Today we are pleased to announce another brand new release, from a brand new Cow Tongue Taco artist: Son of a Bit!
Chorophobia is an energetic blast of hardcore chipmusic, and we’re really pleased to have them join the Cow Tongue family.
You can grab your copy of the EP as a free digital download, or on cassette tape over on our main shop, or on Bandcamp.
CTT: Tell us a bit about yourself! Who are you, and where do you come from?
SoaB: I’m Sanditio Bayu Estuputro, a freelance illustrator / comic artist based in Jakarta, Indonesia. I really love making many things I love (such as chip-music, drawings, comics, pixel-arts, etc)! Oh, and I also had another chip-music cover project called “Little-Sound Orchestra” (http://facebook.com/littlesoundorchestra), maybe you can check that out if you have more time.
CTT: How did you get into making chip music?
SoaB: When I was in high school (late 2007/2008), my older brother introduced YMCK (Japanese chiptune group) to me. I was instantly hooked and kept some of the songs in my mp3 player. I really excited about this group and tried to introduce YMCK’s “Magical 8-bit Tour” to one of my best classmate, Pajar Prasetyo and he really liked it! Inspired by that, Pajar suggested that I create a chiptune project with his friend Fajar Sidik. One of his reasons to make this project is, in Indonesia, there wasn’t that many chip-tune projects around, and chip-music sounds really unique! From there, we learned how to make Chip-music together from some tutorials on Youtube… and that was the time when “Majemuk” born, a chiptune / hip-hop group which I run with them. We were also invited to several events such as Chipmovement vol.1 in Depok (a city close to Jakarta), Jakarta Toys Fair 2009, and many others. But, in April 4th 2009, I decided to resign from Majemuk (due to a personal reason) and create a chiptune project inspired by heavy music called “Son of a Bit!”.
CTT: Your style is pretty unique; a sort of cross between metal and chiptune. How would you describe it?
SoaB: Some people call it “Nintendocore”, but I’m trying to avoid this term right now for a personal reason. Maybe i would just call it Heavy-Chip Music or just Chip-music, because I focus more on 8-bit sounds than other instruments. Yes, I add some other instruments in my music (such as Electric guitar) but it’s only a few and nothing more than 2 instruments. Most of my music is inspired by metal music in games such as Guilty Gear & BlazBlue series (Hell yes, Daisuke Ishiwatari is my number one inspiration for this project!) and some other great chip-music artists like Virt, Zabutom and Shitbird.
CTT: Tell us a bit about the album… and how it was put together.
SoaB: This album was supposed to be released 6 years ago (2011). But at that time I was focusing on another project so the release of this EP was abandoned. After checking back the old files on my hard disk, I finally remembered that this album existed! So I decided to release it in this year. This album focuses on songs that have vocals, so I add every vocal tracks that Son of a Bit! had. Some songs in this album is already in my 2nd album “re.demon.stration EP” and I remastered them for this new album (but too bad, that EP link download has already expired). I also added one more track “DEMITUHAN” for the cassette tape version.
SoaB: The name “Chorophobia” itself is an expression of my anxiousness against many other dance music inspired chip-music in my country. The fact that in Indonesia, there’s more or less 75% of chip-music artists here focused on this dance music thing. Maybe most of chip-music artsits here are dance music fans and that’s why there are so many of them. Well, I don’t mean to hate and blame them since there’s no prohibition to make any music with this medium (and most of them are my bestfriends!) but I just want to show to other people (mostly to non-dance music fans) that you can make any music with chiptune and that’s why chiptune is a great alternative medium to start with! Hope you like the new album ❤ \m/
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