Seeing how musicians use chiptune sounds, or music made using sound chips from vintage video game music, over the last 18 years or so has been exciting. The spectrum of artists using the limitations of music designed for early video games to make full bodied songs is incredible. While chiptune naturally lends itself to dance music and more pop oriented artists like Anamanaguchi, chiptune has slowly begun to infiltrate heavy metal music. Chicago’s Blind Equation have spent the last few years fusing the punishing sounds of grindcore with the ability of chiptune technology to generate hundreds of beats per minute. Blind Equation, billing themselves as “emotional cybergrind,” also recognize the nostalgia generated by the 8-bit sounds. There are emotions behind listening to chiptune generated music. On their debut for Prosthetic Records, Death Awaits, Blind Equation take on cybergrind using the nostalgia of video game inspired sounds as a form of catharsis.

If you’re of a certain generation, listening to chiptune transports you to a very specific time in your life. Those sounds instantly evoke playing your NES or Sega Genesis on a Saturday morning or late night sleep overs trying to beat Sonic the Hedgehog 2 or Battletoads. Grindcore on the other hand sounds like you’re inside a high speed laundry machine trapped with the cleats from a football team. There is nothing intentionally nostalgic or warm about the sound of grindcore, or its industrial music inspired offshoot cybergrind less so. So when the gentle cascading notes over hyperactive drum sounds come up on the self titled opener “Death Awaits,” it’s a shock. On this and the rest of the album, Blind Equation create music that still has the punishing rhythms of cybergrind but none of that genre’s sonic darkness.  so even if the music has a sunny quality, there’s still a lyrical darkness underneath.

Listening to Death Awaits though feels like progressing through a classic platformer game like Castlevania. Only it’s Castlevania if the demons and monsters you fought were personal ones. As Blind Equation progress through the album, songs sound like the band fighting harder and harder bosses. Blind Equation aren’t redefining cybergrind or grindcore in general. What they’re doing is using the punishing rhythms of that genre to reinforce heaviness of the lyrical content. The nostalgic chiptune sounds infer a darkness in the past. However, there’s a sunniness to the nostalgia of the 8-bit sounds. It hints at a brighter tomorrow. Blind Equation find a balance between the darker, oppressive lyrical content and rhythms with the bright sounds of video game nostalgia. 

Blind Equation create a veritable rainbow of sounds on Death Awaits. There’s punishing rhythms and depressing lyrical content, but also bright, shiny notes generated from 8-bit sounds. The fusion of emo, cybergrind, and chiptune here only enhances the deep well of emotions on this album. That fusion lends a complexity that might otherwise be missing. The album acknowledges the same sounds capable of conjuring the warmth of nostalgia lend themselves to the darkness of self-punishment. Death Awaits acknowledges that the two coexist together.

— D. Morris

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Death Awaits will be available September 15th on Prosthetic Records.  For more information on Blind Equation, visit their Facebook page, Twitter, and Instagram.