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          OBSOLETE OBSESSION

    [From the Portland Oregonian]

  With their Ataris and Commodores,
    fans of 'chip' music crank out
             Micropalooza

01/20/04

JOHN FOYSTON

    The computer industry worships the
latest and greatest -- but plain ol'
human muley-ness almost guarantees a
backlash.

    Micropalooza was part of it. The
recent concert by musicians devoted to
old, weird machines -- held in Ground
Kontrol, a downtown Portland arcade
devoted to Reagan-era video games --
suggests that everything old shall be
booted again.

    Its practitioners call it chip
music or 8-bit music and use modified
("bent") machines with primordial
8-bit processors and sound chips:
Ataris, Commodores, even Game Boys and
Speak & Spells. It sounds primitive
compared with the lush layers of
contemporary electronica -- raucous
beats and video-game theme music, some
of it.

    But it's also very much music made
by people, which is part of why
punk-rock svengali Malcolm McLaren
recognized something akin to what he
heard in the Sex Pistols 25 years ago:
In a recent Wired magazine article, he
recently proclaimed chip music as this
century's punk. He plans to release an
album of chip music called
"Fashionbeast" in the spring.

    Lots of people still use their old
Commodore 64s daily, even if they
never play a note. Call it
retro-technica or the new wave of
old-school computing, there's an
underground that cherishes gear that
seems positively medieval, and it was
also part of Micropalooza.

    "If you've ever waited for Windows
XP to load all its drivers at
start-up, you know that modern
computers aren't necessarily faster,"
said Robert Bernardo, an English
teacher and the president of the
Fresno, Calif., Commodore users'
group. "With a Commodore, I can be on
the Internet in 30 seconds. I can put
up a text editor in seconds."

    Bernardo's very lapel pin
proclaimed his loyalty: "I Adore My
64." True enough: He helped sponsor
Micropalooza and loaded seven
computers, three monitors and boxes of
hardware into his Honda and headed
north during the late-December freeze.

    He got stuck in the Siskiyous,
incurred a few hundred bucks' damage
from loose tire chains, almost got
stuck on the way home -- and still had
a great time.

    By mid-afternoon, he and a dozen
other Commodore users had set up
several computers that ran
demonstrations of games and graphics
software. Ground Kontrol is a big,
black-painted room, dimly lit by black
light and neon tubes and the cheerful
glow of 60 or so old arcade video
games such as Frogger, Star Castle,
Centipede and Asteroids.

    (Definitely Asteroids: This is
where some fans recently tried to
break the world record for continuous
Asteroid play, only to have the
machine freeze up after 27 hours.)

    Even when players weren't plugging
in quarters, the machines whooped and
beeped like a roomful of R2 units
declaiming a dozen separate
soliloquies. Add in the mutter of
Commodores and the clamor of pinball
machines, and Ground Kontrol was not a
place for quiet concentration.

    Which was exactly what Portlander
Jeri Ellsworth was doing as she wired
a guitar's whammy bar and a
potentiometer into a Commodore
keyboard for Seth Sternberger of 8-Bit
Weapon, Micropalooza's headliner.
(Random song title: "Spy vs. Spy II
(Drunk n basement mix.")

    Ellsworth is sometimes known as
the darling of the nerds in Commodore
circles because she's a talented young
computer engineer who designs her own
machines -- and is considerably more
scenic than your average
obsolete-computer fan. Judging from
the assembled Commodorians, many
vintage computer enthusiasts tend to
be male and of a certain vintage
themselves.

    "In '83, my folks got a Commodore
for my brother," she said. "I was 8 or
9, and I'd turn on the computer and
type in commands that it didn't
understand: 'Draw house,' and it'd
flash back 'Syntax error.' 'Paint
house,' I'd type; 'Syntax error.' Then
I'd type, 'make house.' 'Syntax
error.' "

    She's gotten a bit better since
then: I watched in polite bafflement
as she ran a program called Verilog
that dissected the layers of digital
design in her latest project. It was a
nice gesture and nearly as effective
as my recent chat with the cats about
the art of Toulouse-Lautrec.

    Meantime, Ground Kontrol was
louder than ever. The Commodorians
sent out for three large pizzas, and
the first of the evening's fans -- who
were unlikely to be mistaken for the
vintage computer guys -- milled around
and played games as some of the
musicians set up laptops, mixers,
keyboards and other gear.

    And what gear it was. Battered,
jury-rigged, jumper-wired computers;
paint-spattered, toggle-switch-studded
Speak & Spells and Speak & Maths
modified -- "bent" -- to get That
Sound. You know how careful you are
with your computer, how you coddle it?
These guys would laugh. They look upon
shiny computers the way hot-rodders
look at a '57 Chevy: a pretty good
starting point for something really
cool.

    Such as Waxin' Wary's gear: He
opened the show using a laptop whose
keyboard was a gap-toothed smile; such
keys as remained were marked in
Chinese. His friend, MOS-8 (they
belong to a Eugene music collective),
said they find their equipment in
thrift stores, at garage sales and
even the University of Oregon
Dumpsters at semester's end, when
departing students decide to pack
light.

    "This is a great place," said
MOS-8. (Random song: "59 Billion
Raindrops.") "I look around and
realize, wow, people really do love
this stuff."

    It was hard to talk by then,
because Waxin' Wary (random song:
"Dand-e-lion (portable scalpel
Emulator Disco remix)") had cranked up
some fairly ferocious, bass-heavy
beats. Hunched behind his laptop, he
dialed in bits of filigree and bursts
of syncopation, triggered voice
fragments and instrumental swatches
and at one point mutated a gentle
organ figure into a down-the-drain
spiral, as if played by E. Power Biggs
on cough syrup.

    The audience listened intently
and, soon enough, even started
dancing. And in some respects, the
21st century didn't look all that
different: The first dancers were a
pair of young women as the guys stood
and looked on.

    John Foyston: 503-221-8368;
    [e-mail].