The Times: Tech column - The GameBoy music scene
By David Rowan
HERE'S a test to see how tech-savvy you are. Is the Nintendo GameBoy a) a 14-year-old handheld games console that's now so obsolete as to be naff, or b) the latest in high-fashion portable music players?
Congratulations if you answered b), for the GameBoy is undergoing a remarkable renaissance as a cult music-making machine in nightclubs across Europe. It might seem odd that DJs and techno bands from Sweden to Austria would abandon conventional mixing decks for a hand-sized games console. But that would be to underestimate the hacker community's determination to make consumer appliances do things that their manufacturers never intended. Coders have lately been hacking TiVos to collect e-mail, and Xboxes to run as PCs - so why shouldn't a mini-console be transformed to get 100 clubbers dancing?
The GameBoy music scene owes its popularity to an unauthorised program called Little Sound DJ (www.littlesounddj.com), which turns a toy into a "full fledged music workstation". Johan Kotlinski, a 29-year-old Swedish DJ, wrote the software because it was "fun" and, well, because he could.
Musicians are using it to synthesise a range of electronic sounds in four channels and to sample anything from drumbeats to speech. "You can't imagine that a DJ would get a whole show out of this hand-held box they pull out of a shopping bag," says lektrogirl, a London-based DJ familiar with the scene. "The joy is to take this toy and turn it from a passive consumer device for killing time into something creative."
It has led to a thriving underground culture, with wonderfully named GameBoy bands such as WidgetPhreak, Poodle Scream and the "gameboyzz orchestra project". The music itself is perhaps not something that many Times readers would tap their feet to - the sequences are typically fast, repetitive and rough-edged, although they can certainly get a room moving to a persuasive techno-beat. Sometimes the tracks even have lyrics: one GameBoy anthem from a band called Puss contains the classic couplet: "When we use our cable, everything is stable ..." Beat that, McCartney.
Next Saturday, lektrogirl (aka Emma Davidson) is bringing GameBoy music to the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, where DJs including Kotlinski will use the hacked consoles to run workshops and a club night. "It's thrilling, when you're told that you can't alter a machine, to turn it into something that's better than its creators intended," says lektrogirl. "And you get loads of credibility with other hackers by using old equipment that people think is naff to pump out kick-ass tunes."
A rather seedy new industry is growing up around the new generation of camera phones being marketed heavily by the telecoms giants: the "adult picture-messaging" website. These sites, not connected to the phone companies, offer for sale "real mobile phone picture messages taken by voyeurs, clubbers, partiers" - for, as one of them candidly states: "The most amazing breakthrough in mobile phones is the new camera facility and colour screens that allow the owner to take snaps wherever they may be." Sports clubs and swimming pools from Bolton to Brisbane have banned the new phones, largely to prevent children being photographed by paedophiles.
Yet all of us face a new potential threat to our privacy. The potential risks of phone voyeurism surfaced last week over an alleged rape in a Brighton pub, which police say was filmed by a camera phone, but there will be thousands of more minor incidents in which these phones are used to film people for the gratification of others. Is it time for "phone voyeurism" to become a criminal offence in its own right?
(The Times, June 24 2003)
HERE'S a test to see how tech-savvy you are. Is the Nintendo GameBoy a) a 14-year-old handheld games console that's now so obsolete as to be naff, or b) the latest in high-fashion portable music players?
Congratulations if you answered b), for the GameBoy is undergoing a remarkable renaissance as a cult music-making machine in nightclubs across Europe. It might seem odd that DJs and techno bands from Sweden to Austria would abandon conventional mixing decks for a hand-sized games console. But that would be to underestimate the hacker community's determination to make consumer appliances do things that their manufacturers never intended. Coders have lately been hacking TiVos to collect e-mail, and Xboxes to run as PCs - so why shouldn't a mini-console be transformed to get 100 clubbers dancing?
The GameBoy music scene owes its popularity to an unauthorised program called Little Sound DJ (www.littlesounddj.com), which turns a toy into a "full fledged music workstation". Johan Kotlinski, a 29-year-old Swedish DJ, wrote the software because it was "fun" and, well, because he could.
Musicians are using it to synthesise a range of electronic sounds in four channels and to sample anything from drumbeats to speech. "You can't imagine that a DJ would get a whole show out of this hand-held box they pull out of a shopping bag," says lektrogirl, a London-based DJ familiar with the scene. "The joy is to take this toy and turn it from a passive consumer device for killing time into something creative."
It has led to a thriving underground culture, with wonderfully named GameBoy bands such as WidgetPhreak, Poodle Scream and the "gameboyzz orchestra project". The music itself is perhaps not something that many Times readers would tap their feet to - the sequences are typically fast, repetitive and rough-edged, although they can certainly get a room moving to a persuasive techno-beat. Sometimes the tracks even have lyrics: one GameBoy anthem from a band called Puss contains the classic couplet: "When we use our cable, everything is stable ..." Beat that, McCartney.
Next Saturday, lektrogirl (aka Emma Davidson) is bringing GameBoy music to the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, where DJs including Kotlinski will use the hacked consoles to run workshops and a club night. "It's thrilling, when you're told that you can't alter a machine, to turn it into something that's better than its creators intended," says lektrogirl. "And you get loads of credibility with other hackers by using old equipment that people think is naff to pump out kick-ass tunes."
A rather seedy new industry is growing up around the new generation of camera phones being marketed heavily by the telecoms giants: the "adult picture-messaging" website. These sites, not connected to the phone companies, offer for sale "real mobile phone picture messages taken by voyeurs, clubbers, partiers" - for, as one of them candidly states: "The most amazing breakthrough in mobile phones is the new camera facility and colour screens that allow the owner to take snaps wherever they may be." Sports clubs and swimming pools from Bolton to Brisbane have banned the new phones, largely to prevent children being photographed by paedophiles.
Yet all of us face a new potential threat to our privacy. The potential risks of phone voyeurism surfaced last week over an alleged rape in a Brighton pub, which police say was filmed by a camera phone, but there will be thousands of more minor incidents in which these phones are used to film people for the gratification of others. Is it time for "phone voyeurism" to become a criminal offence in its own right?
(The Times, June 24 2003)
posted by David Rowan at Tuesday, June 24, 2003
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