Live Electronic 8-Bit Game Boy Music: So Simple Records’ WMX from Isla Vista, Santa Barbara

Posted on 09/23/09 by

Ryan Andersen

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So Simple Records is a collective of electronic music artists based out of Isla Vista, California - a bi-polar sleepy beach-side town by day, crazy college party town by night. Many of the members of So Simple Records are students at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) who spend many-a-night performing live electronic music to eager college co-eds.

Download the audio of this song (Right click and choose "save link as...")

Read the full blog to see all 7 videos and download all the audio tracks.

Isla Vista has made a name for itself as a mini mecca for independent and do-it-yourself (DIY) music with such venues as The Biko Garage, The Pink Mailbox, and The Furnace, all enveloped in the SBDIY collective. But So Simple Records sits apart even from this obscure collective of art venues and individual expression. As they describe it on their website they're "just some dudes who met in college in Isla Vista, California and now we're rocking it coast to coast, from Strong Island to Santa Barbara." If you dare venture into the circus of Isla Vista on a Friday or Saturday night, you will surely hear the distant beat of some electronic music playing to a bouncy crowd in a college house on the beachside Del Playa drive. Follow that beat and you might find DJCrabhat, WhyNot, Exnaut, Teddy Nava, Wildman Steve, WMX, or McPhatskillz of So Simple Records creating noise and beats on their laptops, Game Boys, or other music making devices.

Isla Vista also plays home to the Santa Barbara Electronic Music Festival every May in Anisq' ‘Oyo park. 2009 saw such acts as RueMusic, Max Vangeli of Ruby Skye and IV Legend of Libertine.

UCSB also takes credit for fueling the electronic music of Isla Vista. The UCSB Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology (CREATE) was established in 1986 to "serve as a productive environment available to students, researchers, and media artists for the realization of music and multimedia works." UCSB is also home of the Media Arts and Technology Graduate Program and the new experimental audio/visual performance medium called the Allosphere. The CREATE program at UCSB is run by such intellectual minds as Dr. JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, Stephen Travis Pope, and Curtis Roads (with whom I had the distinct honor of studying during my studies at UCSB - he is a pioneer in Granular Synthesis and a huge inspiration to me). Its facilities have been used by such names as Iannis Xenakis, Thea Musgrave, and Bebe Barron.

WMX (a.k.a. Gus) and others from So Simple Records joined One Night Music for a very unique session of live electronic music in our downtown Santa Barbara bedroom recording studio. Others brought laptops. WMX brought a Game Boy. Didn't know that a Game Boy could create music? Neither did I. But it's really cool. Enjoy.

Please note two things about this music. First, he is in fact playing all the music on the Game Boy. There is a direct input that makes the sound so clean. Second, the video and audio are properly synced even though it's hard to tell. You are watching him perform in real time.

SoSimpleRecords.com

Filming for all videos by Elia Vargas.
Film editing and audio recording by Ryan Andersen.

Download the audio of this song (Right click and choose "save link as...")

Download the audio of the final song that doesn't have a video (Right click and choose "save link as...")

This blog post was written by

Ryan Andersen

Comments

bandsxbands on 02/07/2010

Reading these kind of posts reminds me of just how technology truly is something we cannot live without in this day and age, and I am 99% certain that we have passed the point of no return in our relationship with technology.

I don’t mean this in a bad way, of course! Ethical concerns aside… I just hope that as memory gets less expensive, the possibility of transferring our brains onto a digital medium becomes a true reality. It’s a fantasy that I dream about almost every day.

(Posted on Nintendo DS running <a >nintendo dsi r4i</a> DS SurfV3)

Live Electronic 8-Bit Game Boy Music: So Simple Records’ WMX from Isla Vista, Santa Barbara

Comments

bandsxbands on 02/07/2010

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