This interview first appeared in Steel Bananas.
I don’t know if you’ve caught on to this by now, but gee-whiz I like video games. I will buy video games for systems I don’t even own because I like the cover art. I lose sleep wondering how great a new 7th Guest would be. Well, golly, I love everything about entertainment’s most time consuming variant, and I hope you do too. As it has long since past infiltrated our culture, it’s seen in movies (poorly) written about (awkwardly) and talked about (hopelessly). But did you know there’s entire genres of music that sound like Duck Tales for the NES? It’s true! On top of forcing you to do a Popeye impersonation upon utterance, Anamanaguchi is one of the most popular chiptune bands there is. Coming from New York, they’ve enchanted music snob and game dork alike with their furiously addictive brand of chip punk. Visiting The Whippersnapper for NXNE, and recently completing the score to the Scott Pilgrim video game coming out later this summer, I had a few things to ask members Peter Berkman and Ary Warnaar when not being distracted by Little Italy’s attractive pizza smells.
Zack: Alright we need to lay down some ground rules.
Peter: Ground rules?
Zack: Yeah, so first, no Portal references, none, and like a maximum of oh, say, three YouTube allusions.
Peter: No Portal references will be easy, three YouTube videos max will be difficult.
Zack: How’d this ensemble start?
Peter: The ‘assembly,’ as we pronounce it in America, actually had a couple of ‘begannings.’ In December of 2003, I was a ‘fefteen’ year old boy and I stumbled upon this backend ‘wabsite’ where I ‘doonloaded’ a program called NerdTracker 2. It turned out it was a DOS program where you could ‘proogram’ Nintendo stuff and write NSF, which is sweet! Man I’m doing a bad job at this. Okay, here’s the abridged version. I found this FUCKING program and then I started making music that sounded just like video game music. Then I started to make music that I was writing with my actual band on the Nintendo and it was kind of like rock music, then I added some guitars in it and said, “Woah dude, this is the exact music I want to be making.” I went to college, I met Ary, then we were FOUR GUYS IN A BAND!
Zack: Cool! I hear bands have four guys.
Peter: Bands usually have four guys, actually in the States there’s this program where you can get some tax breaks if you are a band with four guys. It’s the four-guy-band-clause. Prop 4Guy. It was introduced by Gerald Ford.
