2008 has been a good year for dorkumentaries. Along with the dvd release of King of Kong, we’ve also seen the premiere of not one, but two docs about nerdcore hip hop (Nerdcore for Life & Nerdcore Rising). If you just can’t get enough retro gaming and quirky music, be sure to check out Blip Festival: Reformat the Planet, a documentary that focuses on the first annual Blip Fest, a four day chiptune extravaganza in NYC. The documentary covers the history of New York’s chiptune scene, as well as plenty of live footage and interviews with video game musicians from all over the world. The film has many great moments, but one of my favorite parts was hearing Glomag (Chris Burke) comparing chip music’s usage of Gameboys and other gaming devices to the musical re-appropriation of turntables in hip hop.
For the next few days, you can watch Reformat the Planet in it’s entirety for free, courtesy of Pitchfork.tv [link]. The film is really well put together and very interesting. I’m hoping they’ll release a soundtrack sometime, but you can currently grab tons of free chip music (including the film’s title track) from the fantastic 8BitPeoples website. You can also see a interview with the film’s director and live Glomag footage on Epic Fu.
On a similar note, Nerdcore Rising has recently released their film’s soundtrack which features music from the film and tons of live MC Frontalot performances. The cd is available on their site and will also be available at PAX.
Leave a Reply