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flight of the bleeper bird: obviously i was abducted by paper aliens

from The Art of Noise by Meerenai Shim

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  • Record/Vinyl + Digital Album

    This is the 3 song collection "Flight of the Bleeper Bird" for flute and Gameboy from my album "The Art of Noise". Only 100 45RPM records have been made and only 50 will be sold via Bandcamp. The rest will be available at my shows and at Matthew Joseph Payne shows.

    These super-awesome record jackets are old 8" floppy disks. The 7" record with paper sleeve and plastic sleeve are inside the 8" floppy. (I am not ashamed to say I stole this idea from Urizen!)

    Each 7" record will ship with the full-length CD "The Art of Noise."

    THE FINE PRINT: I'm selling only 1 record per person. I'm shipping vinyl within the USA only....unless you *really* want one - just let me know - but I will have to charge more for shipping.

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about

“Chiptune is often seen as a study of working within limitations, but in reality the four monophonic voices (only three of which can play actual pitches) of the GameBoy's internal synthesizer have a wider pitch range and more tonal variety than a string trio. Each voice is capable of changing musical roles instantaneously and rapidly, interchanging melodic, harmonic or percussive duties in ways that human players could never manage. Such a set of voices would only be considered limitations in the world of computer music, where artists are used to having essentially infinite voices with infinite capabilities, being limited only by the capabilities of their computer.

The modern flutist has a lot in common with the typical voice a chip tune composer has to work with. Beatboxing allows the flutist to create percussion effects, similar to the Game Boy square wave channel's sweep effects that can be used to create kick and tom drums. Flutter tounging in the flute mirrors the Game Boy's hard vibrato distortion.

Flight of the Bleeper Bird is by no means the first piece to bring chipmusic hardware and sounds into the realm of composed music, but much of the work I've heard so far focuses on what happens when "real" instruments are asked to do their thing alongside bleeps and bloops, or what happens when an NES becomes the backing ensemble for a solo concerto.

When Meerenai asked me to write a piece for flute and gameboy, I almost immediately knew that I wanted to treat the flute as a fifth voice for the gameboy, and integrate it into my chipmusic composing style. The result was a wild ride that has as much in common with danceable chiptune as it does with music in the concert setting, and explores someof the things that are possible with just one more voice added. To add an additional, somewhat ridiculous layer, samples of Meerenai's flute playing were recorded and are played back by the Game Boy (the console's WAV channel is capable of playing back two samples simultaneously). While the samples aren't particularly recognizable, they allow the instruments to switch roles in a somewhat amusing way.

The chiptune portion of Flight of the Bleeper Bird was composed in Little Sound DJ, a native tracker that runs directly on the GameBoy platform. LSDJ is written and distributed by Johan Kotlinski, and is available for a tiny donation at littlesounddj.com.”
- Matthew Joseph Payne

credits

from The Art of Noise, released April 4, 2013
"flight of the bleeper bird" for flute and Gameboy (2012) composed by Matthew Joseph Payne

Meerenai Shim, flute

Recorded/Engineered by Jesse Nichols at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, CA.

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Meerenai Shim Campbell, California

Flutist and jack of many trades, Meerenai Shim is 1/2 of the flute/percussion duo, A/B Duo, and 1/5 of the chiptune/folk/doom/jazz band The Mineral Kingdom. She has released 3 solo albums and founded the indie classical record label Aerocade Music.

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