It was an especially cold December in New York City this year. And it had nothing to do with the massive blizzard that was whipping 18 inches of snow around at speeds up to 35 mph. It had to do with the fact that, for the first time in a long while, the five boroughs (and indeed the world) was bereft of the joyous celebration known as The Blip Festival, the largest chip music festival that our tiny blue planet has to offer — 3 days of performances from musicians and artists from around the world, celebrating the musical and visual limitations of obsolete game consoles and other antiquated computer tech.
But fear not — Blip Fest isn’t gone for good. Not even close. Rather, it’s being rescheduled to take place later next year, in the brighter and cheerier month of May. Still, there’s a certain nostalgia associated with Blip’s wintery whimsy, frightful weather and the G train notwithstanding. And it’s fair to assume that thousands of chip music fans have been a bit down in dumps in light of the Festival’s absence from their 2010 calendar.
Luckily, there was a small bit of mercy left in Blip’s stead, and it came in the form of Blip Festival: Reformat The Planet, the comprehensive documentary on chip music and the Blip Festival, crafted lovingly over the course of 3 years by NYC filmmaking troupe 2 Player Productions. And lucky still, what they’ve captured on this DVD amounts to the closest possible simulation of the inspired artistry and impassioned mayhem that surrounds the half-decade strong Blip Festival.
Hit the jump to see how a skeleton crew of documentarians went about capturing the world’s largest and most exciting chip music event, and the indelible impact it had in the spreading of an exciting new form of electronic music to all corners of the globe.
