Crystal Castles rips off chiptune artists

Filed under: News

For those of you who don't follow indie music, no, we're not throwing plagiarism accusations at Atari's Crystal Castles arcade game, nor are we denouncing She-Ra's headquarters of the same name. Crystal Castles is a Toronto-based, two-man group generating a lot of buzz on the strength of its "new sound" and favorable reviews from tastemakers like Pitchfork.

Though the band claims to have no connection with chiptune artists, their songs don't venture far from the micromusic genre. As fans of the chiptune scene, we were irritated to see Crystal Castles snub the community in a recent Exclaim! interview: "It was only to create annoying sounds. That keyboard was made back in 2004 and then we learned about this whole 8-bit scene, which we don't really have anything to do with. It's a completely different world."

Attentive ears, however, have noticed that the group has a very direct connection with several chiptune artists, such as Lo-Bat and Covox, two artists whom Crystal Castles has sampled without credit or compensation, disregarding the Creative Common License the original songs were released under. Crystal Castles' response? They're denying it. Listening to the juxtaposed tracks in the video above, the similarities seem obvious ...

[Via Gameboy Genius, GameSetWatch]
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments


More...