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Pixelh8 a real live wire
Words Jim Ottewil
Electronic geek Pixelh8 may make music through old computers and aging software, yet he’s not ‘the boy with the digital heart’ that the title of his second album suggests. This game junky is human after all.
“I am a product of suburbia and all of its ‘edutainment’, home entertainment and automated education,” he says. “I live in Ipswich but I really live inside a computer, somewhere in Ipswich.”
While the creation of his first opus Videogames Ruined My Life consigned an array of laptops, Commodore 64s, Game Boys and kid toys to scrapheap heaven, his second long-player has been encoded from scratch.
“I am banned from almost all software while my second album is being written,” he insists. “There will be no reverb, no phaser, no effects, no trackers. If the original machines can’t do it, it’s not going in.”
Pixelh8 discovered his passion for lo-fi digitalisms through a misspent youth hooked on the NES, Commodore 64 and a beloved Amiga 500, which he returned to after being disappointed with his first PC. And, at the minute, he’s loving a piece of kit called the Acorn Electron.
“It has this amazing thick sound with an incredible envelope on it,” he says. “It’s like a chocolate bar that’s too big to eat. But I’m also using a Commodore PET - it doesn’t have a speaker but if you turn one of the bytes on and off fast enough it makes a clicking sound.”
For others, these musical limitations would be constricting, but it’s their self-imposed confines that add fuel to his creative fire, driving his music forward.
“I get the computer, read the spec on the back of the manual and then ignore it,” he says. “It’s getting harder to find old equipment as more people get into retro computers. But I don’t break stuff as much anymore. Now that most of my systems are programmed as synths, it’s just like sitting down at a piano - a QWERTY piano with function keys and joystick ports.”
Other members of the scene (such as the soon to be huge David E. Sugar) have furthered their music through inviting vocalisers on board. Pixelh8 hasn’t, amusingly suggesting, “I’d get in trouble if I rewired them.”
He adds: “Ultimately, chiptune is instrumentation, not a style or a genre defined by conventions. My music is heavily influenced by Curtis Mayfield, Sly & The Family Stone and Marvin Gaye. Mix that in a bowl with Aphex Twin and Squarepusher and, blammo, you have funk music played on videogames.”
