Despite my reported indifference to the Blip Festival, where fans and DJs gathered from around the world to celebrate the music made from tweaked Game Boys and other circuit-bent gear, I came away from last night's show with a Luigi-like spring in my step. It was—and I am really not using this word lightly—joyous.
The Blip Festival shares the basic form of raves and other dance parties: a DJ on an elevated stage behind a table of gear; flashing lights; a quartet of Mackies puking a cone of bass that takes years off ears. And like the underground electronic dance scene of the late '80s and early '90s there is a kundalindi-unwinding lack of pretension. While there may be a "blip scene" in the backwater inlets of the intertron, it's not yet co-opted by blipper-than-thou scenesters. I'm sure there are feuds and debates like in any subculture, but at the Blip Festival the attitude was starkly positive and free from irony.
It might be because blip music is inherently so dorky that it's beyond criticism; I doubt anyone attended that didn't find childhood solace in the sines and saws of early videogame audio hardware. At some point the sounds of Sonic, designed to emulate real world instruments, became more appealing than the real thing. To be in a crowd of people in whom those sounds also carried an emotional payload was great. For a split second I thought my cell phone couldn't download email because there was already too much data in the air.
It didn't hurt that I arrived to catch two crackerjack DJs pulling out all the stops.* Scene stalwart and Blip Festival organizer Nullsleep thrashed on stage, somehow keeping his minijack plugged into his Game Boys. He was followed by Japanese artist Hally, whose exuberance and crescendoing aural exhortations brought the crowd together in nerd dance frenzy that was the highlight of the night.
The Festival is going on one more night, so if you're in New York, you've got a chance to see the closing events. Do it—or start planning for next year.
~* I used that phrase because I'm a lazy writer, but a lot of the things that make blip music so appealing—the soaring arpeggios and tight, piercing sounds—are similar to the organ fugues of Bach and... anyone else who wrote fugues.~
