Signals and Noise: Anamanaguchi in New York City

The Museum of the Moving Image looked like one large pixel. The cubic structure occupies half of a city block in Queens, New York and illuminates like a lego brick stuffed with LED lights. I walked in and picked up my ticket, which came in the form of a lenticular wristband—it changed shape and color depending on how I looked at it. I turned to my left and saw an entire wall covered in a collage of YouTube video diaries—up close it looked like a collage of pixels, from a far it looked like a full image. The pixel seems an appropriate metaphor for the evening, and for 8-bit culture itself. The pixel is at once the part and the whole, the small component of a larger picture and something to be looked at independently. For 8-bit culture, there do not seem to be insiders or outsiders, merely many different people combining to make one aesthetic.

Anamanaguchi were one of many attractions at Signal to Noise, a night thrown by the museum once a month which features bands, DJs, art exhibits and interactive installations. While I waited for the band to start, I went upstairs and checked out the museum’s main room. Inside were arcade games and old console systems, available to play, but mostly as objects to-be-viewed-in-a-museum. The statement was not lost on me: games like Frogger and Asteroids should be seen as art. The whole night backed up that tone, treating videogames and associated 8-bit cultural items with a supreme level of respect and reverence.

Another large part of the evening was interaction. Whether it was a human-scale bubble popping game projected onto a wall upstairs the banter of bands in between songs, or the wall that displayed any tweet with the hashtag #SignalToNoise, the line between involvement and consumption was blurred. Most people in attendance took photos or posted tweets, creating their own media out of the evening. It was an evening to be enjoyed and re-lived, looked back on with a sense of fondness and nostalgia similar to the feelings of nostalgia evoked by the video game consoles upstairs.

Before Anamanaguchi officially started their set, they stood on stage joking, swapping riffs and laughs. Guitarist Peter Berkman plucked out the notes of the star-spangled banner to test his guitar tone. Quickly those notes transformed into the opening riff to “Dammit” by Blink-182 and drummer Luke Silas joined in. Within seconds, the entire crowd recognized the song and started dancing. Everything swirled in a moshpit and the then music stopped. A confetti popper went off a second too late. “Yo, that was fun man,” Berkman said, chuckling. The band then proceeded to finish setting up before announcing that they were “officially” ready to start the show.

Musically, Anamanaguchi take a tremendous amount of influence from pop punk and metal. The guitarists grew up trying to be “shredders,” and the songs come at a frantic pace. When not called “8-bit music,” the genre is referred to as chiptune, a call on the chips used to create the synth and drum sounds. Anamanaguchi transform white noise snares of an NES and the whining squarewaves of the GameBoy cartridge LSDJ into songs that move around simple single-line melodies and, though instrumental, follow a verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus structure. The pop punk comes through when these melodies shift on top of heavily distorted power chords reminiscent of blink-182 and Weezer. Consistent with pop punk and metal, the main bodily reaction to the music is moshing and slam-dancing. It’s done with a certain token of irony, but only a very small one. The rules to the mosh-pit are consistent with the rules at hardcore punk shows—pick someone up when they fall down, don’t let anyone get hurt.

The community centers around a shared sense of nostalgia for the videogames and music, both of which are reminders of the comforts of childhood. The members of Anamanaguchi are college-aged, and their aesthetic focuses around the pop culture of the 1990s. It’s music to play Pokémon to, and it’s re-appropriation of a timed-out mainstream culture that constitutes the aesthetic. It’s not videogame culture in the sense of Call of Duty: Black Ops or Battlefield. It’s decidedly lo-fi, an homage to reductive pixels and non-fluid graphics. It's a throwback.

The audience fully bought into the aesthetic that night. It was unclear whether the venue created a unique experience for the show, which was a very real possibility, but the cohesion of the evening made it feel like a true subculture. I felt implicitly welcomed. Because of its base in nostalgia, anybody who shares a sense of his or her childhood is encouraged to participate.

When Anamanaguchi had technical difficulties, they played a chiptune cover of the recent Britney Spears hit, “Till the World Ends” over the PA and the crowd went nuts. Everybody bought into it, jumping to the beat and hollering along. The layer of irony was already so thin that this moment dissolved it altogether. There was no shame or communally acknowledged sense of mockery. It was genuine fun. It was the same feeling everyone felt when the band launched into an impromptu Blink-182 cover during soundcheck, and the same feeling I got when I first stared at the outside wall of the Museum of the Moving Image.

Everyone was welcome as long as they checked their pretentions at the door. If this was going to be a night of fun, nobody could half-ass it. It felt unique to me, a culture that operated by putting everyone on an equal plane rather than setting out rules for insider status and subcultural capital. Signal to Noise and Anamanaguchi melded pixels with soundwaves, creating a unique existence for a night that called so much on the collective, shared, and remembered experiences of playing videogames as a kid.

I should note that I do peripherally associate myself with this scene. I’ve been to shows and art exhibits many times, and I know a couple of the performers. The account I provide of the openness of 8-bit culture may be so because I have the prerequisite knowledge needed to fit in. I remember playing Pokémon on my GameBoy as a kid and loving the music, and I remember being in awe when I heard Scott Pilgrim was going to be a major motion picture. I’m unclear as to how the scene would appear to someone who is outside the generational cutoff for this scene, but I would hope that it would appear as open and fun loving to anyone else as it does to me.

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