In his first feature doc, Paul Owens looks into ChipTunes, a new underground electronic music genre consisting of music made on out-of-date video game hardware. Blip Festival: Reformat the Planet, screening on the 24 Beats Per Minute program, premieres on Saturday night at the Dobie. The trailer’s above, and Paul Owens answers our questions below.
Tell us about your movie. Who did you work with, why did you make it? Give us the reductive, 25-word or less, “It’s like [pop culture reference a] meets [pop culture reference b]!” pitch, then explain what the quick and dirty sell leaves out.
Blip Festival: Reformat the Planet delves into this music movement known as ChipTunes, which is based around using forgotten videogame hardware (nintendo, atari, gameboy) to create new, original music.
I made the movie with Asif Siddiky, who did the cinematography, and Paul Levering, who was the producer. In the beginning, we checked out a live chiptune show and we were all blown away. We’d never seen or heard anything like it, but because it was sort of anchored to this classic videogame sound, it instantly struck a chord with us. Slowly we accumulated live footage, interviews, important moments in the scene and two years later, we had a documentary. …Read more
The 15 year-old version of Karina is jumping up and down at the news that Brad Laner of Medicine is composing the score for Beautiful Noise. I swear I’ve written about this film before, but I can’t find a previous post on Spout about it, so here’s the rundown: directed by Eric Green, Noise is a documentary about shoegaze, the British flash-in-the-pan trend that, or a couple of years in the late 80s, sort of united stoney, droney bands like My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Lush and Jesus and Mary Chain, before a press backlash made uttering the very name of the trend anathema.
(If that syndrome sounds familiar, check out the Wikipedia sections on both the shoegaze movement and its backlash, which attribute the genre’s collapse to a single Melody Maker story which referred to the genre as “The Scene Which Celebrates Itself.” After that story, shoegazers “became perceived by critics as over-privileged, self-indulgent and middle-class.” Ho-hum.)
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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The 15 year-old version of Karina is jumping up and down at the news that Brad Laner of Medicine is composing the score for Beautiful Noise. I swear I’ve written about this film before, but I can’t find a previous post on Spout about it, so here’s the rundown: directed by Eric Green, Noise is a documentary about shoegaze, the British flash-in-the-pan trend that, or a couple of years in the late 80s, sort of united stoney, droney bands like My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Lush and Jesus and Mary Chain, before a press backlash made uttering the very name of the trend anathema.
