The Depreciation Guild: Play Your Game Boy and Gaze at your Shoes

5. April, 2012 by Brandon Music, News 1,214 comments

As a lover of chiptune music combining itself with other genres that make very little sense, I was really excited when I found out about The Depreciation Guild. I was then immediately saddened when I found out that they had disbanded early last year, with their second album having come out mid-2010. The Depreciation Guild started out as a chiptune shoegaze band, mixing elements of My Bloody Valentine texture with the chirps and beeps of a Game Boy. By the time their second album was released, the chiptune element had been reduced to some melodies here and there, mostly for texture to blend with the My Bloody Valentine-style guitar.

For the uninformed, shoegaze is a musical genre built around the idea of using fuzzy guitars as texture. Vocals are often a bit lower in the mix, and the result is usually a wall of noise that you can just get lost inside of. Truthfully, it’s usually a love-it-or-hate-it kind of genre, and for that I can understand people not being into it. That being said, The Depreciation Guild was a band that sounded like Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine and Bobby Wratten of The Field Mice / Trembling Blue Stars got together to play video games. If that means anything to you, you’re in for a treat. If you love spacey guitar and 8-bit bleep bloops, you’re also in for something special.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ShwvRYAbcw[/youtube]

My friends know that I am a huge fan of shoegaze music, and it has been a major influence on my own guitar playing, so finding a band that mixes that style of playing with chiptunes is something I could get really into. The two main members of the band, Kurt Feldman and Christoph Hochheim later went on to play in fuzzy indie pop band The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, and some similarities are definitely apparent between the two. I really like this band, and like I said, if you like some spacey guitar and bleep bloops, I think you’ll like it too.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXFj94qr0R0[/youtube]

You can find their original debut EP for download over at 8bitpeoples for free, and you can find mp3 downloads of both of their full length albums available on Amazon for under ten dollars each.

- Brandon

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