Obsolete Sounds: Atari, Nintendo, and the Chiptune Aesthetic

I've been thinking a lot about how obsolete technological objects continue to haunt our cultural lives long after their 'moment of production' has passed. Following Colin Davis' gloss of Derrida's 'hauntology' as that which 'supplants its near-homonym ontology, replacing the priority of being and presence with the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive,' I'm captivated by all of the ways in which the object (let's say, for example, the classic Nintendo Entertainment System) persists in the form of specters, traces, and motifs. In other words, I'm interested in all the ways in which people express their Nintendo-ness after the Nintendo (or Atari or Coleco) effectively becomes defunct. Examples of these forms of expression are surprisingly numerous. In terms of sound, which is, of course, only one dimension of the entire NES experience, video game cover bands like The Advantage, The Minibosses, and Select Start keep game noises alive with their instrumental tributes to everyone's favorite ditties: "Super Mario 2," "The Legend of Zelda," "Castlevania," while orchestras like "PLAY! A Video Game Symphony" compose adaptations of various titles in the NES catalogue, drawing mostly on Koji Kanjo's repertoire.

But the most interesting form of the 'trace' is perhaps found in synth pop groups like Crystal Castles (name taken from an Atari game) who sample classic video game beats in their experimental mash-ups. In these complex orchestrations, the beat becomes the cipher, the key to unlocking the central architecture of otherwise frenetic compositions. The group's track Seed regularly intersperses the 'twing' sound I associate with the gold Mario Brothers coin (but it's probably an Atari 8-bit chip) while their song Alice Practices is maniacally fueled by 'high score' and 'laser' sounds. The group belongs to a sub-genre of music known as 'chiptune' that utilizes video game sound chips to produce non-video game music. Corroborating Mc Luhan's theory of obsolescence--he surmises that the form of old technology becomes the content of the new, giving examples of how the 'theatre' or the 'novel' becomes the (narrative) content of television and the movies--the chiptune aesthetic takes for its content the variegated forms of our video game past. The book E is For Ecstasy (unfortunately out of print) makes a parallel argument for how electronic music reproduces the sonic landscape of the (now absent) factory floor. Ultimately, outfits like Crystal Castles reproduce the sonic landscape of our video game youth: all of the chings, szwurps, and thaps that would otherwise lapse into obscurity with the obsolete console.