them. You start to forget who you are. I think I've done that with every single person I've ever been with which is why I think all of it has failed. 

Chiptography: I think a lot of people can relate to that. Finding that balance is extremely difficult. 

DIY_Destruction: Well the thing is you know, people love people and they never want to admit that there was something wrong with them. They want to see that it was themselves. So that's what that is.

Incense and whiskey.

Chiptography: I wanted to ask you about your experience being adopted. Were you a baby or older?

DIY_Destruction: Mine was right at birth. I think it was just a circumstance of either couldn't have the kid or didn't want to. There's no documentation or if there is I never really asked. That's where my relationship with adoption really stopped. I never was bothered by it. I thought it was amazing. I have the general ignorance to be able to say, my habit is developed because of me. It's not my father's habit. I don't do this because my mom does. I don't get angry in the mornings because my grandpa was like that. I don't know those things. Everything that is me is my own. That's incredibly freeing and awful to deal with. My grandma told my brother that he was originally from Florida because he was adopted as well. And I'm from a woman in New Jersey which is very weird for me. When my brother told me, he didn't really give me an option. I was helping him build this play treehouse for his kid and he's like, "Hey yeah, Nanny told me. You wanna know?"  I was like "eh, not really 'cause you know, it's like this whole freedom thing" and he's like, "Yeah you're from a hairdresser in Jersey!" I'm like, "God, you're such a piece of shit!" Like what the fuck? I am happy he told me but I still don't care. It's one of those things where the person didn't wrong me. 

Chiptography: No, they actually did something really good for you. 

DIY_Destruction: Yeah! I don't feel there's a thank you needed. They were in a position. They had a choice. They made the choice and they live and do their own thing. And me, a result of that choice, I'm doing my own thing. That's really my relationship with it. I think adoption is a great thing. I still feel that it's a woman's choice. The idea of anything child-related and another person being involved, if they aren't half of DNA of that child, they have no say in anything. My family's a little different about it. They like, "You were a gift from God. We adopted you because you were abandoned." I don't know man. It might have just been another family. 

Bedroom detail with my 2020 Chiptography Calendar on the wall showcasing a photo of gwEm performing with visuals by DIY_Destruction.

Chiptography: Where do you see the chiptune community in 30 years? 

DIY_Destruction: I think at that point, wouldn't chiptune music be made on Macbook Pro chips? 

Chiptography: Or something that hasn't even been invented yet. 

 DIY_Destruction: I think the chip music community will be really interesting at that point ‘cause in 30 years realistically a lot of this hardware might just really start to fall apart. 

Chiptography: Well, it's funny you say that because a lot of musicians are creating compositions on "instruments" that are 30 years old. 

 DIY_Destruction: Yeah, but we don't have electronics from 70 years ago that are functioning and being used so we really don't know where it's going to go. Ideally, I see people taking the schematics and not doing those crazy improved ones but I see somebody taking the original NES schematics and just building it true to form. I think that's what's going to happen. NESs are going to be really hard to find. Or like Gameboys, well I don't know if the Gameboy will ever be hard to find. I don't even make music and I have six so I really don't think those are going to be hard to find ever. But Commodores and shit like that, and retro computers- that's where I think a lot of the music is going to die. Like the old retro computers that Carl does, OxygenStar and whatnot. He's gotta hold onto that ‘cause that stuff is getting thrown out or recycled or burned. There's a facility in Texas that's 5 acres large and the lease expired or they couldn't pay it anymore and all these people from around the country started going there trying to pick stuff up. It was a 5 acre sized warehouse with tractor-trailers just parked all next to each other, like 30 of them, filled with computers. The guy just kept collecting them and then the state started dumping them there. That stuff is going to be gone forever. The same shit's happening with like chipmusic things, at least in America. In Europe and Japan, they're a little bit better at preserving these things but here.... But I think chip music itself will still be here. No one is going to stop playing the games.

Chiptography: I wonder what it will sound like then.

DIY_Destruction: I went into Turntable Lab to pick up some records. I bought the Drab Majesty album and the guy was like, "Oh, if you like Drab Majesty, you'll love Korine." And I was like, "Yeah if you like Korine, you should totally listen to Trey Frey cause it's completely different." That's where I think a lot of chip music is going. I love seeing chip musicians progress and grow into newer things. Like Wet Mango, has this whole project now, Tree Skeleton. It's this interpretive dance beautiful show that she does and it is so far away from the other things that she's done and I love that. When my friends start making new things that's when I get really impressed. We can all make the same things after a while but every time someone makes something new they get so excited about it. It’s great to be able to be excited with them and validate it ‘cause that's all we're looking for. We get it from chip music easily through a lot of the culture and the connections that people have with it but then when you create that connection with them and then do something different that they're not used to and then getting the support from those same people, it is unbelievable. I've done visuals for other shows that aren't chip. This pop group, Gillian, they're awesome. It is just this nice pop-rock stuff and I and when I started to do visuals for them it was through, Kris Keyser. 

Chiptography: Oh wow! That’s so cool!

DIY_Destruction: He was friends with them and they were looking for someone to do video and step it up a notch but not have cliche type things and he suggested me. Doing visuals for them has now opened me up to working with different studios like this audio recording studio, King Killer. They want to build a visualist area to be able to have a place for the visualist to set their shit up, run the right cabling, have all the right connections which is taking the stuff that I do for my job and putting it into my art and passion.

Chiptography: Tell me about your professional career. 

DIY_Destruction: I'm working for The Mill, a subsidiary of Technicolor. I'm a systems engineer and I go from doing basic break-fix work (I can't log in/ my password's not working) to setting up 40 machines in the span of two days so they can be ready on Monday. 

Chiptography: What does The Mill do? What type of company is it?

DIY_Destruction: Post-production, VFX work, a lot of 2D and 3D work, some comp work. No sound- really just all video work. 

Chiptography: You're not doing any of the video work, right? You're just doing the IT support type of roles. 

DIY_Destruction: Yeah. I love that stuff and I want to learn more of it but that's more so my passion and I'm good at supporting the technology and those things. I'm good at that. 

Chiptography: You don't want to transition over to the creative side at some point? 

DIY_Destruction: Not really. I don't want to work with clients. I don't want to come up with a great vision and have a client be like, "That's great but no." I don't really take criticism like that very well so I don't feel like I would have a very long life span in that career. 

Chiptography:  I understand that a lot. I think that's part of why I moved to freelance event photography. 

DIY_Destruction: The thing that's nice is I'm the primary engineer for Mill East. They handle all the immersive technology, the VR stations they set up for Comic Con and the premiere for Watchmen. They did an augmented reality thing with hallow lenses and I got to help them with that which was a lot of fun. It's fly by the seat of your pants. One day it's "hey, fix my password" and then it's "We need to create an entire external network for us and we need it now." 

Chiptography: It sounds really challenging and intense but in a way that excites you. I've known you for a long time so I've seen you go through a lot of different phases in your professional life. I want to ask you about your experience now that you're in a job that is very fulfilling on so many levels. It's steady, you're financially comfortable, you're living in NYC and it gives you the freedom and flexibility to travel and pursue your own artistic career. That's the dream but this isn't where you've been all the time. 

DIY_Destruction: This is new. I feel greedy. 

Chiptography: Why? 

DIY_Destruction: It feels like a lot because people are finally respecting what I have to say. That's why I feel greedy. I feel like I should be doing something as a thank you.  

Chiptography: Do you feel guilty that you have happiness? 

DIY_Destruction: There's always guilt. I have a lot of guilt from past relationships and past things. 

Chiptography: You have this job. However, you got to it whether it was through your hard work or.... 

DIY_Destruction: It was hard work. I do know it was hard work. I know I'm good at what I do. It's just hard to take a compliment sometimes. It comes very easy. I've just been doing it for so long and it comes very easy to me.

Chiptography: When you work in a career that you're passionate about and you're genuinely interested in it, it doesn't feel like work. 

DIY_Destruction: That's the thing. It does not feel like work. 

Chiptography: But you don't have to feel guilty about that. 

DIY_Destruction: Yeah, I just know a lot of people have a lot of tougher jobs and they go through so much more, especially in the chipmusic community. 

Chiptography: I totally agree with that. I think everyone has their own path and their own journey. When you have something that's a blessing in your life you shouldn't feel guilty about it because you want that for everyone else. 

DIY_Destruction: Yeah, that's the thing. 

Chiptography: You mentioned you went to college. Did you graduate? 

DIY_Destruction: It was a two-year degree. I got associates in computer technology. It's an applied science degree, that's all. It's the only thing I did for two years there. It's just all computers. My dad had a friend that owned a computer company and I met with him briefly and he offered me a job the day after I graduated. That worked out pretty well. 

Chiptography: What was that job? 

DIY_Destruction: Shipping and receiving. I was handling UPS packages. 

Chiptography: You've come so far from working in shipping and receiving to where you are now. 

DIY_Destruction: There's still a lot I want to do though. 

Chiptography: Of course there is, but between then and now, you had a winding road of being employed, being unemployed, living with girlfriends, moving back home, moving out on your own.

DIY_Destruction: Yeah. It wasn't easy. 

Chiptography: I understand why you feel guilty but you deserve to be proud of where you are at this point in your life. Do you think that for you being in a relationship means you have to give up your own identity or compromise on your own identity? 

DIY_Destruction: No. I wasn't in a healthy relationship. I think people get into relationships with the best of intentions. That's the golden line but it's true. We all say we're going to support that person with the life that they're living now and we'll live a life together. Sometimes it doesn't get lost but sometimes it does. And that's what happened. My passions fell to the wayside because I felt responsible for taking care of people. Fixing things. Constantly fixing. I was trying to fix things that weren't necessarily broken but they just didn't exist. You can't fix something that's not there in the first place. 

Chiptography: What does that mean? What didn't exist? 

DIY_Destruction: Mutual respect for each other's passions. Interest in each other's passions. The person I was with wasn't into the things that I was and vice versa. How can you say to your partner, I don't want you going because you're not going to be supportive without starting a fight? That's what it came down to. You start to stop yourself from saying things. You start censoring yourself and from that, your artwork and your passions start to dwindle because you're censoring more and more and more. Eventually, you're just a highlight sheet of personality traits of what you once were. 

Chiptography: I think even in the best relationships, especially in the beginning, it's tricky to find that balance where you don't give up your own autonomy and you don't compromise on your own passions and pursuits. You're excited by the person. You want to spend every minute with them. You want to do what makes them happy and then months go by, sometimes years go by and you realize, oh crap I haven't even seen my own friends. I haven't even gone to see a concert of a band that I like because they're not into it and I'd rather just do something that they want to do. When you get in a committed relationship your priorities shift. It's part of life but I'd like to think there is a way to still remain who you are. I think for an artist especially, it's important to try to remain who you are.  

DIY_Destruction: To make it actually work, I think the most important part of it is to shift priorities but both people have to shift priorities. It's a give and take. The majority of my previous relationship issues was a lot of giving from me. My last relationship should have been over a long time ago. I just put a vice grip on it and didn't want to let go. I wanted to make sure the dogs were ok. I wasn't really sure if she could take care of the rent and things like that without me. 

Chiptography: As much as it sucked, It was also a comfortable, well- familiar situation for you. You’ve been brought up in a culture of “fixing” things. It started with your family dynamic when you were young and living in suburban Long Island. It was reinforced by the expectations of your friends and girlfriends in your adolescence and even now, as an adult, you have cultivated a career around fixing things, finding solutions, and taking care of other people. It’s so ingrained in your psyche that you feel guilty at the thought of having someone take care of you. Your art is the only place in your world where you don’t have to take care of anyone or anything. Your visuals allow you to explore technology and create visuals in a way that doesn’t fix anything. It allows you to be emotional. I really connect with your visuals because I also grew up with a family life where I was the fixer and when I look at your work, especially the abstract work, it taps into an emotional place within me. Do you see yourself as an artist?

Desk detail.

DIY_Destruction: I think art is something that people find and create. It's either an idea or it's an impression or it's a concept that somebody can take and make real. If you can take something that no one has done before that will make someone look at things differently, to me that can be art. Everyone can be an artist. It doesn't particularly make sense but I think that calling myself an artist is stupid because there are people who have really spent time going to school to like pursue that as a profession. My passion is art. My profession is computers and things like that. I want to get paid to do that. I don't want to necessarily want to get rich off of art. I like doing it.

Chiptography: You're equating money to success. 

DIY_Destruction: Well a lot of people do. I think that there's a lot the stuff in art that I just avoid. I feel like if I start calling myself an artist I'm going to start doing different things and looking at people's different projects which isn't bad but there's a lot of shit out there. If I spend my own time just creating, I really don't have to look at that really bad shit cause it depresses me. Everyone's art deserves being seen but a lot of people call themselves artists. 

Chiptography: A lot of people call themselves photographers too. 

DIY_Destruction: Oh my God, yeah. Actually... 

Chiptography: I'm taking some online photography courses and I'm looking at the edits that they're doing I think they’re awful! I really don't like their post-processing choices but you have to take it with a grain of salt. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder to some extent. The art I like is when I get a message from the artist about the world we live in or if it's something that brings me joy or it's something that is moving. I'm not very good at expressing myself with words but I do spend a lot of time looking at other people's artwork. I love going to museums. I love taking my time with it and reading about it and reading other people's perspectives on it. 

DIY_Destruction: Yeah, that aspect... I think I've just had too much exposure to pretentious art. I think that's a lot of the issue nowadays. 

Chiptography: You have a real talent for taking technology and using it to creating abstract visual imagery. I love abstract work so I think that someone who is more into realism may not appreciate it but from my perspective, I really do enjoy it. 

DIY_Destruction performing at Pulsewave Open Mic, July 2013.

DIY_Destruction: Well that's the thing. My abstract work is, out of lack of for a better word, talent to create things that I want to. I like creating abstract things but I've had a ton of ideas. If I could just draw, it would have been awesome. I have a tablet in my closet. I tried doing it. I can't do it. I tried creating music. I have a Gameboy and a nanoloop cartridge. I started doing that and it literally turned into Invaderbacca with his video clips. I did one open mic and I was like, "NOPE!" I'm just envious of people who are able to take a blank sheet of paper and create something beautiful that way. I do not have that ability. 

Chiptography: But art isn't about that. I think it's about being able to change someone's perception of the world. To make something where someone else will come along and see it differently. 

DIY_Destruction: That's part of what I really try to get. Specifically, I like using the circuit-bent NES. I like to take something that someone's familiar with and give it this dismorphication that they may not be comfortable with and then blending that with other video elements. I don't like putting something on the screen that someone is familiar with. I don't want them to feel like they are in a familiar place. I want them to be somewhere different. You came out to a show to see something different. I'm going to put you somewhere different. I've been going through a lot of my files recently and trying to organize shit just ‘cause I keep thinking of it more and more. It's 10 years of just data. I'm looking at a lot of the video clips and I'll use them sometimes, glitch it, make it abstract, do my thing. But they're from 2009! And I'm like, "Mike! You can't use this shit anymore." So I'm picking up my Nintendo again and I'm like, shit, I need to start doing more analog stuff. Not necessarily all analog, but use the tools I have. I don't need a laptop. It goes back to the idea of like everyone is a photographer now but some people feel like they don't need a camera sometimes per se. But that also goes right back into chip music where you're working within your own restrictions. I think that is art. Working within restrictions whether it be analog, digital, emotional, environmental. 

Chiptography:  I think that's a very natural experience for an artist. You have to try new things and figure out what you like and perhaps more importantly, what you don’t like. I look back at the work that I've done even in my first book and I can't look at it without cringing. I hate all the pictures that I've taken in that era of my life but you grow, you change, you get better at your craft. Your artistry is that it's you. It's not only the limitations because you can take the same exact equipment and take another individual with the same exact knowledge and you'll get a different result. 

DIY_Destruction: Well yeah but that's people. You put a person in a corner and they're going to fight a different way. That's what it is. 

View DIY_Destruction’s projects and archive of live performances.

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Photos by Chiptography © 2019.

skybox

Chiptography: Tell me how chiptune found you.

skybox: I think it was 2004. I was living in a rural part of Missouri, outside of Kansas City.

Chiptography: Is that where you're from? 

skybox: My dad was in the air force so we moved around a bunch. My earliest memories were living in Shaw Air force Base, South Carolina. We moved to St. Charles, Missouri which is just a couple of hours north of St. Louis. Ultimately, we moved to this area called Warrensburg because Whiteman Air force base is there. If you didn't know, it's the airforce base where all the B2 bombers are. My dad was in the 509th which is the B2 Bomber division. It's really interesting 'cause whenever there are military movies, even in the Shin Godzilla movie, they had their squadron division setting up to drop bombs on Godzilla and stuff. I was like, "Oh, that's cool!" 'cause I know where these are flying out of. From about 2nd grade to graduating high school, I lived in Warrensburg which is about 45 minutes east of Kansas city in rural farmlands. I must have been a sophomore in early high school. 4chan was still very, very new and the internet was very wild west but there was a board on 4chan that was just for flash animations. One of my favorite things about 4chan at the time in that flashboard was there were always people making really cool looping animations. It's kind of like Nyan Cat, just that looping song. There's nothing going on. I don't remember the name of the flash but there were lots of bright colors and shapes shifting when I clicked on it. I spent days trying to figure out what the song was. I'd ask people and nobody could tell me. I ended up having to find a flash decompiler so I could pull the SWF file apart and actually get the source name of the audio inside and even then it was just the track name. The song was Pastel Colored Candy. So I kept digging and digging and eventually, I found out that it was made by this group called YMCK. I went on to buy their Family Music CD which had just come out in Japan. I had always really liked video game music. Even as a kid I always wondered, "How did they make it? How could I make it?" I wasn't making music at the time. I was playing with FL studio and playing with weird samples and stuff. I had just got into making music as a way to waste time. After more digging, I found out it was called chiptune. It's kind of where it started but I didn't get involved with any particular scene until I moved to Detroit which was much, much later. 

Chiptography: So you weren't making chip music. It just piqued your curiosity. 

skybox: Yes. Most of my original chipmusic was fakebit up until about 2012 when I got really deep into LSDJ.  I actually didn't have a lot of chiptune as an influence when I was making music. When I was younger I was big into DDR, dance music, trance, and house. The first album I was super, super into was Daft Punk Discovery. Then I got into IDM and breakcore so like Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Venetian Snares. My biggest influence at the time was The Flashbulb. He was a little different than the rest of the people in that genre. His music was very melodic driven, very progressive and evolving. It wasn't big percussion stuff or trying to be as aggressive and loud as possible. It was very fluid and it resonated with me. There was also Kettel, a Dutch guy, who does really strong, melodic, I guess you would call it acid music. I realized that I really liked that and I also wanted to make really melodic stuff which is why a lot of my music is very melody-driven as opposed to hypertechnical. 

Chiptography: After high school, did you go to college? 

skybox: No, after high school I had an opportunity to move to Seattle. Technically, Redmond, Washington. It's a suburb about 30 minutes away. Originally I told my parents that I wanted to go to school in Bellingham which is about two hours north of here. I wanted to go and I was like, I'm going to go to Seattle and save up. I have three other siblings. My mom was working as a manager at various food places and retail stuff. My dad was working in the military so we weren't the most well off and with all the kids... I never felt the gravity of not having money or my parents not having money but I definitely understood what it was later. Nobody in my family went to university. My mom didn't even graduate high school. She had a GED. Between the time that I had moved out, she decided to go back to school for radiology and now she's a radiologist.

Chiptography: Good for her!

skybox: So I moved to Redmond and I didn't really know what I was going to do but I wanted to try. I realized very quickly that going to school requires a lot of money. Money which I did not have. I was working two jobs, both full time. From 6 in the morning until 8, 9, 10 pm every day. I would get lucky sometimes and have both jobs off on the same day but it was very, very uncommon. So I was just working 7 days a week. Even then, I was not realistic. 

Chiptography: What were your jobs?

skybox: I worked in retail. I worked at the flagship store for Eddie Bauer.

Chiptography: I can't imagine you working at an Eddie Bauer. 

skybox: It's so weird! Eddie Bauer has really shifted over the last ten years. They went back to their roots of hiking and that kind of stuff but for a while, that market wasn't there especially during the recession. They were banking super hard on mid-30s women's clothing. So you would go to the store and it would be like Pacific Northwest Women's mid-30s basics. It was a lot of that. There was a small men's department just for denim and your very basic dress clothes. It was a good job. I also worked at a movie theater. That was the worst job ever. I quit within a month.

Chiptography: What didn't you like about it? 

skybox: I applaud anyone who works in the food industry, whether it's fast food or a high-end restaurant or anywhere in between. It's so stressful. The work and stress to compensation ratio is so unfair. With the movie theater, they made their money with concessions. It was super high stress and high pressure for any teenage kid but they're the only ones who are going to take those jobs. It sucked so be nice to the people at the concession stands at the movie theater 'cause it's really stressful. It seems like it's pretty straightforward, just making popcorn and stuff but all the equipment is really hot. There's a lot of oil around there so there's a high potential for burning. They have high standards for food freshness which is great but there's also that pressure of everyone trying to get to the theater. When they're done with that it's just clean up and break down and it's a constant cycle. 

Chiptography: I never thought about that actually. I was a waitress for a long time. I worked at several 24-hour diners so I understand the pressures to keep everything moving and not make mistakes.

skybox: I also worked at World Market. My bosses loved me there for some reason. I always had a lot of fun. It was a much lower stress job. At some point when I was working between Eddie Bauer and World Market, I would go to one, get off, walk to the next place (they were about a 20 minute walk away from each other), change my outfit and get to it. As you can imagine, that is just physically and mentally too demanding and financially still unfeasible. I realized I couldn't make the kind of money that was needed for a school as nice as Bellingham. The university there is super, super nice. I had no sense of scale or gravity of everything involved. My parents didn't go to college so they didn't really know all the intricacies. I didn't even consider school loans or anything like that. I had no established credit.

Chiptography: It sounds like you didn't have much guidance. 

skybox: Zero. None. I realized that I was just going to kill myself staying in Redmond and I ultimately moved back to Kansas where my parents were. At some point, I got really stressed out and depressed about the whole thing and I moved to Washington DC. I had a friend who lived in Reston which is just outside of DC. I was there for months just recentering myself. Before I moved there I was working an overnight job as an overnight grocery stocker and I had become a full-blown zombie. Doing an overnight job like that changes so much about your brain. It's really weird 'cause when you're working overnights, you don't get that social connection with your friends because you're always sleeping when they're awake. Even on your days off, you're just too tired to hang out. There's something about that shift and not seeing the sun that destroys your ability to function. You have to get way more sleep. 9 hours, 10 hours doesn't cut it. It took months for me to recover but during that time I would be up really late and I was working on music. That is when I started doing LSDJ stuff. I had a chance to not work. I didn't have to worry about money. I was just living in my friend's living room. I put out The One Electronic album, Long Time Ago. It was a very naive idea of what an album was. It's still kinda cool even though it's very unpolished because it's progressive and narrative and melodic and all the stuff that I liked about my influences. I would say that for a long time a lot of my music was very much like diary entries. They're all narrative. When I was living in Reston, I was still doing computer music but I was learning LSDJ and it was really hard. I had one of the old clear blue official LSDJ carts. They don't have the USB port on them like the modern EMS carts do. You had to have a computer with a parallel port or serial port to flash it with a big cumbersome device or you had to send it to somebody to flash it for you. Anyone who was using the software at that time was a madman. One of the biggest things that it lacked was this thing called note prelisten. So when you're writing the music, you can't hear it until you press play. Instead of inserting the note and hearing what the note is or making an instrument and hearing that instrument as you're placing it down, you'd have to stop your stuff, move back to the main section and let it play through. You couldn't play in specific spots so if you wrote a new phrase in one container, you couldn't just to hear it and press play, you'd have to start from the top so you're always starting over. The longer the song got, the more painful it became… Anyone who was doing it, y'all are crazy. 

Wall detail from skybox’s studio.

Chiptography: How long were you in Reston? 

skybox: Like 4-5 months. I didn't want to be too big of a burden. I went back to stay with my parents for another year or so and then I moved to Detroit. I had a lot of friends who lived in Windsor. Windsor is the Canadian city adjacent to Detroit. They're separated by the river. I wanted to be closer to them. I had about $400 and I just took off. I still had not been part of the chiptune scene yet. I was still making music on my own. In 2012, I was having a hard time with my relationship with my girlfriend. Our group of friends ended up being more of her group of friends so I was very isolated at the time. My friend Tomas who lives in Chicago said, "Hey, I know you're having a really bad time right now. There's a show going on and my friend Nigel is playing." Nigel, as you may know, is Saskrotch. Back in 2007 when I was living in Redmond, I was digging into finding chip music besides YMCK and I learned about Sabrepulse and Saskrotch and Trash80, just a lot of the good kids. I remember talking to Nigel on AIM. 

Chiptography: For those who don't know, AIM is American Online Instant Messenger and it was the first mainstream way of chatting online.

Skybox: I loved AIM! I miss AIM. It was so good. The away messages! I wish facebook messenger had away messages. Imagine if someone messaged you and you could have a song quote or something deep. But yeah, so my friend was like, "Saskrotch is playing this thing. You should go!" and I was like this sounds like an amazing opportunity to see some chiptune stuff live 'cause I was just starting to post on 8-bit Collective. That was my first time being at a real chip show. There were a lot of notable people in the crowd, one of them being Corey (SNESEI). There are pictures from the event literally standing next to each other, not knowing who we were at the time. We ended up moving in together at some point. After the show, or between acts I can't remember, I stepped outside to get some air. I was with my friend who was very drunk and he's one of those people who just kind of like shouts things. He's really friendly. I think I was talking to Bubblegum Octopus who just finished their set and I was like, "Oh that was so good and it's really cool that there's a chiptune thing going on! " My friend just shouts, "THIS GUY MAKES CHIPTUNE TOO! IT'S REALLY GOOD!" And I'm just like, oh my God I did not want to be that kind of person. Standing next to him was Rebekah (Watabou) and she was like "Oh, there's a chiptune collective going on in Detroit right now called Piko Piko Detroit. If you're doing chiptune stuff you should message them or send them some music and maybe they can hook you up with shows." And I was like, "Ok cool, yeah!" The next day I did that. I messaged Piko Piko Detroit and I told them that I was looking to play shows. The person who responded to me was Tony, he goes by Monotony. He listened to some of the demos and stuff and he was like, "Oh this is so cool! I'm going to set you up with shows." And that's where I got brought into Piko Piko Detroit. This was like early summer 2012. Another chiptune person I met through Piko Piko Detroit was Justin who at the time went by Barbecue. He now goes by Kite Splash and makes incredible footwork stuff. He messaged me and he was like, "Yo, you want to hang out and get some drinks and stuff?" And I was like, why not? I met him at a bar and we got really drunk and really high and we talked about chiptune and we wandered around a park. I told him I was just learning how to do LSDJ stuff and I was showing some of it. At some point, he snatched it and started working on stuff. He played it back to me and it was blowing my mind 'cause I had not learned to do any of the technical stuff in LSDJ. I was doing basic bleep bloop stuff and I realized there was so much more to it. I ended up hanging out in his basement and just passing out watching Akira. 

Chiptography: That's really amazing because I feel like you were trying to figure out life on your own. After high school, you really struggling to figure it out and it was the same thing when you started to make chiptune. You didn't have any guidance or a strong community. That moment is so meaningful because he was there to guide you and mentor you. It was a turning point.

skybox: Yeah! We would regularly go on "dates" where we would get drunk and we would go to this place that's still around called One-Eyed Betty's and it's a craft beer-gastropub type deal. We would always get this giant thing of mussels and eat way too many of them and get way too drunk. It was always fun. We would tell people we were going to hang out at “Mussel Beach.” It was nice to finally make some friends who were my friends, do you know what I mean?

Chiptography: Was this when you started performing live?

skybox: One of the first shows that I played was this thing Piko@Lab. It was this event that Piko Piko Detroit would do monthly at a frozen yogurt shop in Ann Arbor. They would set up a tiny PA and we would play 20-30 minute sets and afterward, we would just go get food! The first time I met Corey, he was playing one of the Piko@Lab shows. We had played the same show but Corey and I still hadn't really talked. At some point, we sat down to eat pizza and he was like, "Dude, your stuff is super cool." And I was really impressed because Corey's stuff has always been super melodic and catching and fun. We connected over pizza which is very chiptune. At some point, I decided to move out of my house. He had a spare room and I moved in with him. That was very influential to the way I write music now. I really learned the ropes of LSDJ but before I got to that point where I was fully doing Gameboy stuff, we had a show. It was a music festival that we decided to throw on the same day as Movement. It's a very big midwest EDM festival that lasts a whole weekend. For some reason, we thought it would be a great idea to do something the same day because everyone's already downtown and they'll see these fliers and come.... Nobody came to the show. 

Chiptography: Oh no! 

skybox: It was just the performers. I'm pretty sure Nigel played that one. Who else played it? AndaruGO played, HunterQuinn, Mail Order Monsters, I played, and I believe Corey played. There was Cincinnati, Chicago and Detroit people. That show was, for me, a complete and absolute nightmare. 

Chiptography: Why?

skybox: I was still doing computer music at the time. I had a laptop, a synth, and my Gameboy. For whatever reason, all of my hardware failed. The laptop completely was unresponsive and my synth wasn't working. 

Chiptography: So it was a chiptune show? 

skybox: Yeah, it was maximum chiptune. Everything failed except the Gameboy. After that show, I decided it's time to just use the Gameboys. I cannot rely on this computer anymore. It was years of struggling getting hardware to work right and my computers failing. At some point, I was bringing a full-fledged desktop and monitor to shows because my laptop wasn't reliable enough and even then my computer's power supply started failing. There were times when I would keep pushing the power button on my desktop until it would power on. I would get pushed back on the lineup until it would turn on. It would turn on, I would plug all my stuff in and play the set. What a mess. I decided computer music sucks. I'm just going to use Gameboys. My Gameboys have never failed me ever still to this day. None of my carts have ever failed. Sometimes they'll crash if I smack them against the table too hard but I've never had any catastrophic failure with the Gameboys. 

Chiptography: You just needed that little push from the universe. Tell me about your current artist name, skybox. Where does that come from?

skybox: It's a bit of a story. A couple of years ago (2016, maybe 2015), I went through a big period of different monikers that were confusing for people. Either they didn't know how to pronounce it or they didn't know how to spell it and it just became sloppy. It was really frustrating playing shows and people either mixing it up or mispronouncing things. I really wanted something very simple and modern. I guess it's technically somehow videogame-related because skybox is the 3D environment where video games sit in. When you look at the sky you're literally looking at a skybox that the environment's sitting in. It's subtle enough that it's not like, "VIDEOGAMES." I'm not like Mario Man. You get the idea.

Chiptography: What were some of the other names you experimented with?

skybox: The very first name that I went by for a long time, I'm talking 2006/2007 - 2013/2014 was called The One Electronic which sounds very, very pretentious. 

Chiptography: I think I photographed you under that name. Did you do a New York show?

skybox: I did! There was a Piko Piko Detroit takeover show for Pulsewave back in 2013. 

Mikey playing as The One Electronic during the Piko Piko Detroit Pulsewave takeover in 2013.

Chiptography:It was in that loft space, right? 

skybox: Yeah! It was this interesting cool, loft thing. It was the first time I was in New York and I was super nervous about it. There were a lot of really cool OG people there. Bit Shifter was there and I remember he was just like, "Which CDs of these are good?" I forget who was at the table. I think it was me, my ex-girlfriend, Rachel and I want to say it was Dr!p. We were like, "This one's good. That one's good. They're all good." He was like, "Ok- I'll take them all." That was really cool because it was before the show even started and we were all really nervous. It was really surreal that we were going to play and do this big Pulsewave thing. It actually took a lot of tension out of the show. But yeah, I went by The One Electronic. I was a big fan of this comic called Rice Boy written by Evan Dahm. One of the characters in it was this bruting, stoic, detective kind of guy. He was also a robot guy and his name was The One Electronic. He was going on this journey to find somebody who was going to be a catalyst for this big, world-changing event. He was a really cool and interesting character. I reached out to Evan Dahm and I was like, "Hey, your comic is really inspirational. I've been doing music and I've been doing chiptune stuff. It feels very organic and natural to use that. Are you ok with this?" I know it's not a trademarked name or anything but it would be weird if I played a show and he was like, "Why is this guy using this name of this character?" He was totally cool with it. 

Chiptography: Do you think he's a little disappointed now that you gave up that name?

skybox: He probably forgot about it as soon as I sent the email. He was like, "Yeah, ok, whatever dude." So yeah, I went by that for a long time. It always sounded a little pretentious and also people would say it wrong. They usually say, "The One Electric." They would either say it wrong or spell it wrong and it's also a mouthful so I was like, "Ok, maybe I won't do that." For a couple of years, I want to say in 2013/2014, there was a big anime aesthetic that popped up with vaporwave and stuff. In the chiptune scene, Slime Girls was really popping during that time. It was something that I always really liked too. I like a lot of anime stuff so I was like, maybe I'll combine something with that. I was also really into idol stuff for a while. I had thought of this concept of doing a chiptune idol duo. I would do backing music and then have somebody sing on top of it. I actually did it a little bit with my friend Amina. Amina went on to move to Tokyo and became one of the first and biggest Black Idol Stars in Japan. She does modeling and all sorts of stuff but when she was living in Detroit, she would sing covers of songs and I would write the covers on LSDJ and we would play them together. It was a lot of fun but we couldn't commit to a full project. The project was called Shoujo Kiss. I think most people recognize me as that initially but I never found a full-time vocalist. That's when I decided to switch over to something that was more straightforward. That's when I decided to go with skybox. Again, Shoujo Kiss, how do you spell it? There are actually two correct phonetic ways to spell it and people don't necessarily know how to pronounce Shoujo Kiss. When I play with The One Electronic people, they have a weird impression of what that's going to be. So I decided I wanted something very neutral so that I could expand my palate. I still get described as very happy and cutesy. It's good but I'm also looking to expand the skybox project and being able to do a wider range of styles and interests. It's one of the reasons I went with it. It doesn't limit me to just doing the cute stuff. 

skybox showing Kino’s dog, Macaroni LSDJ.

Chiptography: Tell me more about your experience in Detroit because you were living there before the gentrification, or maybe a little bit into it? 

skybox: Yeah, I would say that I probably lived there around the same time that it started to repopulate. Everyone was telling me at the time, "Oh Detroit, I feel it. It's getting better." It's definitely getting better for the people who moved there and had the money to make it better I guess. Gentrification is always kind of a double edge, right? It's nice that people with money can come in and increase the quality of living for everyone else there but at the cost of making things more expensive. It's weird 'cause this community and this neighborhood is really cool and really historic and important. I lived right next door to Hotel Yorba which, if you're not familiar with Hotel Yorba, got famous because there's a White Stripes song called "Hotel Yorba." I lived in that neighborhood and it's really interesting 'cause, West Grand Boulevard, the street I lived on, was all mansions. It was definitely a super nice, wealthy area pre-white flight. After everyone left, it kind of crumbled. I guess within the last ten years, people with money started moving back into that part of the city and they put their money in and raised all the values. All these places that used to be covered in bullet holes now have gastropub stuff. Within 3 or 4 years of me leaving, I came back and it was a different neighborhood. It was wild. I almost never saw any other white people. I'm half Mexican and I'm very white-passing so I get that world of either not being white enough or being too white. My dad is 100% Mexican and his parents didn't want him speaking Spanish. He never learned so I was never taught. I kind of learned some in high school and then I lost it all because I lived in rural Missouri where nobody spoke it so I was not able to keep it up. It was weird, you know 'cause people would talk to me in Spanish and I would have to struggle to remember how to talk back and eventually I would give up and speak English and they would have that very disappointed tone when they realized, "oh, your last name is Vallejo but you don't speak any Spanish." That was always a weird thing. 

Chiptography: Do you feel any connection to Mexico or Latin America? 

skybox: Culturally, I was not educated on it. 

Chiptography: Did you have any relationship with your grandparents?

skybox: I did. They lived in Kansas City but they Americanized themselves as well. It was that time when you had to be very American.

Chiptography: Do you have any relatives in Mexico? 

skybox: Not that I know of. My great grandfather or his father, was adopted so the family history is not there. I don't know anything further back than that. It's very mysterious. Living in Detroit was interesting because when I was there, I lived in Mexican town. I did feel like I was a little more culturally connected with the people on my Mexican side. A lot of them treated me just fine. It was mostly the older, older people who would speak to me and I wouldn't be able to understand. I definitely felt more connected with that side of my heritage.

Chiptography: Tell me about how you came to Seattle. 

skybox: I was living with Corey and we were playing a lot of shows now. It was late 2013, early 2014. We were traveling around a lot, going to Magfest, playing shows, getting booked. I was playing one or two shows a month every month for a while. In early 2014 I got laid off at my job. I was working at a warehouse and I was making really good money. I was really happy with where my situation was going but I couldn't find another job and I ran out of money. My parents offered for me to stay with them again. It was really depressing because I was leaving all my friends behind. I kind of coped with that by going to a lot of shows. That's when I was going to Orlando and I was brought out to LA to play Freq.Fest. I was going out to Chicago and Texas. I got flown out to Detroit a couple times. I went all over the place. It was the best years of me being booked for shows. I got invited to play a show in Seattle during Sakura-Con which is our big anime convention in the Spring. During that time my friend, Alex was living in Seattle and I was telling him how much I loved and missed Seattle. It had been about 10 years. Everything was really surreal 'cause there was all these landmarks and people and smells and all these things that I remember from my very youthful age of 17. That was such a  weird time 'cause I was totally shifted as a person over the ten years. That was before I was moving around and really unsure. I had just left high school and I was feeling good about myself. It was before I realized how hard things really are when you're on your own and you don't have that support. It was weird to revisit it and have the knowledge I have now. He told me, "Well, there's a spot opening up in my house. It's probably going to be the cheapest rent you're going to find in Seattle. You'll be with me and we can find you a job. Consider it." I was like, "ok, I'll think about it." I went home and I thought about it over a month or two. I flew out to Seattle one more time to visit friends, check out the house, make sure I really wanted to do it. There was a point where I dropped myself in the middle of downtown and just walked around Seattle, walked around the neighborhoods and I was just like yeah, I gotta come back. I went home, put in my two weeks, packed all my stuff in an even smaller car than the last time I moved and drove 2,000 miles from Kansas City to Seattle in a car with no air conditioning. It was right in the middle of the summer, the last week of July. I drove through Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho and Oregon. It was super fun. 

Chiptography: How did Pacific Noise Works come about? 

skybox: A lot of the experiences I learned from Piko Piko Detroit, I applied to Pacific Noise Works. 

Chiptography: For me, Pacific Noise Works is really different in that it's not 100% chiptune. 

skybox: Yes, so when I started this I really wanted to do more shows but I don't want to just keep playing chiptune shows. I feel like one of the limiting factors because we're so niche, we have this really nice tight-knit community but there's a point where, when I was going to shows I was always seeing the same faces, the same people. Either somebody was a performer or had performed before and nobody else was coming to these shows. How can you bring people if you're not inviting people in? It wasn't a gatekeeping thing. It was just the choices that we made and the people we picked to play shows were always the same people. So I wanted to do a chiptune thing that wasn't just chiptune. It ultimately became the three pillars of Pacific Noise Works. If you look at our logo, it says, "Chiptune, hardware and dance music." The idea was, we could bring people doing chiptune, hardware, Gameboy stuff with people who are using full-blown synthesizers and drum machines and people making really cool computer music. I really think it's resonated with a lot of people here. So it was originally me, Nikola Whallon, who was also part of Piko Piko Detroit, and Graz. We built the concept and we talked about what we wanted to see at the shows and what we didn't want to be there and a lot of ideas have been thrown around since then but I think what we're doing now is solid. We three started it and I brought Kino in. 

Pacific Noise Works Posters.

Chiptography: Where did you meet Kino? 

skybox: I met Kino online, just through dating stuff. Kino came to our first show and at some point, we realized that we needed an art direction for our fliers and Kino is an illustrator. Kino did a lot of our original fliers. They did the original flier from WAV.Fest last year which is phenomenal. I have it on my fridge. Kino became a vital pillar for our group. We ended up dividing the work so I do most of the curating for performers. I usually pick out who's going to play the shows, contact them, help book transportation and that sort of stuff. Graz does a lot of the online promotion stuff. Nikola talks with the venue and Kino handles the art side. One of the things that I've really pushed when we first started to do the Heat.WAV shows was I really wanted to have a variety of performers come in. In every scene, there are a lot of white dudes making music. There's just a lot of them. We didn't even know if people in Seattle were interested in chip stuff which had been dormant for almost 10 years. It was brought up to me very early on that we were playing too safe. By safe, I mean just booking shows for friends I guess. We had a big talk over the last year about who we wanted to book for these shows. I think it's really important that we have women, people of color, and queer folk all coming and playing and being seen and being heard. We're trying really hard to make sure that's a core element of Pacific Noise Works and the Heat.WAV shows. Even our illustrators that we're commissioning for fliers, we specifically reached out to local, queer and POC people who we see their art floating on the internet but they're not getting the local attention. It's amazing how much of it is present and somehow ignored. I feel like a lot of the visual art especially is sometimes forgotten about.  It's understandable when the event is supposed to be about the music. People come for the music but the visualist are so important. 

Chiptography: I 100% feel that. That's why when I'm taking pictures of a show, it's very important for me to try to get as many shots of the visuals in the photos. I get a little nit-picky about the fog because it impacts the visuals. 

skybox: I'm glad you brought that up. As soon as I told the guy from the venue to turn it off, he did. 

Chiptography: I mean, I get it. Fog is fun. It looks cool, but.... 

skybox: The shots look great by the way. I was actually just thinking how nice the visuals looked. They're so vibrant and you can see them illuminating from the back. Our very first show didn't have a visualists. Honestly, we got a lot of complaints about it. 

Chiptography: It's flat without the visualist. 

skybox: It really creates that dynamic that people expect or they get when they're at the show. It's the whole package. We want to make sure that everything matters. One of our sister shows is Vancouver Chipmusic Society’s Overflow show run by Bryan, bryface in Vancouver. His shows are so high production. They're fantastic. They do the works. They have really cool venue with amazing sound. The visuals are always showcased. They have a big booth for the indie game dev stuff. It's so impressive and it's a totally different vibe than our shows usually are. Ours is usually much more grimey and feels more DIY and, for me, it's more intentionally like that. We don't do video game showcase stuff. We talked about it. I don't think it's what our show represents. 

Chiptography: It's important to have your own identity as well. I appreciate both shows. I have fun at both shows and I like them for different reasons. They both bring a lot of value to the chiptune community. 

skybox: Absolutely, 100%. I've been lucky enough to do one of the curated open mics as well as played an actual set for Overflow. When I saw what he was doing, I knew that we had to raise our standards as well. He curates the fliers and the performers and stuff so I think being able to have that other group so close-by kind of keeps us both in check of what we're doing and how we can make our show better.

Chiptography:  Where do you see chiptune going in 20 years? 

skybox: I want it to be remembered by more than just the community that it's in. I feel like it's starting to get there now where it's being recognized as a thing. Bandcamp has a dedicated section for chiptune. When they do their ads and show all the different music styles, chiptune pops up. It's really cool to see it there. 20 years from now, there will be kids who are in their teens and they're listening to influential music to them and they can talk about, "Dude, there's this guy making amazing chiptune stuff. Sabrepulse, he's so cool! I wish I could have been around to see him play in his hayday!" We talk like that about jazz performers or the Beatles or that kind of stuff. I'm not expecting to have that level of fame or anything but for something that's so important for us to be remembered like that would be the most rewarding thing. As far as music, it could be dead and that's fine. I just hope that it's not forgotten. 

Chiptography: I really like that answer. Was there a life-changing element about chiptune that you walk away with or something that that turned your life a different direction? 

skybox performing at Square Sounds Tokyo 2019 on the same night as YMCK.

skybox: Honestly, it was finding Piko Piko Detroit, being invited in and doing Gameboy stuff. I have LSDJ tattooed on my arm. I got it the winter before last, December 2017. People were saying, "It's gotta be something really important, something that's so important to you that you'll never regret getting this tattoo." I actually thought it over for a long time and I thought, what was the one thing that really impacted my adulthood? What brought me to me now at 30 years old? It was making Gameboy music with my friends. LSDJ. If it wasn't for picking up the Gameboy and going to the shows and getting better, there are people who I know now that I would have never met. I would probably never gone to Japan. I went to Square Sounds twice now and this time I get a chance to play with YMCK, the group that got me into chiptune in the first place. Super crazy. We are playing the same night. It's very surreal. It opened up opportunities to meet people, start relationships both platonic and romantic. Every path that I made was possible because I was doing music with people doing chiptune.

Chiptography: It sounds like it's not just a cool hobby. This is your life. 

skybox: It's a direction. I wasn't doing anything before I started doing this. I had no idea where I was going with my life. I didn't know what I wanted to do. As far as career and stuff, it was just always so foggy but this has always been a clear path, winding with many weird forks, but it was never scary or uncertain. It was just following it and seeing where I end up and here I am. 

skybox after winning the live video game Colorful Numbers during YMCK’s Square Sound Tokyo set in 2019.

Listen to skybox’s music on Bandcamp and Soundcloud.

Follow skybox on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Photos by Chiptography © 2019.

Nikola Whallon

Chiptography: I'm sitting with Nikola Whallon. Am I pronouncing it right?

Nikola Whallon: I pronounce it "WAY-lin" and then "NIK-ko-la." I pronounce Nikola wrong. Apparently it's "ni-KO-la" yeah. 

Chiptography: That's what I thought... 

Nikola Whallon: Yeah, that's just how I say it. 

Chiptography:  So that's your actual legal birth name? 

Nikola Whallon: Yeah, like from Nikola Tesla ‘cause my mom is from Yugoslavia where at the time I don't know what it was, but Tesla was born over there. 

Chiptography: Oh! Interesting! A lot of people don't use their real name as their chiptune artist name. I wasn't sure if that was your actual legal name or if that was the name you preferred to be called. But it's your actual name?

Nikola Whallon: Yup! 

Chiptography: Why did you decide to keep it as your artist name? 

Nikola Whallon: Probably a combination of me being lazy and it's sometimes difficult to keep track of faces and names and artist names. I like to write all sorts of kinds of music and I didn't want to have to make a different project for each of them. I just wanted to be known as, "Hey, that guy writes music and sometimes it's really cool chiptune, sometimes it's totally different." 

Chiptography: What other types of music do you do? 

Nikola Whallon: I guess I started writing classical music and then I started writing rock music when I was in high school. I was in some rock bands. And then electronic music in college and then at the tail end of college is when I started chiptune specifically. 

Chiptography: Did you study music in school? 

Nikola Whallon: Sort of. I studied music a lot before college. When I went to University of Michigan, for fun I took a bunch of music classes but not enough to minor or major, just sort of to meet the people and learn some composition stuff. I have to say, all of the things, credit should go to my parents. They started me at violin at 5. Obviously I hated it for like five years and then by the time I hit middle school, I liked it. Right around that time, I started picking up other instruments because I realized that I really liked instruments. I took piano lessons, I continued violin lessons until I was 17. I picked up the guitar like everyone in high school does more or less. I just sort of went crazy. I started composing very simple tunes. 

Chiptography: Aside from chiptune, you're part of several musical groups. What are they and can you tell me a little bit about them?

Nikola Whallon: Ya! So I used to be in a couple bands before life got really busy (starting in 2012/2013?) - I've been able to keep doing my solo chiptune act during that time because you don't need to coordinate with other people, but I really love playing in groups so since I finished grad school I started playing with 2 klezmer groups, 3 orchestras (the Seattle Social Rock Orchestra, the Seattle New Baroque Orchestra, and the Seattle Video Game Orchestra and Choir), and a 10 piece rock band called Steel Beans. I play violin in all of these, except a little sax in Steel Beans and a little clarinet in one of the klezmer groups. It's a really full load, and I have to drop from some of the groups for some concert seasons, but having the opportunity to play all sorts of different styles in the different groups is really musically fulfilling.

Chiptography: Tell me about your family. Are they also musicians? 

Nikola Whallon: Ya! So my dad is a violinist, also just amateur. He does stuff for fun but he got me into it. My mom doesn't play music herself but she was a big reviewer of media back in Yugoslavia. She had listened to tons of music and has a lot of perspective from her background. My mom introduced me to my favorite band of all-time, Bosnia-based Bijelo Dugme, and their composer Goran Bregovic. She also introduced me to Balkan music in general, one of my all-time favorite genres. A lot of Yugo-nostalgic influences have made their way into my music as well - I do several Balkan numbers during live sets, and while sometimes those less familiar with the genre do catch on at concerts, if my mom and her friends are ever in the audience, they burst into dance to the 7/8 beat, it's really cool!

Chiptography: You shared the history of your family on both your mother's and father's side. Not only is it incredibly interesting, but it shaped you into the unique person you are today as far as your musical background and political passions.

Nikola Whallon: I try not to delve into politics too much on stage or at shows, but it'd be naive to think politics should be separated from art, and this is definitely an appropriate place to get into it. My mom is from Yugoslavia, and her parents were super OG life-long communists, and my dad became a university professor in the 60's, came from a long line of academics, and in many ways was your stereotypical hippie-socialist-academic type. This has definitely contributed to me being a vocal leftist for sure! And it gave me an appreciation for both boots-on-the-ground leftists and also armchair leftists.

 My grandmother on my mom's side fled into the woods after the Nazis burned down her home, and she joined the partisan movement as a secret messenger. After the war she volunteered her labor to build Yugoslavia's infrastructure, and my mom's dad joined the Yugoslav army - both working towards that whole brotherhood and unity ideal. My mom really enjoyed growing up in Yugoslavia, it was a lot different from the stereotypical view of authoritarian communist countries - Yugoslavia broke off all ties with Stalin in the 50's, even after Stalin tried to intimidate them bringing tanks to the border, but Tito wasn't having any of it. Yugoslavia also had a thriving art scene (music, movies, etc), and my mom worked in the media as an art critic, and also did stuff in theater-like directing.

 Chiptography: Wow, that is wild! What a different reality your grandmother and mother lived in. 

 Nikola Whallon: Learning about Yugoslavia really had a big impact on me politically - in the US we learn that "communism is bad, period" but there are bright exceptions out there. I remember it was either me or my brother who wrote a paper in middle school about Tito's Brotherhood and Unity in response to the prompt "write a report on why communism is bad". When explaining the benefits of Yugoslav society, the teacher's response in red ink was something like "oh, I didn't know that." I'm not saying I'm a communist, I firmly believe 21st-century problems need 21st-century solutions, but the blatant anti-communist propaganda in this country is pretty sickening, there are good ideas on the left. Anyways, Tito eventually died, and so did his Brotherhood and Unity - the Balkans fell apart in brutal genocide, and the rest is really complicated history.. I remember when NATO, backed by Clinton, bombed our friends and family in Serbia - my grandparents in a bomb shelter, some of my parents' friends narrowly escaping just because my dad called the day before to let them know we were gonna bomb them.

Chiptography: I can’t imagine the fear and anxiety your family had to endure during that time.

 Nikola Whallon: My dad has been an archaeologist for over 50 years and has traveled the world over decades, bringing back an appreciation for cultures and art and music and "old things" from everywhere he goes. I'm in the process of getting the saz he bought in Turkey in the 60s restored and recently have gotten really into ashiks (Turkish saz player/traditional singers), my dad used to go watch them play when he lived in Istanbul. His work travel is how he eventually met my mom, similarly, I met my wife during work travel to Japan.

Chiptography: History repeats itself!

Nikola Whallon: My other passion in life, science, comes from my dad. Both him and his dad were professors, and while I likely won't go down that route, I did manage to snag a PhD in Physics along the way. Doing that research is like super geeking out, and understanding the coding, electrical engineering, signal processing, etc that came from the research is actually really illuminating as a chiptuner and audio engineer as well. During one project in undergrad, I determined the waveforms of dozens of variable stars, and converted the data to WAV data, threw it into my sampler, and then I could play tunes from variable star waveforms with a midi-keyboard! Ultimate geeking out.

Chiptography: Did you grow up in Washington State? 

Nikola Whallon: No, I grew up in Michigan, in Ann Arbor. The first chiptune-y stuff that I did was with this group, Piko Piko Detroit. They were super awesome but one by one a lot of the members started to move other "more hip places" like me now in Seattle. I love Seattle so much. I want to stay here for the rest of my life. 

Chiptography: We're currently talking on your houseboat which is amazing! Tell me a little bit of how you found this houseboat and how you figured out that you wanted to be on a houseboat. 

Nikola Whallon: I was applying to grad schools and I got into a few. I started looking at the cities that the grad schools are in got it down to, "I like both of these schools, which place would I rather live in?" I was curious if it was financially feasible to buy anything which is very hard these days. The cheapest place I found was this houseboat. I looked at it and I saw the price tag and I was like, "This is the most amazing thing in the world. I have to live here." And so we figured that out and here I am now. 

Chiptography: Amazing. Were you with your wife at the time? 

Nikola Whallon: We were dating long distance. We were long-distance for five years 'cause she lived in Japan and I lived either in Michigan or later, here, Seattle. But we weren't like fiancee or married or anything. 

Chiptography: How did you meet?

Nikola Whallon: We met at a chiptune show in Tokyo at 2.5D. Hige Driver was playing. I got very drunk and we met and it was extremely cute. 

Chiptography: I love it! So then you started talking and became friends and decided to go long-distance? 

Nikola Whallon: Yup- kind of right away. We went on like three dates while I was in still in Japan during that trip 'cause you can't stay for too long. We decided to go long-distance right away and I came back three months later and went from there. 

Chiptography: You speak Japanese, correct?

Nikola Whallon: Yeah. 

Chiptography: Did you know Japanese before you met her or was it something you learned? 

Nikola Whallon: I knew before I met her but at various levels. I'm still getting better. By the time I met her I was competent enough that we could hit it off. 

Chiptography: Why did you decide to learn Japanese? 

Nikola Whallon: Let's see... I mean the honest answer is that I'm a massive weeaboo.

Chiptography:  What's a weeaboo? 

Nikola Whallon: A weeaboo is like a foreign otaku. Foreign from the perspective of Japan. Apparently it has a really weird history where it was autocorrecting the term "wapanese" on some website at some point and then it took on a life of it's own. It basically means someone who is not Japanese who is pretty obsessed with Japanese culture. 

I was in middle school. Anime and video games. It has to be anime and video games. The more you get into anime and video games…. first you see Toonami, and you get the video games from Toys “R” Us but you dig deeper and then all of a sudden you realize that this world of anime and video games is much bigger in Japan. Now it's not so much the case. Now our cultural exchange is much faster. But you know 10, 20 years ago there's always a time lag when we get to watch DragonBallZ and when they got to watch DragonBallZ and stuff like that. 

Chiptography: Wow. And now you have a Japanese wife and a baby. 

Nikola Whallon: Yup.

Chiptography: How old is your baby? 

Nikola Whallon: He is 7 months. 

Chiptography: Brand new! 

Nikola Whallon: Yup. 

Nikola and Rin.

Chiptography: Aww. And you have a Japanese cat! What's your cat's name again? 

Nikola Whallon: Rin. Short for Ringo. In Japanese it means, apple. He came here originally from Hyogo-ken and then to Tokyo and then his first stop was in Berkley, California where I was at the time. And then we went to Michigan and then we went to Seattle. So he's been all over the country and all over the world. He's really good in cars, not so much planes, but cars- he digs cars. He belongs to Yumi and she got him something like 7-9 years ago. So before we met and stuff. 

Chiptography: He's part of the family now.

Nikola Whallon: Yup.

Chiptography: What's your day job? 

Nikola Whallon: I'm a software engineer. I went to grad school for physics and that was great but there aren't a terribly large number of jobs in physics and some physics people from the University of Michigan that went on to make a start-up in San Francisco got a hold of me and said I could work remotely. That was an offer I couldn't refuse. So I do software engineering. 

Chiptography: What type of software do you work on? 

Nikola Whallon: A.I. We write models for natural language processing. Speech to text. I started a year ago, but because we have the baby now, it would be convenient to separate work and home more. A week ago, the company agreed to get me access to a co-working space which is right over there [pointing out the window]. You can kayak there. It takes about 20 minutes. It's on the water. 

Chiptography: You kayak to work? 

Nikola Whallon: That's right. I tie up to the floating office space but then I go inside to the building which is nicer. That's one of the reasons I love Seattle. We have two big lakes: Lake Union and Lake Washington. And then west of them, we have the whole Puget sound. You have mountains and you have a forest and you also have a gigantic city with everything that you would want from a city. 

Chiptography: It definitely sounds like the best of all types of worlds and environments. That's really interesting. That's really cool. I like it. I'm liking it more and more. 

Nikola Whallon: Maybe you should move here! 

Chiptography: As far as your creative process, do you have something already in your head that you're then just trying to pull together and in a more visceral way or do you take something and build on it and let it grow?

Nikola Whallon: I try a lot of different things. When I hear music in my head that I think sounds really cool and I try to write it, that is the hardest for me. I wish I could do it better because you often hear things in your head abstractly that are extremely cool but then putting it on paper or putting it on a sound chip is much more difficult. What ends up working much better for me, although I continue to try other techniques of being creative, but what ends up working really well for me is I'll grab and instrument and I'll just doodle daddle for an hour. I'll hit on some things that I really like and then I'll write them down and then maybe I'll build on them then. Maybe I'll just diddle daddle some more and a week later I'll go back and build on some of the riffs and whatnot that I wrote down. That's what works best for me these days. Because of that, I'm trying always to learn new instruments 'cause you have a completely different perspective the way that you do your diddle daddling. 

Chiptography: What types of instruments are you experimenting with? 

Nikola Whallon: I just this year, picked up the saxophone. It's extremely fun. Luckily I played the clarinet before and my mouth was somewhat used to making the noise. Flute for me is impossible. I can't make a noise. People are like, "Oh, I'll just blow on a bottle. You can make a noise." No. I cannot make a noise blowing on a bottle. My hard limitation there. I know, I've seen people do it.  I have started to make sound on brass instruments. I've played trombone a little bit but sax is going really well and I'm working it into my live stuff too. It won't be ready until maybe the end of the year because I need to work on stamina unless I just want to play one or two pieces. It's totally different than violin, totally different than guitar, totally different than keys. The production of the sound, the way that you do the fingering and whatnot. So the diddle daddles that I get out of it are different. When I write that stuff down it is different music. 

Chiptography: That's great. Tell me about being a dad. 

Nikola Whallon: It's really, really awesome. It was terrifying at first just because the baby is so fragile and you're afraid at every step but he's started eating like crazy and he grew very big. It's just so fun playing with him. He likes music! He's kind of picky though. He likes when I play violin and when I play guitar but if I play clarinet too loud, he's like, "No, I don't like that" and I'm like, "ok fine I guess I won't play that for you." His favorite is my tamburica right there, it's kind of like a mandoline but from central/south Europe. He loves it. He plays with it and he plucks it and stuff. I'm like, "You're already plucking it. That's so cool!"

Chiptography: Do you know if you like that as a kid? 

Nikola Whallon: I have no idea. I do know that when I started violin I hated it. That makes sense. Your parents are making you do work or whatever. 

Chiptography: It's also a really difficult instrument. 

Nikola Whallon: Yeah, it is extremely difficult and I don't like it when people who love violin will say it's the best instrument in the world. Well purely from an ergonomic point of view it's a terrible instrument. 

Chiptography: Yeah, I mean you have to hold both your arms up in the air for a long time.

Nikola Whallon: And your neck in this thing and there are techniques where you don't need to pinch it with your chin and stuff but then you have to focus on other techniques for shifting. The way that it's taught is totally different if you're doing modern classical where you pinch it so you can shift freely or older styles, either old classical music or like fiddle tradition. Then you don't shift as much and your neck is more free and that's nice but then you have sort of less things that you can do with it. Anyways, I love it as an instrument but it's very hard and it's not a perfect instrument. No instrument is perfect.

Chiptography: What is your favorite instrument? 

Nikola Whallon: [sigh] I mean, it's violin! It has to be! 

Chiptography: After all that?!

Nikola Whallon: Just ‘cause I'm most comfortable at it and I have the most experience with it. If I stand back for a minute keyboard is easily the most utilitarian instrument. It's unbelievably useful and great. I think saxophone is the coolest instrument. I read a book recently on trombone actually that claimed the two perfect instruments are the violin and the trombone and I immediately knew why they said that. They said that because you have a true sliding scale. You can play any note, any microtone. Guitars have frets. Keyboards have as many tones as they have keys. Saxes have keys. Clarinets have keys and holes and flutes have keys. Recorders have holes. So they're all discreet instruments. In other words, you can do techniques to bend around a basic tone but they're not nearly as versatile in tone in terms of microtones as violin or trombone. 

Nikola modifies and sells gameboys.

Chiptography: What about chip? Is that even more limited or is it less limited in the amount of tones? 

Nikola Whallon: Gameboys are great actually ‘cause they can generate all frequency. Not all frequencies literally but basically all frequencies you'd want to hear. 

Chiptography: But is it more on the level of trombone/ violin? 

Nikola Whallon: If you take the example of a keyboard where you can only literally play the frequencies that each key is assigned to, if you think of a very bad keyboard, you get basically a chip inside an Atari2600 which can play this set of frequencies and that's it. That doesn't even fill out a complete major scale or anything. It's extremely painful to work with which is why basically no one does. Or people who do are really cool because to be able to make something sound cool on an Atari2600 is a real feat. 

Chiptography: Let’s talk about tie-dye. When I think of you, I think of tie-dye and bright rainbow colors. What's the appeal of tie-dye?

Nikola Whallon: I used to wear tie-dye every single day exclusively and now I wear it more or less half of the time, on normal days but 100% of the time for performances. My dad at some point in his life (aka the 1960s) was a really hippie. I see pictures of him with long hair and headbands and a big beard and I'm like, "Oh my God, wow."

Chiptography: My dad too. He's from Germany but he was a total hippie. He hung out in the town center and played his sitar. 

Nikola Whallon: My dad had this instrument, a Saz. He got it in Turkey. It's pretty exclusively a Turkish instrument. He got that, he had this long beard, this long hair. He had a fez. I'm like, "You are so stereotypical."

Nikola Whallon performing at Pulsewave in NYC on March 20th, 2013. Photo by Chiptography.

Chiptography: Do you think your love for tie dye comes from the influence of your father? 

Nikola Whallon: Yeah, for sure. I mean it's a big mishmash. There's the hippy stuff. There's the classical stuff. There's the ethnic stuff from Eastern Europe. 

Chiptography: And of course, Japanese culture. 

Nikola Whallon: Yup, that's new to the table. That didn't come with my parents but now that is going to be passed on to my kid so he's going to have an even more mishmash of stuff than I did. 

Chiptography: Where do you see yourself in let's say, 25 years.

Nikola Whallon: In 25 years, the kid will be in college or whatever he'll be an adult. Well, probably Yumi and I will get a “house house,” hopefully in Seattle. Probably, we'll give our kid this houseboat. That would be cool. I'll have a bigger studio. I'll have more instruments, a real collection. And I'll have, I don't know, half a dozen albums that I'm really proud of. Probably I'll be working a similar software engineer job. 

Chiptography: What I'm hearing is you're really happy with the way it is right now and you just want it to grow. 

Nikola Whallon: Exactly. I'm in a really good place and I'm eternally thankful that that has happened and I know that's not the case for a lot of people, especially a lot of musicians. The hustle is real for sure. I'm pretty happy. 

Chiptography: Pacific Noise Works is a fairly new chiptune group. How long as it been going on?

Nikola Whallon: A year and a half. We started in January of 2018. 

Chiptography: Were you one of the founding members?

Nikola Whallon: Currently it's me, Mikey (Skybox), Graz and Kino. Kino does a lot of the art. Graz is super big on the promo. Mikey does a lot of the curation booking and I do all the relations with the venue and a lot of local promos. I hit up media outlets and try to do some interviews and some stuff. This group, like most effective groups, works really well as a team. You need a team effort to be able to put on really cool events like this. 

There's an interesting short story about how we started at Substation. Actually more or less how the whole thing started. January 2018 I was just like, I want to play somewhere. I send a message to Substation booking and I was like, "Hey can you get me a show on some Thursday this month." The dude's like, "Well this next Thursday or in two weeks, whatever it was, we don't have anyone booked if you want to book the whole night." I was like, "It's now or never." So we got the crew together. We're like, "This is it. We're going to do this night and then we're going to make Pacific Noise Works." And so we did. That was a really good chance that lead into something.  

Chiptography: Who played that show?

Nikola Whallon: It was me, Skybox, Graz and now I have to remember.....  PTYNX! From Olympia. 

Nikola shows me some CRTs he fiddles with to make visual art in his office.

Chiptography: That brings me to my next question. How did chiptune find you? Tell me about your first exposure to it and how you came about integrating the Gameboy into your musical life.

 Nikola Whallon: Chiptune for me is intrinsically tied to VGM (video game music) - I know and totally respect that this isn't the case for everyone, but it is for me. I loved the music in the video games I played growing up and at some time I discovered OC Remix - that's where the majority of my iTunes playlist would come from in middle school and high school. It wasn't long before I discovered the VGM cover band scene, and then Magfest. Then I discovered the live chiptune scene when I saw Zen Albatross perform at Magfest... 7? I think it was 7 (it was quite a ways back now) - I thought it was the coolest, hypest music. That, and more or less simultaneously discovering 8bc and Sabrepulse at the recommendation of a friend, inspired me to try to write some chiptune in 2011, that's when I made Massive Squarewave Party, my first CD/release, it was fakebit though. I had been writing music (mostly classical and rock, some VGM) up until that point, but chiptune gave me a chance to create a solo project I could perform live.

In 2012 I started messing around with LSDJ, right around the time I met Corey (SNESEI) and Yuuya with Piko Piko Detroit (I actually met them in my favorite cafe because I saw Corey "playing" an original Gameboy, and I just knew he had to be using LSDJ or something). I tried playing a few shows with them and very quickly decided to throw live instrumentals in, mostly because playing instruments to me is so fun but standing behind a table staring at a screen felt awkward and embarrassing, so instead of queueing up sequences or whatnot, I get euphoria from running, jumping, and wailing on some strings instead (I think those stage antics show out particularly at shows too).

One of the tunes I wrote on Gameboy in 2012 was 8-Bit Hypnotized - it was a remix of Metal Hypnotized by the Earthbound Papas, Nobuo Uematsu's band, made for one of their competitions. I had met Uematsu and his band at Magfest in 2012, and after nervously telling them how much I appreciated their music in Japanese while they were on their smoke break, I got a selfie with the band and they later recognized me as "the guy with the cool tie-dye t-shirt" when I was in line with hundreds (thousands?) of others for their CD signing. Their kindness and openness really inspired me too, and so I entered their remix competition and got an honorable mention.

The rest, you could say, is history. But I'm still evolving as an artist, I have yet to release a big production of Gameboy + live instrumentals (though I finally released a final final version of 8-Bit Hypnotized this past summer with guitar and violin), and I have some plans beyond my next release already, we'll see.

Listen to Nikola Whallon’s music on Bandcamp and Soundcloud.

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