A second Blip Festival was held in November/December last year, and stamped a big pixelly footprint on music culture by easily selling out the 800 capacity venue. Josh is now officially involved in the running of 8bitpeoples, and was there at the beginning of Blip. “The idea of doing a large-scale festival was something that'd been kicking around between me, Nullsleep, and our colleague Mike Rosenthal at The Tank. Ultimately, the catalyst was an e-mail we'd gotten in mid-2006 from Coova, a Game Boy musician from Japan, indicating that she and 7 or 8 other Japanese chip musicians were planning to visit New York later that year. So we quickly realized that this was a pretty significant occurrence in its own right, and that it presented an opportunity to bring the festival idea to an immediate front burner. It turned out to be a pretty shocking success, we were floored by the response the event got.”

Above: Bit Shifter live at the Blip Festival 2007

So where next for chiptunes? Well the future must be bright. The style has now long-since transcended any false trappings of geek-only niche tomfoolery. The core scene is thriving, and growing faster and faster every day. Mainstream artists from 50 Cent to Nelly Furtado to Beck have used the 8-bit sound over recent years, and 2006 saw the release of a chiptune tribute album to electronic pioneers Kraftwerk on the prominent Astralwerks label. A few years ago, Sex Pistols Manager Malcolm McLaren even dabbled in the scene, writing a reverent article on it for Wired magazine (Though being McLaren being McLaren, not everyone was happy about that). Such a close-knit bunch of people making music they love in a style that’s important to them on so many levels with, as Bit Shifter attests, “a surplus of integrity”, surely cannot go far wrong. The only question that really remains is just how far chip music can break the surface.

Michelle is optimistic. “The next step will be an actual chiptune artist going mainstream instead of a pop star just using the sounds on 1 or 2 songs.  When that day comes, it'll be interesting to see who emerges as the first chiptune superstar.”

Yes it will. Yes it will indeed.

Interested? Want to actually hear some of this aural 8-bit goodness we've been so enthusiastically banging on about? Then just click here. We've got you covered. And if we've tickled your sonic fancy and you fancy taking a crack at making this stuff, have a look at the hardware here and here, and then check out a couple of community sites to get some pointers. It's easy to get going.