Flashback : Blip Tokyo 2010
May 21st, 2011
Blip Tokyo was held at Koenji High in Tokyo on the 4th and 5th of September in 2010.
I can say with a fairly significant amount of confidence that Blip Tokyo was the best thing ever. It is hard to know where to begin talking about how much fun it was. The venue was basically perfect, the right size, great screen for visuals and a sound system that could kill house hold pets at 500 meters were it not 2 floors under ground. The staff “got it” and there was a queue of fans outside an hour before the place opened. A fairly huge number of people from Australia and the US flew in for the show, not to mention artists from 4 continents and the cream of the local crop.
Quarta 300 started the festival with so much bass, Nocarrier had to Macguyver a solution to stop his NES units resetting due to the vibrations. Next up was Stu who demonstrated to the crowd why the Atari ST is such a beast of a machine. Maru and USK voltronned into Portalenz for a too rarely seen set of Fukuoka rave then Stapause sexed onto the stage with the soon to be famous m7Kenji for 30 minutes of pig fueled funk. After a 20 minute intermission, Nullsleep and No Carrier eviled up the joint before Goto 80 and Raquel Meyers dropped a dual vocal version of Microcolorado. YMCK made a few dreams come true with one of the slickest and most professional performances you will ever see. To close the day, Trash80 got the entire venue dancing with the biggest collection of happy, sweating smiling people I have ever seen at a chip show.
Another once in a life time pairing of Saitone and Raquel gave everyone a chance to see the awesome Thriller collab up close and personal. And how do you describe Bit Shifter live? Almost impossible, the addition of guest vocalist Luke Chaos didn’t make the task any easier. Who doesn’t love Sabrepulse, so much personality and melodic lovelyness in a single performance. I had been looking forward to this for a while, Little-Scale was pretty well known in Japan for his hardware work but it was wonderful to see how positively he was accepted by the crowd, nice cameo from Coova too! After the intermission, 8GB assaulted the audience with a well coordinated visual / Audio set followed by a late addition set from famicompo curator K->. The last two performers of the night were both legends, Hip Tanaka Ex. and Hally. I don’t think anyone really knew what to expect from Hip, he is obviously incredibly well respected and pretty much as old school as Chip Music can get. What the crowd got was an inspired synthesis of reggae, dub and chipmusic. If you ever get a chance, do all you can to see Hip Tanaka Ex live. In contrast, everyone knew what to expect from festival closer Hally, funky, danceable and incredibly catchy pop music, that is exactly what they got and it was loved by one and all.
Love you Tokyo….
