Chips Ahoy!

The new underground sound is "chip music," hacked from old Game Boy units. While the industry is pushing slicker 24-bit high-resolution studio tools, a new generation of punks is getting messy, with back-to-basics 8-bit technology.

The November, 2003 issue of WIRED contains an essay by Malcolm McLaren, the producer and clothing designer, best known for his discovery of uber-punk Sex Pistols. In "8-bit Punk," McLaren describes his discovery of a new punk subculture built – literally – on the re-engineered shards of outdated electronic toys "from the antediluvian 8-bit past."

McLaren laments the stifling corporate sameness of our current "karaoke culture." Literally, "karaoke" means "empty orchestra," which McLaren finds to be a perfect description of our "lifeless" music, "unencumbered by creativity and free of responsibility...You can't fail in karaoke. It's life by proxy, liberated by hindsight."

His personal quest for "authenticity," which is grounded in "the messy process of creativity," led him to embrace chip music. (His own release in this mode comes in 2004.)

Just as the punks of the late 1970s rebelled against the increasingly safe and sterile direction of rock and pop music, the chip music underground is raging against the new audio machine – ProTools, "software that reduces every mixdown effect to a mouse click." "Lo fi" artists want a raunchier, hand-crafted feel the same way their 1979 predecessors wanted edgier, more distorted guitar sounds. Oh, and there's an "attitude" involved, too.

McLaren's own epiphany comes in a visit to a desolate industrial district of Paris, where he learns about Role Model, Bit Shifter, Nullsleep, Glomag, and other lo-fi artists in a crumbling room that sounded like "a video arcade gone mad."

MORE: Read McLaren's account, and his complete essay in WIRED

Visit the sites of chip-music artists Glomag, Nullsleep, Bit Shifter, and Role Model

Visit some examples of lo-fi subculture at Apathy, CasioNova or 8-bit Peoples