Zach Robinson is a fan of 8-bit music. He also makes music under the moniker D/A/D
Tristan Rodman: How would you categorize your relationship, as a listener and a fan, to 8-bit culture as a whole?
ZR: I mean, so, okay. There's a couple ways to look at it. In terms of like, 8-bit music, I've been listening to it for a while. How do I put this... Listening to 8-bit music recreationally with bands like Bit Shifter and Anamanaguchi and those guys, for a while... but when you really wanna trace it back, I've been listening to 8-bit music since 1994, when I was playing, like, videogames, and GameBoy, and all that stuff. Our generation has an incredible connection to this music, and that's why everyone who's making it and listening to it is mostly is in, like, a ten year radius of the early nineties. 'Cause that's where those sounds are coming from. I'm a fan of it, I think 8-bit music and videogame music as a whole is an incredibly diverse and powerful genre and it's just as intricate as pop music or classical music--it's great melodies, great progressions, intense technical ability is required to create it, it's a good subgenre.
TR: What role do you feel the internet has played in the proliferation, the sharing, of this music?
ZR: It's played everything. I would say everything. If 8bitpeoples is responsible for a community, 8BitCommunity is responsible for a community, Nullsleep, BitShifter, Anamanaguchi, every big--Starscream is on there I think--every big 8-bit artist went through 8bitpeoples at some point... That's how I heard that stuff first, and I know thats how most people heard it, it's that--it's the internet--and the people that use the internet the most, and the people that I feel use it to its fullest and would go 8bitpeoples are the ones that would appreciate that music the most. They're nerdier, really tech savvy, love videogames, love nostalgia. It works really perfectly. Everything really works for 8-bit music in that sense, but at the same time, there's a glass ceiling, and Anamanaguchi scored Scott Pilgrim--you imagine, "Woah, that's huge, that's a huge deal, they scored a Scott Pilgrim videogame--and seven years ago Pete [guitarist for Anamanaguchi] was making Power Supply in his basement, and now this specific music, you wonder, "How big can it get?" and then you realize, wait, this is like, videogame music. People are gonna have a really hard time with this, this couldn't be on the radio. I feel bad in that sense, but I think they [Anamanaguchi] rise to the challenge.
TR: How does one go about turning a GameBoy or an SNES into a musical instrument?
ZR: Technically, it's hacking. You know, Pete [of Anamanaguchi] hacks the Super Nintendo, he hacks the sound card and burns it onto cartridges. There's a lot of old school sequencers--you know Nintendo thought of this, regardless of 8-bit music being kinda popular in the past seven or eight years, Nintendo has been way on top of this since the beginning. LSDJ on GameBoy was a sequencer, Mario Paint was a big sequencer when you were younger. These are music machines. And it goes back to these Japanese composers just writing music on four-track machines, they only have a sine, a triangle, a noise and a square wave. And they're writing on these soundchips, it goes back to that--they just had nothing, and they created some of the most iconic melodies in music. If it makes noise, if it makes rhythm, you can make it into an instrument. I think that 8-bit music is part admiration, part nostalgia, and then it's mostly, like, innovation. And that's why I think people like it.
Great interview excerpt Tristan.
ReplyDeleteThis interview seems to have a good bit of meat. The interviewee's expository responses allow for a depth of firsthand information about the 8bit music scene.
Zach's responses demonstrate technical jargon familiarity, a sense of ownership over the music's history, and an insightful musicological intuition about the source of the appeal of the 8bit melodies to a certain generation as a musical artifice, not simply a sonic ornament. This early sonic tastemaking reveals the way that 8bit musicians draw a continuity from their childhood music taste to their adult music taste. This of course runs against the general tendency towards disparaging the embarrassing list of bands one enjoyed in childhood. 8bit seems to stand at the point where the sonic palette is formed in childhood without the precocious or underdeveloped taste in more robust but traditional bands.
Enhorabuena.
-Houston D.
I find particularly interesting the extent to which Zach praises the genre, yet assumes that 8 bit music would never be played on the radio. In addition, the length of his responses and his drawing on nostalgia and the complexity of the music as evidence for its legitimacy seems to indicate that he feels the need to defend the genre. I'd be curious to know what, if any, other types of music Zach listens to, and how he might introduce his passion for 8 bit music into other music scenes, if he participates in other music scenes. How is this music, and musical culture, perceived by outsiders? How does that affect the insiders' perceptions of their music culture?
ReplyDeleteJulie
I was struck by 8bit music as a form of nostalgia. Despite having played my share of video games, I never thought about connecting with 8bit music through memories as opposed to it just sounding cool. It makes sense, however, that it would have a greater draw. I often wonder how videogames have impacted my creative development; I spent enough time playing that I know they must have. Your explorations into the 8bit scene have been really revealing of what can happen when we embrace all parts of our experience for inspiration.
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