Behind every bubbly software interface lies a web of internal commands and operations that very few of us can understand. That’s someone else’s job—we just want to play with virtual knobs and buttons until something interesting happens.But last week, during a late night, recursive Facebook loop, I scrolled past a video attributed to one Diode Milliampere, with lines of flashing commands surfing across a sea of text in a colorless MS-DOS environment. “HI HAT”; “SQUARE WAVES”; “arpL1,” the lines indicated, before being inundated by new stacks of code that shuffled in from off screen every few seconds. The thing that really had me hypnotized was that they were all flashing in perfect synchronization with the beat playing in the background.After following a few links I came to find that Mister Milliampere is a Chicago-area musician who makes thick, futuristic dance jams that are too rich to simply be called “chiptune.” I mean, you could tell me this shit came out of Ableton and I’d still be impressed at its depth and complexity. And whether it’s the algorithmic ravers, the Black Midi posse, or any of the myriad musical movements built on hacking and coding, half the fun is watching the insides work while listening to the end product.Wondering what could possess someone to make such sophisticated work in software that not only disallows the use of a mouse or trackpad, but also traffics in files no larger than a few kilobytes, I quickly tracked him down and, despite the recent frying of his motherboard, we sat down to talk.THUMP: Are you surprised at the response you've garnered?Diode Milliampere: Yeah. I never expected that I would make a video of one of my chiptunes and get more than a quarter of a million hits in a day. But I've also been on Reddit for about a year now sharing my songs as I make. It was kind of on a whim to record the screen and post it to /r/videos.That's what I wanted to get to somehow—why Reddit?In the fall of 2012 my best friend Konstantine, who I was staying with, was browsing Reddit, and I hadn't really ever used it or realized how much of a "thing" it is. And of course in a week I was hooked browsing it myself. I finally signed up for an account because I had just started making tunes for the first time in my life, or rather, actually finishing ones—and I wanted a place to share them. For someone who has zero fans and zero context for what they do, even the small sub-boards can give you encouragement to keep doing it. Posting to /r/chiptunes or /r/synthesizer got me a few dozen plays on my Soundcloud and even a occasional Bandcamp sale which blew my mind as someone totally new. It's just a great outlet for anyone who wants to find other people that grok their shit.Check out the rest of the interview at Thump
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