Music, Style & Culture
| Print : Web : Radio : Mobile

minusbaby: It’s A Head Trip

If there is anyone who embodies the New York chiptune scene, it is Harlem-based artist Richard Alexander Caraballo.

Posted 14th January 2010, 6:06pm in Interviews, by Max Foxman
minusbaby If there is anyone who embodies the New York chiptune scene it is Harlem-based artist Richard Alexander Caraballo, known more commonly as minusbaby. A member of the 8bitpeoples musical collective, minusbaby has been making music with New York's best chiptuners for almost a decade and has traveled around the world performing in at least three continents. At last month's Blip Festival, DIY sat down with minusbaby to get the skinny on chiptuning, his latest works and his eclectic musical influences.

Why don't we start with your name. Your performer name.
Richard Caraballo. I go by the name minusbaby. I've been doing that for a while now.

And you are part of 8bitpeoples. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Kind of Jeremiah, Nullsleep, started it with Mike Hanlon. They were two musicians who really had no idea if chip music was happening outside of Europe, pretty much, just because there really wasn't a demo scene out here. So they figured they'd put together not just a music label, but also one that covered the visual side also. You know art packs. Like back in the day, demo scene dudes would release graphics that they would work on for demos and you know, just give them out for free. Like 3k would be like fifty images and shit like that. So they just wanted something sort of similar to that, but ya know, on this side of the pond and I met Jeremiah through micromusic.net in 2001 and that was pretty much both of us looking for local people to talk about music with, Chip music or be cool otherwise. So yeah, we met up and played a show a few months after that. It was the first show he ever played and the first show I ever played and yeah that was in 2001. Just from being there from the beginning kind of. 8bitpeoples started in '99, but shows started in 2001. Yeah and because of that I just became part of the crew. I was there.

And the crew is the brainchild of Blip Festival right?
Yeah.

So how does it feel to be in your fourth year here?
It's amazing. It's crazy. It's crazy on several levels because you meet all these people you've only known as texts or through their music. And it's a head trip because there's like this new phenomenon happening too where you think you know people just because you see their picture replying to facebook and shit, but it keeps happening over and over again but for a good reason at Blip Festival just because we've dealt with each other in one way or another. Shared stuff. Back in the day, things were a bit different because nobody really knew what they were doing. So, you would share technical breakthroughs and shit like that. Just figure things out and it's a little bit easier now because all that stuff ended up in tutorials and what not. So the scene is different than it was back then. There was tons of searching technically back when I started like '99 and 2000 and now it's like since that stuff is there, there's a library of how to work all this software and hardware, there's a nice offshoot. Now people are thinking about the music heavily which is cool. It's either that, or copying what's already there. But whatever. Everyone's done that. Every new musician sounding like their loves. The Beatles sound like Chuck Berry, so... There's less of a nerdy part, sort of, but more of a musical part. But yeah, it's a trip. It's nuts.

And to see it... It's been expanding I assume...
Yeah there was a Blip Festival Europe this summer. Nine of us went out: Bit Shifter, Nullsleep, Receptors (originally from Europe, from England, but he's been in the states since he was a kid), Nigel (Saskrotch), Paris did visuals. We had Europeans. Rosa (Menkman), who's playing the festival now did visuals. Covox joined us out there. Random played. Rabato from Spain. So, there was a core of nine Americans heading over to Europe and we did that in Denmark and we also played a festival in Poland right after that. And I kind of schemed it... They gave us a grand to get to Poland, by way of Denmark. So I took their money and went to Portugal and played a show there, played a show in London and Liverpool, so I just got really cheap prices and played five countries in that month and then Aron, Failotron, was playing. He played yesterday. He sent Nullsleep and I to Budapest to play MicroBudapest. Those guys really know how to party. It's great. So yeah, it's happening. It's on the ground, hardcore, but people are hearing about it.

Crazy shit happened like I scratched my cornea last week and it happened months ago. I know what the problem is now, so I'm fine with it. So, he [a Doctor] asked if I could do a follow-up visit Thursday, yesterday. And I said 'No, I can't because I have a show to play.' And then we started talking about music. He asked who I'm listening to because he listened to Boards of Canada and what not. So I said email me and I'll send you a list of stuff I listened to. So I give him my email and its minusbaby@gmail and he's like 'Wait. I've seen you on a flyer. I've seen your name.' So you know it's like, people don't know chip music, but shit's getting out that we play often and people dig it. So yeah. It's a weird thing. It's like poking its head out, but I don't know if it will pull some Loch Ness shit or something.

At least in New York you have lots of people covering it. Time Out New York obviously and Soundcheck on WNYC today.
Yeah and then two years ago BBC mentioned it. I mean you know, people have been talking about it. I mean I'm a designer as well and a big part of what I do is trying to get chip music away aesthetically from video game culture, just because I was a gaming kid, but this was in the '80s. For me, it's not about Super Mario and what not. It's about people who happen to be doing this stuff because the sound of YM chips, or just whatever. I think if that would happen more often, people would hear more and understand the music would be... would have a reason to listen to chip music and not just think its video game music.

I was going to ask because I wondered how your show went yesterday, I know a lot of people were talking about your visuals in particular. I know that's not what you are doing on the stage, but the connection there, etc. You were doing stuff with 3-D Glasses and stuff like that. How did it go?
I don't know. I didn't see it, but I knew it was going to be less true red/blue anaglyphic 3-D and more pop art, which I was cool with. For me, last year I brought on eight musicians to Blip Festival. I had a hammer dulcimer player, trumpet, trombone, drums, melodica, accordion and glockenspiel. Not all at the same time... So I did that and people flipped out just because it was pretty fucking crazy and this year we did a European tour and then I played a festival in Chicago. Just me. Like I went back to how it was in 2000 and 2001, when it was just me and two speakers. So I wanted to do that again for Blip, but have a little something different that sort of pointed to last year. So I thought it would be cool to do something with the visuals instead of bringing out a crazy-ass band. And Alex was up for it. Enso, who did the visuals, and yeah so we figured why not? It's not that expensive to get a bunch of 3-D glasses and the crowd dug it. It was fun.

People were loving it.
And it was a trip to be up there and see 100 people with 3-D glasses looking at me. It was crazy. The catalyst was really... I've always been this hybrid sonically and visually. So I wanted my visuals to point to 1953 or something. It doesn't have to point to 1984 laser tag and stuff. We can talk about Bela Lugosi

So how did you think your set went sonically?
I dug it. It was real damn fun. The sound system here is just badass. I was able to like crank the bass... We're always telling people just come out to the shows. It's completely different. It's not like listening to a sound test to a game. The room adds a lot to it. People are always surprised. They just don't understand until they show up. It's been happening more and more lately which is cool.
Click like to get the latest music news, hottest tracks and more via Facebook.

Comments