Is it Nostalgia Music, or just a Blip on your Screen?

Haeyoung Kim, a classical pianist, took the stage at a hip Manhattan art space before a crowd of twenty- and thirty-somethings, many shaggy-haired and wearing T-shirts and glasses.

oOo The new long-hairs and beat generation. . . ? oOo

But this was no far-out modern classical music scene. Instead, soon the room was filled with electronic beeps and buzzes of a 1980's video game pulsing to a danceable beat, as if Mario were hosting a rave. oOo Not an electronic piano, not a synthesizer, but her instrument of choice: a Nintendo Game Boy. oOo oOo

The performance was part of Blip Festival, [ check out the retro website! ] a four-day celebration of music made with obsolete computers and electronics. So-called "chiptune" or "8-bit" music is building a cult audience among former Atari jockeys. [ Atari-who?? oOo ]

"We are the first generation for whom video games and computers played an important role in our childhood," said Mike Rosenthal, 29, one of Blip Festival's organizers. "Now [the sound of these toys] has taken on meaning, and many of us are at an age where we want to take apart our toys and see what else we can make them do." oOo sort of Re-purposing your childhood. . . oOo

Chiptune includes pop, metal and other styles. The electronic, tinny sound oOo oOo which is not unlike the dinn of today's Brittney wannabees oOo of the first commercial video games has aged enough to feel nostalgic: oOo

The eclectic artist Beck has even released an EP of chiptune remixes. oOo What's next - "Chipmonk" tunes? Aaarrrgh! oOo

The scene is informed by the do-it-yourself ethic of punk rock and hacker culture, oOo read: hacks, not pros,

where everyone Ass-umes that "they" can be a musician or artist, without hard life-long sweat and tears or inborn gifted talent oOo

Favorite "new" instruments include the Commodore 64 and Atari 800, but the most popular chiptune gadget may be the Game Boy, which Nintendo debuted in 1989. These modified thinga-ma-rigs have only a fraction of the computing power of today's average cell phone, but that's part of the appeal. oOo let's bust out the washboards and mouth-organs, too. Everybody needs some kind of personal, grass-roots expression. . . oOo

I guess most subcultures need to rediscover their down-home ways of making noises after they've been marginalized as mere bits and bytes in the mega techno-power commercialized entertainment grid. oOo oOo

It's also about subversion and working within constraints. Great artists have always known a struggle with the grit of available materials to use, versus the ideas to express. "It makes you more creative to work within the tight limitations of the technology," said Jordi Huguet, one half of the Barcelona-based chiptune duo "Yes, Robot".

oOo Let's just not go the route of lowest-common denominator in art and music, where any old crap "you" want to churn out is worthwhile to expose "the rest of us" to. Self-censorship never hurt anyone - it usually spares your reputation, and the rest of us from embarrassing IBS and severely ruptured eyeballs and eardrums. oOo oOo