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.
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Photos by Chiptography © 2019.