Fieldwork: Chiptune Interview

This is a partial transcript of my interview with Chris Novello, a friend and chiptune composer. Italics are me, normal type is him, notes of omitted sections are in brackets. Minor edits for readability have been made (e.g. removing "um"s and the like).

So I guess I’ll start off with a basic question, how did you get into chiptunes?

It pretty much has always been in my background, having had a childhood with 8 bit games. I started with an Atari 2600, and then Coleco, and Nintendo, Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, etc. I had a Gameboy, and a Commodore 64, basically a lot of things that made really raw waveform bleeps.

That was actually my next question, what’s your history with videogames and how do the two relate for you?

Although my interest in the texture nowadays doesn’t feel necessarily connected to videogames sometimes, it absolutely is. You know, there’s no question that these particular tones are reminiscent of something from childhood. I kind of feel like I was raised by a Nintendo or a Super Nintendo the way some people say they were raised by a television. It’s imprinted in me in subtle ways that I don’t think I can articulate or really claim agency over.

[Talked about how videogames influence his composition]

You said write other music - where does chiptunes fit into that and what kind of other music are you interested in writing?

Yeah, I mean there’s always this dream right? I guess ever since The Postal Service it’s kind of been like “Oh wow, you can take that sound and make it into something a little more pop accessible, and I guess its been happening for a long time, I feel like that band was the first to kind of like COMPARTIZE that sound in a popular fashion. And they’ve got credibility, too, and since then it’s become kind of a cliché. But it’s interesting, because even though it’s a total cliché, I still feel ownership of it.

[Talked about chiptune covers]

I don’t want to call chiptunes an aesthetic, there’s something… maybe it’s the infusion from childhood, or maybe it’s just these raw waveforms, you know, but if you take an arrangement by The Smiths, and play it through chiptunes, without Morrisey whining, you all of a sudden hear how happy that music is. And to hear The Smiths done in chiptune from really recontextualizes it so that you feel like you’re playing a platformer that’s got like, you know, neon hues and pink skies and all these cartoonish things.

[Compared with shoegaze, in terms of compositional motivation and posting on message boards]

Speaking of message boards, one of the kind of big resources in the chiptune community is 8bitcollective, what’s your experience with that site been?

That site is awesome. For many years, I’ve kind of looked online for either access to hardware, or ways to get that sound, for almost ten years now. And that site finally came around and just kind of became what I consider like an epicenter for the information, and also for the community of distributing the music . And people with all sorts of different perspectives on chiptunes post there, it’s a really good community in that way.

[Talked about resources on the site, fringe projects on 8bitcollective, current chiptune listening]

[Asked him about possible disadvantages of an online scene, he said there aren’t many and the advantages far outweigh them]

[Talked about hardware and software]

Nowadays there are some pretty good software emulations that I’ve heard, and it’s easy, it’s always so seductive to want to just go that route and cut out all this hardware, and go that way. But truthfully, it’s just never… there’s a little something missing that’s kind of important, whether or not you think it’s important.

[Talked about more emulation]

One of the things that they have is a SID emulator, a 6502 I think is the chip? Which doesn’t sound exactly like you would want it too, it’s kind of digital. But again, at a certain point, once you have raw waveforms, you’re in this domain. You could almost do it with like an analog modular synth.

[Talks about the different sound of different chips]

They’re all a little different, but the idea is just these raw waveforms and using them in a certain kind of minimal way. Although, you know, the creativity that those composers milked out of those chips is nuts. I mean you’ve got a chip that has like two or three oscillators and a noise channel, and sometimes a sample channel, and somehow they get these like… I mean, arpeggiation comes into play to make chords, and just the way they will jump between these channels, and the tricks they pull, are just… there’s a lot of finesse. There’s a real mastery of a platform, which is to me kind of what any good musician is doing with an instrument. And by that I mean an expressive system, so an acoustic guitar, a drum machine…

[Talked about authenticity, difficulty involved in creating chiptunes, and the value of structural limitations]