A lot of people tend to think that chiptunes are just a bunch of dancey dancey blipity bleep bloops. And to an extent it’s true (although some damn good dancey dancey blipity bleep bloops!!!). However, I know of at least two particular crazy German chiptuners who would reply to that line of linking with a solid, “F**K OFF!”, and they’d enforce it quite handily with their latest album:

Pathoscillator
by Stern Fucking Zeit

I’ve been a metalhand for at least a decade now,
long before I ever really got into chiptune. There’s something about the energy and the ferocity of metal that appeals to me even today (that and the badass  guitar solos, of course ;). So to discover an album that deftly blends both metal/hardcore/screamo stylings and chiptune (chipcore? chipmetal?) so damn well fills me full of \m||m/. Even if the entirety of it is completely devoid of any metal guitar!!!  :O Although the indescribably brutal LSDj riffage does the trick JUST as well, which is quite the claim, I know! The album itself is a fair mix of both instrumentals and punishingly metal vocally led tracks, all interwoven with the perfect mix of thrash and melodic work to really make it catch. Either way, there is nothing about this album that isn’t METUL AS FUCK; it hits me right in my wheelhouse with the power of 10,000 pixelated Henry Rollins. And man, what I’d give to catch one of SFZ’s undoubtedly extremely high energy live shows; a mosh pit at a chiptune concert just sounds AWESOME. At any rate, all that I’m really trying to say with this meandering write-up (TOO… MUCH… METAL!! CAN… NOT… FOCUS!!), if you dig both metal and chiptunes but haven’t found anything yet that scratches both of those itches at once, THIS ALBUM IS FOR YOU.

\m|♥|m/