A State of Emergency!

All I can think about when it comes to Australian Chip music these days is Sydney's one man noise onslaught Emergency! Emergency! (aka Stephen J Mitchell). I recently went to see him in Brisbane for the third time when he was supporting indie-guitar-noise band Stature:Statue. The crowd was all there to see guitar bands and so were quiet taken aback by Stephen's setup of Laptop, Microkorg, Loop-Pedal and Game Boy...and he relished in it. The more confused the crowd got the more frequently the beat would change into a mash of noise and screams. I enjoyed the hell out of it and even though it isn't strictly Chiptune music who cares? Emergency!Emergency! is everything bands like Crystal Castles should be, the Game Boy supplies one shot samples from games like Batman and Kirby in a way that it sounds like they were made for the song. The thing that makes all this exciting is Stephen is very interested in the Chiptune scene and will very soon be hooked up with his own Game Boy music cartridges (courtesy of 10k/Tom) so he can incorporate more original Game Boy sounds into his songs. In my eyes Emergency! Emergency! is the perfect cross over to pull Chiptunes into broader national exposure within Australia. So please check out his music page and buy the debut EP and keep an eye on the remix page for individual remixes by Tom and I...

//Alex