Doctor Octoroc's "Soft Bits In" Pays Chiptune Tribute to The Flaming Lips

The 8-bit artist has restarted a Kickstarter campaign that he took down when COVID took over.

Doctor Octoroc likes a challenge. His family and friends know him as Levi Buffum, and he makes 8-bit music, also known as chiptunes. That in itself is a feat because it involves using a Nintendo game console as his instrument. “On the original Nintendo, there are only five channels of sound and each one is monophonic so you can only play one note at a time,” he explains. “And each channel only makes a certain kind of sound. When you’re composing a track using Nintendo hardware, then you’re stuck with three tones, a sample channel that’s really low quality, and the other channel is basically static that you can change the pitch on. I use that for snare, hi-hats, cymbals and stuff like that.”

In 2008, he released 8-bit Jesus, an album of Christmas songs with references to actual videogames threaded through the compositions. He has recorded a number of projects since, and in 2019 he ramped up the degree of difficulty when he decided to cover Neutral Milk Hotel’s indie classic In the Aeroplane Over the Sea in its entirety. He trimmed the Christmas songs down an economical minute-and-a-half or so, which is a manageable length for a song with so spartan a musical palate. Buffum didn’t feel like he had that liberty on In the RP2A Over the Sea, as he called his Doctor Octoroc release. He felt had to honor the songs at their full lengths, including all 8:07 of “Oh Comely.” That track has become one of his favorites from the project, in part because of the challenges he had to deal with on it. The length made it a marathon to create, and Buffum worried that it would feel like one to listen to. It’s also a sombre eight minutes, and “sombre” is not mood the action-oriented Nintendo console is made to create. 

“It does help that that song is almost three songs in one,” he says. 

Doctor Octoroc’s longer projects are hardly the only extended explorations of what can be done as a chiptune. The 2009 Kind of Bloop features chiptune famously remade the tracks on the Miles Davis classic, and Brad Smith used andNES system in 2012 to record a version of John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps.” There are also albums of chiptune Beatles, Kraftwerk and Devo covers, and really, if there’s an audience for a song, there’s a chiptune version too. In most cases, the tracks exist largely as curiosities, and the limited sonic palate make many of them curiosities more than genuinely satisfying listening experiences.

Doctor Octoroc has dealt with that challenge by expanding his sound by adding a Gameboy to his repertoire. That gives him more channels to work with, and you can hear the difference on Soft Bits In, his track-by-track remake of The Flaming Lips’ The Soft Bulletin. He can’t quite recreate the album’s epic sweep, but he successfully fleshes out the often astringent chiptune sound. 

Buffum recorded the tracks in 2019 and 2020 and planned to release it as a limited edition vinyl album last year. He even started a crowdfunding campaign last March to pay for it, but then COVID changed his plans. He felt like he couldn’t in good conscience ask people to give him money for something as frivolous as an album when so many people’s futures were uncertain, so he canceled it. “I felt guilty,” he says. “Even if people don’t know it now, they might be in for $50, $100, $200—whatever tier they backed—then two months from now they lose their job and they can’t feed their family. I’m going to feel guilty about that.” 

Now that we’re transitioning into the next phase of living with COVID, Doctor Octoroc has relaunched the Kickstarter campaign with a number of rewards for contributing, from a digital download of the album to a deluxe vinyl edition with stickers, art, and a chiptune mentoring session. He will print a limited edition of 100 copies, so it’s a now-or-never proposition for those who want it. They can’t wait for it to show up in record stores down the road.

He expects that The Flaming Lips and their fans will appreciate the album and the spirit behind it. “They seem like the kind of band that would totally dig this kind of recreation of their music,” he says. “Wayne Coyne—are you kidding me? You did what with a Nintendo?” 

Hear Doctor Octoroc talk about Soft Bits In, chiptunes, and 8-bit Jesus on our Christmas music podcast, The Twelve Songs of Christmas.