Pitchfork

It's always exciting when someone figures out how to remold the junk of everyday life into art-- Picasso paintings with fragments of old newspapers, hillbilly bands with washboard players, and now, apparently, anyone with a Game Boy and some gumption. Nanoloop, a program developed by German Oliver Wittchow, is a real-time Game Boy sound editor, stored on a normal game cartridge, which allows users to compose multiple sound loops which can then be synthesized and edited, all on the hand-held console you have buried in your closet somewhere. Maybe if your mother had known about this, she would have spent less time riding your ass to quit playing "Qix" and go practice the piano.

The program has already created something of a community of composers who use the Nanoloop site to swap MP3s of their compositions and, in a couple of cases, to announce gigs for Nanoloop bands. Now, a real, honest-to-God record label, Hamburg's Disco Bruit, is getting involved in all this beep-and-blip insanity with a compilation disc of the Game Boy compositions of various techno and electronic musicians.

The album, called simply Nanoloop 1.0, will be released January 21st, 2002, with U.S. distribution handled by Dutch East India Trading as part of their desperate effort to return to their glory days of the early 17th Century. Musicians featured on the album include Wittchow, agf/dlay (Antje Greie-Fuchs & Vladislav Delay), Merzbow, Stock, Hausen & Walkman, DAT Politics, Hrvatski, Felix Kubin, Scratch Pet Land, Pita, Pyrolator, Ostinato, asciii, Bruno and Michael Are Smiling, and Blectum from Blechdom, whose name is frankly all the advertisement you should need.