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A Word With Pixelh8
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For a man whose name implies a dislike of pixels, Matthew Applegate, aka Pixelh8 sure seems to enjoy making music about them. His latest album, 2007's The Boy With The Digital Heart acts like an umbilical chord connecting the listener to a point in their childhood when they tore through pixelated lands of question-marked boxes and mushroom power.
Pixelh8 is a 21st Century classically trained composer. Instead of strings, brass or percussion however, he uses “chips” to colour his scores. Chip tune music is another one of those Internet phenomenons, easily written off as another flash-in-the-pan fad or gimmick but rarely understood on the levels of their creators’ intent. The gimmick comes from the fact that the music is created using old Gameboy cartridges and manipulating computer hardware and software to create synthesisers with a varying spectrum of sound.
Merge digs on anyone willing to rethink, reinvent or reinvigorate something that’s been tossed on the scrap heap but for Pixelh8 it’s something much deeper and more personal than green-washing a past-time.
Pixelh8 took time out recently to talk with Merge about his music, his life and how the environmental statement of his work is a mere by-product of a personal philosophy.
How on earth did you come to the conclusion that ripping off the back of your Gameboy and rewiring your games would be a good idea?
There were a lot of accidents leading up to me learning about chip tune and circuit bending music; and that’s what circuit bending music is, a mistake, a happy mistake. It happens when something is rewired, usually incorrectly and it creates a different outcome. My baby sister destroyed a lot of my toys so I often spent time either trying to fix them or better them. I have always played video games, and ever since that first weekend of constantly playing Castlevania on NES for 36 hours (all my friends brought their power adaptors to my birthday party so we could play for 36 hours) the sound of chips have been stuck in my head.
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When we first heard your music and learnt how it was created we were blown away by the, sort of, environmental statement it made. Was that an important motivating factor?
For me, what I do is both a celebration and an attack on consumerism. I am by all means a classic suburbanite, or at least I was for the most part of my youth, being regularly upgraded to the latest toy, and "edutainment package" so that my parents could go about their self absorbed lives.
It was never my intention to be seen as an environmentally friendly or green musician. I take apart and reuse old toys and computers because they formed a part of my childhood, and now reformed, they form a part of my adult life. For me it's quite a cathartic process. Yes I have recycled things, yes I have climbed inside trash compactors to rescue old computers and gotten hurt doing so, but those are purely to rescue things that people see as obsolete, the environmentally friendly side of it is just a "byproduct" and to claim otherwise would simply be untrue. There is a point that could be made, which is: without consumerism and the method my parents chose to raise me, I simply would not exist as I do today.
What is the message you want listeners to take away from your music?
Part of my ethos now, is empowerment, and by that I mean, never accept what you are given as the be all and end all of what it is capable of. A friend and I were talking recently about how old computers, like the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum, gave you a choice. You could either load a game or make your own, and it was right there on the menu as you turned it on. Modern computers have all but removed that "choice". You now have to go hunting for this and that if you want to program your own things. Modern computers want you to be a consumer, and in some cases have "locked" people out of creating their own software, and the companies actually spend a considerable amount of money and time to do this, purely to push a person more towards consumerism.
I want it back, I want that choice back, and a lot of lecture and workshops I have been running here in England have been to emphasize this. I have taught classes about what's going on inside a music keyboard and showed them they can circuit bend them, they can make their own sounds. People don't have to accept the presets on the front of the keyboard. I have taught people how to make their own software, often it is the case people don't know how or where software even comes from; they simply buy it in a shop. But by teaching people basic programming and understanding of computers it completely changes their view of a computer. It's no longer a thing to spend time on playing games or aimlessly surfing the internet as a consumer for hours, it's a tool, a means of expression.
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Taking your cue for a segue, The Boy With A Digital Heart is the name of your most recent album and is an eleven track expression of everything chip tune. Obviously the record is centered around its own world of digital disco and a mad crazy love affair between a boy and his love. Is the love for a girl, a game, or the digital game girl?
It's a girl, my first girlfriend.
Where do your musical compositions come from?
For me, composition comes from everyday life. It does sound cliché, but then if you hear something you like "IRL" in real life you'll like that something in your music as well. Anything can trigger it: a car, a journey, a collection of sounds in town. Map them out into a rhythm and that’s usually a starting point. I can't remember who (maybe I should find out) walked down to the bottom of his garden and listened to birds, and notated them to form the basis of some of his compositions. I live in suburbia, we just have noise.
There is no escaping the Nintendo undertones of the Chip tone music you’ve created. It seems like you embrace this and go beyond the left to right screen action of the old platform games and try to develop a third dimension.
Chip tune music is often regarded as a novelty, and I wanted to put that idea to rest. I wanted to show emotional depth and I think I did. The other main aim, was to show that chip tune is the instrumentation, it's not the genre, you can play all kinds of genres with a game boy. In terms of genre the album is all over the place, but it's instrumentation holds it all together. The genres were almost a conscious decision; the emotion behind them is just that, emotion.
What is your favourite track?
I would say ‘Super Fantastic Turbo Magical Two Player Love Game Adventure Called Happiness’. It almost wasn't on the album because I thought the beat might be too harsh, too fast, but at the last minute I said” no, it's exactly right” and kept it. And everyone seems to love it.
‘Girl Fight’ has a wonderful story behind it though. About twelve years ago, two girls fought it out in a playground. It was a violent chaotic battle like something in an anime film; I only just found out recently that the fight was over me.
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Thanks to Pixelh8 and Emma Mordue for the pictures!
Check out Hidden Youth Records to learn more on Chip Tune music and Pixelh8.
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