If 16 bits spoil the mood of your All Hallow’s Eve, and you need some chips with your treats, the good peoples of the chip music community are hear to make sure the celebration of the visiting dead are properly accompanied by a free musical soundtrack. The download is free to grab, and fully Creative Commons-licensed for noncommercial, ShareAlike use.

The lineup:
The Guillotine Factory – Assembly Line
NESMETAL – The Throes of Wickedness
Heosphoros – A Traditional Childrens Waltz
Chema64 – Mictlantecuhtli
Norrin_Radd – Reciprocal Dimensions
Mr. Doom – Poison’d Candy
Nestrogen – Infernal Misanthropy
Dr. Zilog – Sanguinary Sect of Worship
arottenbit – Chemiotrails
FTF – Phobos & Deimos
Baphomania – Roaming Spectral Shores
Peter Swimm – illithid
H-Pizzle – Ghosts of a Fallen Empire

Enjoy!

All Hallows Eve in 8bit Hell Compilation

And you can add this to our exclusive, blippy, delicious Liz Revision Mix:
Exclusive Liz Revision Mix

The veil between the living and dead is growing thin, and I… uh, have some free music for you. Sorry, it turns out I don’t have a clever lead for this story, and my segue makes no sense. So let’s get to it!

Friend of the Site Liz McLean Knight aka Liz Revision aka Quantazelle of subVariant has put together a special, exclusive mix for CDM of 117-119 bpm musical goodness, excavated from the “_blippy” folder of sketches on her USB drive. Matt Moldover, who has been working on his CD-as-electronic-instrument album, lent his laptop. (Watch him assembling CDs in the video after the break.)

It’s all in celebration of a Halloweeen party Saturday night in Chicago, headlined by Josh Davis (BitShifter). Party ringleader Liz joins Josh on behalf of subVariant to represent the IDM-glitch-minimal-tech-house side of things, and Mr. Automatic (Front 312) and Onefiftyone (Chicago Workshop) will be joining in. If you’re in Chicago, this looks like the place to spend your Saturday. If, like me, you’re not, well, we have some music and videos for you to bring the party home.

Chicagoans:
Going.com Chicago event link + discount
Presale tickets on FractalSpin

And yes, while Josh is working on Game Boys in 8-bit, our CDM mix is fully 16-bit, baby! I’m telling you, 16-bit is totally the future.

Play this track:

Download MP3

Now, for a bit of Josh tearing it up in glorious 8 bits:

It’s nearly Election Day again here in New York. But it’s also Musical Election Day worldwide for the Efficient Music Competition with CDM, portable Linux-powered studio Indamixx, and modern tracker Renoise. In an age when technology tends to mean more, these artists are making music with less, carefully optimizing Renoise-powered tracks to operate well on lesser CPUs. Now’s your chance to hear the fruits of their labors, and register your vote. (And because these are Creative Commons-licensed, they’re free to share and share alike, too.)

Here’s what to do:

What if, between the original classic Tron and the upcoming Tron 2: Legacy, there were another Tron movie, lost forever in cinematic history? Between the soaring score by Wendy Carlos for the original and Legacy’s Daft Punk music, what would the soundtrack have sounded like? Of course, it would have absolutely had some Journey in it.

Such a movie was rumored, but as with so many projects, leaves behind no evidence. What if it had left a score you could hear? The mysterious “Flynn 1.5″ writes to share a free, downloadable soundtrack that answers that question.

And you can argue with an album that begins out with “For the Love of ENCOM”? Indeed. You can stream the full album and download all but the Journey remix. Read the full “backstory” after the jump.

Tron moniker or no, the results are some lovely music, featuring the likes of Tiger Mendoza, Team9, artist and CDM regular reader Lilith The Kitten, and ringleader World Famous Audio Hacker, among others. (Trivia – Tiger Mendoza has his own, Creative Commons-licensed album, and Team9 earned notoriety for a mash-up collaboration with Green Day.)

Amo Navas Bravetti – Raw (live video) from Gustavo Bravetti on Vimeo.

Sure, novel controllers are fun to watch, like our friend Gustavo Bravetti, driving a Brazilian crowd wild by waving his Wii remote live. But what if you can’t see the performance gimmick, if you’re just listening to the track?

The pitch behind the track “Raw,” celebrating the fifth anniversary of Fresco Records, is just that. It’s a studio-produced track, but the artists wanted to maintain some of the improvised feel of the live music. The track pairs the hit DJ/producer duo of David Amo and Juli Navas with Gustavo Bravetti of Uruguay – the Ableton and alternative controller wizard who regularly feeds tutorials to CDM.

Of course, this trio aren’t the only folks thinking this way. The first sequencers gave us the power to arrange everything in advance, meaning people immediately began to seek ways to restore live feel, turning off the metronome and doing everything in one take. But it’s nice to see these high-profile artists – and our friend Gustavo – taking it on specifically with something as off-the-wall as a Wii remote.