I have almost recovered from our trip to New York City, and I really want to tell you all about how it was.

I didn’t get as tired as I thought during the trip itself, but since we were staying at a cheap hostel we weren’t able to rest 100% until we were back in Japan.

The Blip Festival impressed me from the first moment. We got to greet some old friends when we got into the partyplace, including the organizers Nullsleep and Bit Shifter, and we also got to meet some international chipstars. And, right for the first night, it was the most impressing musical event I’ve ever been to. I’d like to write a bit more about the sets that I remember most.

The festival was opened by pro game music composer Virt, who surprised us playing both guitar and keyboard all over his chiptunes. I was gladly surprised by his mixing genres such as power metal and salsa.

Later, Starpause made us feel as clubby and as pr0n as we can get, from his little korean GP32 machine. His crazy clubber moves and his party animal attitude helped a lot, but his music alone would have got us all to dance like it’s the 90s.

Next was x|k, one of the numbers I most wanted to see, because I loved his Game Boy release. This time he used MidiNES, a midi interface for the NES for which he developed the hardware and the software himself. It was the most techno moment that night, and I was surprised because, although I pictured him as a shy and nice guy, he didn’t look nervous at all. That’s the complete opposite to his music!

Goto80 is another of our old friends, but that night we got to see him perform live for the first time. He got us dancing to any genre with his old Commodore 64, from Fantasy‘s perfect pop (chorus sung by himself) to a Chimo Bayo cover! I think he did that because I asked him so much, but Ai, Rabato, Hally from VORC and me were as happy as could be.

And that’s all that comes to my mind at this time about the first time. I’ll get back to you with some of my thoughts for the second one, which was also our night.