Born Richard Alexander Caraballo in New York City, minusbaby is a musician, designer, photographer, and wandering, beat-collecting, international vagabond, whose finely-crafted blips and bleeps are as eclectic as the broad range of music and culture he draws inspiration from.
Focusing primarily on software-based composition, minusbaby uses lo-fi electronic synthesis to create chip music that defies genre classification. One song could be a micromusic lullaby inspired by 17th Century Spanish architecture, while the next may be reggaetón for a cymbal-clapping robotic monkey, composed with an ear for fine hip-hop beats and debuted for an Australian Cattle Dog in São Paulo, Brazil. With minusbaby, ’60s—’70s Brazilian pop can meet mid-’80s New York b-boy jams cut with Santería percussive patterns, everything filtered through the ears and fingers of a musician looking to push what chip music can display stylistically, and what people will experience when they hear it themselves.
AUGUST 8th, 2008 • 7PM — 11PM
8GB, Auto da Fé, Animal Style, Cheap Dinosaurs, minusbaby and Nullsleep
Visuals by NO CARRIER and VBLANK
Also, several hundred copies will make nice wallpaper for your favorite room.
Coming soon on Rappers I Know Records, “Strong Arctic Winds Take Terns”, fourteen songs written and recorded between 2003 and 2004.
This new release of older material from Richard Alexander Caraballo, aka minusbaby, is, for the most part, not in his usual chiptune style. However, the way “Strong Arctic Winds Take Terns” relates to the chiptune work is instructive to the listener who might be just finding their way into his wildly creative universe.
With chiptune music, there is a forced elementalism, a certain influence imposed by the hardware limitations of making music on a vintage gaming console that pushes the artist to bust out creatively. But when the same artist works in the dizzying world of VST plug-ins and the endless possibilities of laptop music, those without a strong idea of their own sonic identity often flounder and are incapable of forging a distinctive style. minusbaby's work in chiptunes before and after making this music clearly gave him a sense of the need to create limits within which to work — the advantage of forced boundaries. Each track presents a short view into a very defined sonic world in which he explores just long enough to find the interesting permutations on the structure and yet leave the listener wanting more.
While betraying a sensitivity to the integrity of each sound, “Strong Arctic Winds Take Terns” does not come off as a “designer's record” in which one can hear the endless fretting over mix choices while the impact suffers. This release gives the listener a clear image of an artist with a solid, sonic identity; making harmonious, instrumental music.
Strong Arctic Winds Take Terns by minusbaby is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at rappersiknow.com.