I’m very excited to share my debut release with 8bitpeoples. For those of you who are not familiar with chipmusic, 8bitpeoples was a formative netlabel in the early years of the scene and paved the way for many artists and other labels with a steady output of great music and events such as the Blip Festival.
pointe is a collection of club tracks made and recorded on a Game Boy running LSDj
8bitpeoples has this to say about the release:
sm0hm is the long-lost chiptune alias of Sweden-based Ess Mattisson, whose past work includes releases on mp3death, hexawe and DataDoor, as well as product design and software development at Elektron and Fors.
His debut release on 8bitpeoples is a homecoming of sorts. As an LSDJ user since the mid-2000s, he has long been fascinated with the technical and aesthetic aspects of chip music and drawn inspiration from trackers to inform his subsequent professional work on synthesizers.
The tracks on pointe push the Game Boy into the territory of heavier club sounds, leveraging its raw lo-fi character to great effect, in stark contrast to the hyper-glossy production prevalent today. There is a clear continuation here of a lineage that includes x|k’s Nestek and Outra — sounds conjured from old tech that refuses to be labeled obsolete, as it relentlessly pushes further into the future.
We were kind of musing about this last year, it was in a broader sense in terms of contemporary aesthetics. For me I feel like a lot of stuff being put out the past few years is so overly polished and “correct” that it loses something. This is just my personal feeling.
Thank you! Yeah I am also very excited to see 8bp back, really looking forward to hearing what they put out next.
That’s a good question! I’ve been wanting to make a Game Boy-based plugin for years and years so it’s been in the back of my mind but the timing hasn’t felt right. I got really back into chipmusic at the end of 2024 and when we started developing plugins last year it just fell into place. I’d say they came at the same time more or less.
I totally understand that. It’s a feeling I share with you, and am sure many others do as well. So many young musicians seem obsessed by parts of the process that are supposed to come after all the music is written and finished, like mixing, and especially mastering (a purely technical process in its traditional form, and not a magic wand). When you compare modern production to the classics it’s amazing how much got done with so little, and yet lives on to inspire people to this day, which shows that instead of technology we need technique (and a good ear).