March 6-8, 2025

New local fests usually start off small. Not Boston Bitdown, which is fielding a three-day, all ages, music & art event, with 50+ artists, performing at five venues in Year One. The genre preparing for its closeup is chiptune. What are we talking about here? Video game-inspired music, often electronic. And gobs of it.

Info & Tickets

Artist Spotlights

Including (T-T)b, Battlemode, Sam Mulligan, Freezepop, Exciting!!Excellent!!, Minusworld, Magnificent Danger, Ultra Deluxe, DonutShoes, and more.

(T-T)b has a new album coming out in April, titled Beautiful Extension Cord. Easier to pronounce than their band name, which kind of looks like a mathematical expression (maybe it is?). I think I read somewhere it stands for “tiny toy bicycles.” You can just pronounce it “T T B” aloud. Are we letting down the parentheses and hyphen through omission? The burden is heavy but the yoke is light.

Battlemode, the unquestioned grande dame of the Boston chiptune scene, are no-brainer picks to perform at the inaugural Boston Bitdown. Since the electro outfit added a third member and new hi-tech gizmos, their sound is somehow more oddball and more mainstream pop at the same time. I think it has to do with cultivating the right kind of beats, which can accommodate a richer panoply of sonic skullduggery. I don’t know, you go listen to them and decide for yourself. So sayeth the always online weirdos, who’ve never done a lick of research in their blessed lives beyond googling 4chan: “Do your own research.”

Battlemode

Battlemode: “Just Pretend”

Star-crossed lovers falling, or fallen, out of love.

Hack The Planet Day

Renoly Santiago hosts Hackers at Somerville Theatre.

Five-O

Battlemode draws the cops at the 4th Wall.

Battlemode: “Playlist”

The chiptune duo is back! As a trio! Not playing chiptune!

Chip the Tune

Ultra Deluxe tracks European Parliamentary debate at O’Brien’s Pub.

Porch The Fest

Somerville Porchfest 2024: not just Guster!

Chomping On The Bits

Show Me Your Bits 2 earns an extra life at Crystal Ballroom.

Battlemode: “Mega”

The dynamic duo – err, trio – is back!

A Quincy Contingent

Battlemode parties with a South Shore bday bash at The Jungle.

Are You Hedge Spherienced?

Mobius Trip blows into the cartridge at The Rockwell.

Stars Over Bars

Ekoh wishes you a happy birthday at the Crystal Ballroom.

Battlemode of the Bands

Local hyperweights Battlemode get in the ring at the Jungle.

Battlemode: “Die Alone”

Boston’s Battlemode is an inexhaustible fount of energy and creative chutzpah.

Hey, you know that “new third member” we were talking about with Battlemode? Yeah, that’s Sam Mulligan. What’s he going to bring as a solo act? The musician walks the line between 8-bit jamz and comedic yahoo rawk. He’s been known to perform in a pastel onesie. Expect nothing less from the mind behind the highly relatable single “I Already Put On My Jammies,” a song about passing on a wild night out at the club because, well, you know – he already put on his jammies.

What’s a marching band doing at a chiptune fest? Dumb question. Marching bands belong everywhere – and Magnificent Danger plays tracks from the Sonic the Hedgehog score, among other cartridge classics. Next question!

There are chiptune-adjacent artists and there are dyed in the wool, “I see sprites behind my eyelids” chiptune artists. DonutShoes, aka Ethan Desautels, is the latter. The artist out of Connecticut strings together fast, punchy, synth highways of sound that leans into the playful textures of their video game inspiration. He’s an equal opportunity masher: he’ll pen originals, he’ll remix, he’ll glitch out all day long,

DonutShoes 🍩 · Crazy

Oh snap, dawg, Ultra Deluxe has a new album coming out too, dropping in March, titled The Floria Wars. Hump Day News caught the poppy, punky, chippy outfit at O’Brien’s Pub last July (along with (T-T)b and Battemode), and the fronter for Ultra Deluxe was really tearing the European Parliament a new asshole for their wishy-washy stance in the face of humanitarian crises. Hard to believe, but I think it’s true, the situation in the world has gotten even worse. We’re all running out of fingers to point at the awful stuff. Humanity is a high ceiling, low floor prospect.

Ultra Deluxe

Ultra Deluxe: “The Hunters”

Chiptune punkery for the masses.

Chip the Tune

Ultra Deluxe tracks European Parliamentary debate at O’Brien’s Pub.

Chiptune or “5th wave emo?” That’s a genre descriptor I’ve never seen before, pasted up at the Exciting!!Excellent!! Bandcamp. Are we up to five waves already? By the time you get to the fifth wave, it’s probably time to swap in a new ocean. Their song “l a s e r s” has a pleasant factory pop grind, like Mario was putting in an overtime shift at the F-Zero manufacturing plant. Off their latest LP you will watch me die.

Throwback 80s electro synth pop from Freezepop. You’ll dig their VHS-mindset music video library. The music is not so much video game-inspired, with all the blooping and bleeping, as a superb mood setter that will bring you back to the aesthetic cues of the era in which 8-bit consoles took glorious flight. Get into the groove with “Babes.”

High probability of a keytar sighthing with this band. The last time Hump Day News caught Minusworld, they were jamming along with drag artists and stripteasers at Show Me Your Bits 2. Burlesque — video game-themed burlesque, no less. With hawt numbers like “Death Star,” “Cheat Code,” and “Dear Google,” you’re gonna want to make it rain with bitcoin. That’s a thing, right?

Minusworld

Chomping On The Bits

Show Me Your Bits 2 earns an extra life at Crystal Ballroom.

A Touch of Keytar

Minusworld adds to the fun at Midway Cafe.

And keep an eye open for the visual artists flooding the zone with every manner of digital chickenfuckery. Shout out to v.Kash (caught his work at the Hackers screening), BADWARE (sometimes frequenter of The 4th Wall shows), Zebbler (one of the unwitting architects of the 2007 Boston Mooninite Panic) and his Crew.