8-Bit music to me is a bit of mixed bag.  I didn’t grow up with an NES or a Sega Master System, so there isn’t any sort of nostalgia for a childhood spent in front of a TV listening to low quality beeps and bloops while rescuing princesses.   So the modern creation of music utilizing a very limited tool set seems to me to be nothing more than an intellectual exercise, or in the case of people who strip out hardware from old gaming products, a technical exercise.  Except for rare instances, such as Baltimore based Adventure (who isn’t really an 8-bit artist utilizing modern devices), I really just can’t get into it.  It doesn’t really appeal to me.

Kind of Blue is one of my favorite Miles Davis records.  This is almost cliché to say in music nerd circles.  Most of my Jazz love is really in the Hard Bop era, so these albums moving away from that style should almost be hated and yet,  I’ve loved the album since I’ve first heard it many years ago.  It contains some beautiful moments and some even transcendent moments.  It’s been called the perfect album to use to seduce a woman.  It’s influence was felt throughout nearly all genres of American music.  It’s very nearly, a perfect album in intent and execution ultimately held back only by the technology of the time.  So what better way to honor its 50^th anniversary than by recreating a tribute album in a genre devoted to holding itself to a particular technological era?

Kind of Bloop is the brain child of Andy Baio who pulled together the artists to cover the perfect jazz album by a handful of 8-Bit artists.  Funding the project’s royalty fees, artist’s expenses and manufacturing through Kickstarter, a micro-donation site.  Putting out a call for $2,000 he managed to pull in more than four times that amount from over four hundred participants.  He was able to get everything situated and online in time for the 50^th anniversary of the release on August 17^th, which is when I caught wind of the project and immediately purchased a copy curious as to the final result.  Was it worth it?

The four songs are split across four different artists.  Ast0r covers “So What” with what must have been a pretty painstaking straight transliteration of the opening track.  The run time is exactly the same as the original song and doesn’t really add much, but at the same time it doesn’t detract and he even manages to capture a bit of the “noise floor” of the original recording.  It’s impressive but falls into the whole “intellectual exercise” issue I have with a lot of 8-Bit music..

“Freddie Freeloader” is my least favorite song on Kind of Blue, so it’s probably the one most open to an honest examination between the two since there is no passionate devotion to the original song.  Virt does the original song justice and the stylistic choices of instrument stand-ins are pretty inspired.  I was particularly impressed with the snare.  This is my favorite of the songs in this reexamination.

“Blue in Green” in the original is lead by a soft piano giving way to a muted trumpet which to me has always been evocative of lost love, a forlorn wailing against memories of good times never to be repeated.  Sergeeo does not capture this at all.  The notes are there, but it’s too loud, to harsh to sit through.  I think this is more a fault of genre than producer though as subtle engineering is not the forte of 8-Bit.

“All Blues” covered by Shnabubula kind of deceptive in that at the start it manages to capture the groove and saxophone interplay, but around the four minute mark something goes horribly wrong and the choices made just turn into something most accurately described as the funkiest level of Super Mario Brothers since World 1-2.  The highs hit too hard and go on too long overshadowing all other aspects of the composition.

“Flamenco Sketches” by Disasterpeace seems to realize the limitations of 8-Bit and so disregards expectation by building the song’s parts to converge, briefly, into a dance song, which then vanishes.  There isn’t the element of sketches here as the end and the beginning are roughly the same.  I’d have preferred, I think, if he’d just utilized the note structure to actually BE the dance song.

Overall, this is an interesting experiment, but not something that I’ll return to any time in the future.  I found most of the songs to be held back by the limitations of the genre, though Virt’s “Freddie Freeloader” is good enough to stand on its own outside of this project.  I’d be very interested in seeing how something like Dave Brubeck’s Time Out would translate to the genre, since it too was largely an intellectual exercise.

Kind of Bloop Website

Category : album Review