Sometimes creativity emerges best from a limited palette, and finiteCell by generating its sounds via custom programming on an original Game Boy and then sampling the result, adding breakbeat percussion, and editing the outcome into songs, demonstrates the possibilities found by experimenting in a sandbox of restricted options.
Like most ambient music, finiteCell works in layers and loops, setting up a pattern and then inserting other samples to create an effect like textural harmony, but uses rhythmic interruptions to make the power of each “riff” more effective. This might appeal to the metalhead imagination; it is like war metal with beeps and digital drums.
Keeping with the theme, these songs attempt to capture the energy of a solid video game session, turning the fruity music of eight-bit sound into something menacing and reality-suspending. The eight-bit processors generally created single-voice sound with different frequencies produced by alternating the speed of the loops in their code, and this generates strong and simple sounds that have a disturbing otherworldly purity and mechanical alienness.
From this, Liquor Store develops as an ambiguous series of sonic textures, slowly melding the random into something like a gestured theme, allowing the listener to put it all together in the end as a mood of both unfinished and disturbingly immutable perspectives on the modern dystopian soul-void.
Tags: chiptune, finiteCell
This is actually more interesting than the recycled pap that is current metal. Paradoxical in its vapid yet charming nature, the electronic dissonance here acts as an aural mirror of modernity. Silly, chaotic, annoying and somehow also alluring…just like the Kali Yuga we are living.
Ah yes, the cute “it’s purposefully bad in order to mirror its subject” argument. It’s the one hipsters use to defend their empty self-referential drivel like Andy Warhol’s Empire or Jackson Pollock: “bro you don’t get it bro, it’s precisely meant to represent the boredom and chaos of the modern world bro, it’s deep bro, bro you don’t get it bro…”
I will beat every stoner to death
Before it became symphonic, we called this “video game music”. I don’t know that it really says anything, but it’s pleasant, at least.
I guess this is what happens when you overdose on weed and start seeing infinity in the palm of your hand, or, in this case, “an ambiguous series of sonic textures” in shitty obnoxious 8-bit sounds.
exhales
Aye, and sometimes it’s a better listening experience as well. I can’t be the only one to find that chamber music is often more powerful than orchestral pieces?