“There’s a particular restriction they’re putting on themselves because they like how it sounds, but these guys are amazing composers in their own right and rockin’ performers.” Rosenthal was quick to recognize the potential of chip music in 2002 when he was working as an electronic music curator. He put out an ad on Craigslist asking for electronic musicians to play an event, and in walked Bit Shifter with his Game Boy setup. The whole crowd got exposed to something Mike hadn’t seen enough of in electronic music. “These people are a lot more inclined to be jumping around and viscerally interacting with a thing, which is much more like a guitar player or a drummer, than just standing stoically behind a laptop. When people are mashing on these buttons and doing live effect manipulation, it’s so much more engaging to watch.” Not many people had been able to watch before then, but as Bit Shifter, Nullsleep, and Rosenthal’s paths intersected, chip music found a home at the Tank that shortly transformed into Pulsewave, a monthly showcase of performers that galvanized the New York scene but also has attracted outsiders.
     It wouldn’t be a mistake to see chip music as an analogue to punk, in that it strips electronic music down to its bare essentials, but the comparison starts to break down when you hear sounds that the hardware simply wasn’t meant to make. It’s an aesthetic that insists upon pushing boundaries that were broken the moment wave tables made it possible to play any sound digitally without having to synthesize it. Yet that aesthetic isn’t at its roots musical; it’s algorithmic.
     All the music at Blip Festival operates within the constraints of hardware most of us grew up with, and that resurrects in digital music the kind of transparency we normally ascribe to acoustic instrumentation.