Kind of Bloop: Miles Davis Meets Mario

Listening to the sweet 8-bit gurgle of Miles Davis makes me want to replay the Mario water levels. This 8-bit tribute to one of the greatest jazz albums of yore is a revelation. I’ve blogged about chiptunes before, but this album is getting zeitgeisty in a Grey Album kinda fashion (appearing in Time magazine- kudos!), mostly because it’s genre-bending is ridiculous yet oddly sublime. It’s also got a great story backing it up- similar to how we got Juan on the road for the Second Skin screenings.

Andy Baio…works as the chief technical officer for kickstarter.com, a website that allows people to finance their creative projects by soliciting donations from their network of contacts. The site launched a few months ago, and to test it out Baio designed his own project: Miles Davis’ entire Kind of Blue album performed with old school, 8-bit computer game sounds. “Basically, I’m a fan of Davis and just wanted to hear what Kind of Blue sounded like in chiptune,” he says.

Baio didn’t make chiptune music himself, but he knew people who did. He bought the proper licensing rights to Kind of Blue and recruited five artists, each of whom agreed to cover one of the five tracks on the album. The musicians had three months to finish the songs. Baio gave them full artistic license; they could experiment or stay as true to the original song as they wanted. His only request was that the finished products retain some of Davis’ original feeling and intensity. “Other than that, they were free to do whatever they felt,” says Baio. “That’s what jazz is about, right?” He named his experiment Kind of Bloop.

Take a listen and indulge. Five bucks buys you the album. In the meantime, I’m collaborating with some chiptunesmiths on Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark- I’ve already signed Princess Peach on lead vocals.