Tiny Cartridge 3DS

Despite Blip Festival’s tragic absence this year, several North American chip enthusiasts have stepped up to provide festivals of their own. I won’t be able to make it to either but I figured I would pass the word on about both of them in case any of our readers wanted the deets.

BRKFest 2013 will be happening for 3 days starting on August 2nd in Lexington, Kentucky the extensive lineup can be seen on the poster above. If you’ve never heard the headliners: Bokusatsu Shoujo Koubou (often goes by BSK) is the breakcore/speedcore, Trey Frey makes electronic dance jams and an0va performs chip-prog-rock! You can buy tickets for BRKFest on their EventBrite page.

Toy Company Festival will be happening in Montreal the weekend after BRKFest (August 9th and 10th). You could go to their Facebook event page and read all the names and follow all of the links or you could check out the Toy Company Festival mixtape (I suggest the mixtape) to get a taste of who will be there. The festival is happening at the Société des Arts Technologiques, which you may remember from a previous post of ours. You can get tickets over at the SAT website (no, not the standardized test).

March's Chiptune Events

If you enjoy chipmusic/chiptunes, here are some events THIS WEEK and NEXT WEEK in North America that you might find interesting.

First up, if you’re attending PAX East this weekend in Boston and want to do some dancing way before you go to the concerts, stop by the Jamspace Friday (3/22) and Saturday (3/23) between 11:30 am and 2:30 pm for some great chiptunes presented by the Boston8Bit crew. Individual performers for each day are listed on their Facebook event.

Also, if you see me walking around PAX East, say hi! I’ll be there all weekend, likely playing Johann Sebastian Joust.

If you happen to be in or around Montreal instead, this Saturday the 23rd is also an installment of Toy Company, which you may recall from this video highlight. A group of some of my favorite North American artists will be performing this time around and it promises to be an amazing show. It is being hosted at Foonzo, a gaming bar in Montreal.

For those of you attending GDC and/or living in San Francisco, 8bitSF has you covered with not 1 but 2 chip shows next week. There is POW POW: A Colossal Night of Sound + Vision (3/26) and POW POW: Bonus Round (3/29), the latter of which includes Derris Kharlan, who we’ve featured here before.

Lastly, if you’re in New York City (or the surrounding area) on Saturday the 30th, Pulsewave will be having a show featuring the Piko Piko Detroit crew! The event details are on the Facebook event or Pulsewave NYC’s Tumblr. This event has an open mic so if you’ve been making some chiptunes, come on out and show us!

Toy Company live

Toy Company is a series of lo-fi electronic/8-bit shows that happen in Montreal, Quebec, organized mostly by the local chiptune scene. The above video is a highlight reel from the latest event in the Satosphere at Société des Arts Technologiques (SAT) on March 2, 2013.

The artists featured at this year's Nuit Blanche were: Fade Runner (formerly known as ???), XC3N, Pocaille, Das Mörtal and Procyon Lotor. Between all of them they use some combination of LSDJ, LittleGPTracker, Plogue Chipsounds and more to make their music.

LISTEN PWYW Toy Company compilations