Bud Melvin's Popular Music

What do you get when you mix banjo, 8-bit Nintendo and karaoke? (Aside from a Missourian out on the town in Japan.) You get programmer/picker Bud Melvin’s LP release for Popular Music.

Bud Melvin creates a solo novelty using the banjo and chiptunes—music produced by older video game and computer systems that generate sound in real time. It’s both retro digital and pastoral, an unlikely combination that interacts with the dynamism of yin and yang. On Sunday, a live collision of Luigi and Jed awaits release party revelers at Ed's Pub, Leisure Bowl's wood-paneled, karaoke-fraught watering hole. The show is free and followed by a night of open karaoke. In the meantime, the Alibi shipped off a few electronic questions to Melvin about the record.

Why release digital chiptunes on an analog record?

• local music
• albuquerque
• banjo
• chiptunes
• nintendo
• 8-bit
• karaoke

Bernie DeChant

Come visit

Siblings Pascal and Lauren Balthrop are living the small-town life.

They walk nearly everywhere they go, stopping to say hello to people they recognize on the street. They chat with store owners who know them by name and socialize at the neighborhood coffee shop where all their friends hang out.

The Balthrops live in the little-known blip on the map called Brooklyn, N.Y.—a city of 2.5 million. But the Mobile, Ala., natives managed to create an insular home for themselves in the borough's Carroll Gardens neighborhood. "We hardly ever get to Manhattan," Pascal says. "I'm glad it's there, because it obviously has a lot of great things, but we pretty much stay in our neighborhood."

• brooklyn
• alabama
• indie-folk

The sonically and visually talented Bud Melvin agreed to share photos taken on his Game Boy Camera. Here’s a selection hand-picked by us. To see more, click here, and link to more photos at the bottom of each page.

[click to enlarge]

Skunk’s Not Dead

Who Killed Carla, Travesty & The Screwups, Made In Bangladesh, Emergency Ahead, Martial Law, The Plain and Spring Loaded Hot-Dog raise a ska-punk stink on Friday, July 24, at Amped Performance Center (4200 Lomas NE). $5, 5 p.m., all-ages. (Laura Marrich)

• local music
• albuquerque
• ska
• punk
• all-ages