only BotBrs who login may tag

article descriptioncore

Chipography, noun: The study of chiptune. Or,
Chipography, noun: A list comprising the known available works of a particular chiptune artist (see: discography.)

Not a whole awful lot has been written ABOUT chiptune, especially if you discount circa-2007 vaguely congratulatory slice-of-life journalism, viz.: "these kids are making EDM on... Nintendo Gameboys(TM)? And wearing purple-striped fingerless gloves? Shucks!!"

To boot, the nature of chipping tends to foil easy knowledge-gathering. Say you want to get to know a decently prolific artist well: count on it requiring navigating multiple usernames, platforms (and their various and obscure file types not necessarily easily played back on a PC,) seemingly random track name and version changes, group affiliations, and, if the guy has been around for a while, probably a string of variously-functional-and-informational web pages, forum accounts, YouTube accounts... It would make a veteran collector of rare jazz 10-inches red in the face.....

That's not to say it's so bad. At all. In fact, the bewildering proliferation seen in each of chiptune's various aspects is probably what's kept it resilient: among other things, resilient to permanent fad-death, since it's completely impossible to fold it into the mainstream all-canon of album music. For every chipper that's made an attempt to release audio files album-style in the ordinary, easily-digestible way, a great and essential demoscene legend whose modules have literally never been assembled in one folder lurks in the background. A living refutation of the homogenizing information-access-wave of the internet is chiptune- and what's ironic is that it lives in the internet's own backyard, so to speak.

I suspect we're all deadly fans of chip artists that most of the rest of us have never even heard of. In this PLAINTEXT BATTLE, you will author an informational piece introducing us to one of your favorites. They could be old, new, big, obscure, thin, wide.... anything from an OG C64 game composer 1337 to a fingerless-glove-wearing nanoloop cowboy to a... fellow BotB member you want to suck up to, I mean, honor. Besides listening an unhealthy amount, you've probably already cast your dragnet across the mucky clay floor of the internet in search of rare trax and infos. As such, you will be helping us all to become more cultured chippers in our search for more phatness.

Apart from the basics (the 5 W's?,) your piece could include:

-Biography
-Discography (Chipography?)
-Criticism
-Analysis
-Quotations
-An original interview?!
-...or anything else you want.

And for you scholarly battlers disingenuously milling out page after page of florid fluff in an ill-starred attempt to meet the draconian writing requirements of your BotB sabbaticals, good news! I've included an EVIL voting category to reward your obscurantist and anti-fun ivory tower Monday-morning quarterbacking. (...but on the real, though, please refrain from dragging fellow chippers through the mud.)

Voting categories:

Insight
Information
Obscurity
Incomprehensibility of jargon
New Journalism in pants

9

9

1

2

29