Bit Shifter

excerpt from
Play That Funky Music Game Boy
Tom Loftus, MSNBC, 2003 10 01

Later that night Josh Davis, aka Bit Shifter, took the stage. He worked two Game Boys, frantically pushing the tiny keypads to add and remove drum loops to compositions he had pre-recorded and loaded into his Game Boy courtesy of a Mega Memory Card. There was something a little odd to the scene of a musician bobbing his head while staring at a tiny LCD screen. But by the time Davis jumped to his rave-up "Parapersona Crash," the walls started to shake and what little hesitation the audience may have had over dancing to a kiddy toy's "bleeps" and "bloops" vanished. - MSNBC.com

Pat Blashill, Rolling Stone #943, 2004 05 27

Bit Shifter
Life's A Bit Shifter
555

Queens' Josh Davis, also known as Bit Shifter, is a Game Boy hero — all of the short-but-sweet tracks on Life's A Bit Shifter were composed on one of the Nintendo toy gaming consoles, and the result sounds like a chorus of arcade games banging out chirpy shards from a digitized history of Western music. If you've ever wondered what "Flight of the Bumblebee" would sound like with a hardcore techno rinse (and who hasn't?), check out Davis' "Inversion of the Goober Reboots." - Rolling Stone

Steve Appleford, Los Angeles CityBeat

The moment of revelation came and went in a few seconds. Here was the rock superstar Beck, playing a surprise gig at the Coachella desert fest a year or so back, and putting down his acoustic guitar to lift an old Game Boy console from his pocket: eight bits of electronic brain power, enough to get Super Mario hopping across your screen, but nothing Brian Eno would get excited about. But it was nearly enough.

Beck plugged the thing in, and, for a second or two, a flutter of electronic beeps and blurps popped out of the big speakers behind him. Then the damn thing crashed, never to return. Demonstration over. But the case was almost made: A Game Boy could be a musical instrument.

It was a brief glimpse into another version of the latest next new thing, with sounds that have emerged once more on Beck’s newest album, Guero, mingling his beats and indie folk with a noticeable accent from the trash-heap of old-school Nintendo and Atari and Intellivision. But Beck (with the help of the Los Angeles group 8-Bit and others) was dabbling in an underground movement already in progress. Turns out he wasn’t the only one. Ahead of him was Malcolm McLaren, former manager and ultimate destroyer of the Sex Pistols, and who had tapped early into the still-young hip-hop bubble blowing up in the earliest ’80s. Now he was calling the music by these Game Boy maestros his newest fave, naming it the new punk rock or whatever. He’s been right and wrong before.

Some Game Boy artistes are wary of the superstar invasion, but it may turn out to serve a greater good, if it means more attention for this round of boho musicians – and maybe not unlike how Blondie’s “Rapture” was among the very first hip-hop tracks to reach the masses, opening a mainstream doorway for the real stuff to follow. Not that Game Boy impresarios are about to turn up on MTV. These are largely bedroom musicians working alone and without fanfare, embracing the limitations and possibilities of the Game Boy’s four channels, going several generations back from iPods and streaming sound files and Pro Tools’ perfection (24 bits and beyond).

“It is most certainly a movement, a part of a larger idea, which is: Let’s do something different, let’s try something new, let’s make it a community-based thing. To some degree it is,” says Mark Denardo, a New York-based Game Boy musician who briefly worked with McLaren. “It’s also just an instrument. It’s also just another tool.”

This is not limited to Game Boys, per se. Many also plug into other brands of archaic videogame and computer technology, looking for more of the old computerized sounds they remember from childhood. Most often, these players find their way to Game Boys and other artifacts of eight-bit technology after discovering the existence of software cartridges called Nanoloop and Little Sound DJ, the crucial elements that transform toys into instruments – flea-market junk somehow turned into the next-gen crazy sounds of the underground.

Experimental players are often drawn to unusual instruments, from folk artifacts to tinkly toy pianos. And the limitations of these electronic ’80s throwaways have led to a carnival of repetitive loops, a setting for both wild improvs and careful compositions, while somehow finding warmth in the ancient sounds too often out of reach on modern electronic instruments.

The results have been diverse. It is an underground wave of musicians and sound scientists experimenting wildly, playing and composing conceptual music or song-based work: from 8-Bit's hip-hop beats to Denardo’s “folktronic” weave of singer-songwriter moves to the classically trained Bubblyfish’s more ethereal waves of melody and atmosphere.

It is the newest version of the old DIY ethic, and still early enough that no labels or managers or agents (or many fans, for that matter) have crowded (or noticed) their scene. There is no industry. There have been scattered album releases, but no Slash or Def Jam or Sub Pop to take these crazy new sounds to the next level of awareness. Some indie-label releases have trickled out, but much of it finds the curious via the Internet, as individual artists place files of new songs and live tracks online.

“It’s not your typical approach to making electronic music,” says Denardo. “The reason why I personally wanted to use it and master it was because I already played like 10 instruments and I just wanted to have another one that was unique, and gain mastery over it and incorporate it into arrangements. And I could just stick it in my back pocket and go to a gig with it and an acoustic guitar and play some songs. It blows people’s minds.”

As it does when an established artist like Beck picks up a Game Boy onstage, which has some worried. “I don’t want to sound elitist,” says Josh Davis, a.k.a. Bit Shifter, “but given mass media’s tendency to really chew things up and devour it and move on to the next thing, I just feel like it can unduly accelerate the life expectancy of any type of music-making. So I worry about that.”

But Davis, who works with a trio of Game Boy units onstage, does like the results on Beck’s Guero. And he says it’s not his property to control anyway. “I don’t own this kind of music, and nobody does, and, frankly, this sort of music-making has roots that are probably 20 years old. So it’s sort of up for grabs.”

The audiences are small, as these eight-bit players crank their chiptunes in Bowery basements and art galleries. For a while, the New York contingent had its own version of CBGB in the form of the Tank, an art and performance space with good crowds. But it’s gone now, and touring has been minimal. That leaves this a movement known only to a small crowd of serious listeners, techno-hipsters, and videogame nostalgics.

In a way, it’s like the Ramones playing to 10 people in the Bowery at the dawn of punk.
“It’s a really exciting thing to think about, I’ll confess,” says Davis. “If that ends up being true, that this ends up being something that might get a little bit bigger or might be somehow a footnote or more in the history of music – I’m reluctant to let myself indulge in that kind of thinking, but when I do, it is a pretty exciting thought.” - Los Angeles CityBeat