Hurry Up, Snufkin is the Chiptune/Math-Rock Fusion You Know You Need
Hurry Up, Snufkin’s members talk about the methods behind their music, and the virtues of trying something new and difficult.
[This article was originally published on The Tape Deck on July 29, 2022.]
A waterfall of guitar notes; the force of snares and crashes; the undeniable nostalgia of a Game Boy’s square waves – you’ve heard these sounds before, possibly all in the same package, but what Seattle’s Hurry Up, Snufkin offers transcends the sum of its parts. Their songs are carefully constructed compositions orbiting around the chaotic rush of jubilance, escapism with a charm that’s inescapable. Like all music, it’s the emotional stiffness of technology contextualized within raw, human passion.
With its dense arrangements and loaded genre fusions, the project feels inherently Internet-bound. It’s hard to imagine its source coming from anywhere other than the anonymous annals of Bandcamp or the more umbral corners of forums, where art exchanges empty hands as fences in a thieves’ den. As always, there’s a real person behind the buttons.
Her name is Jordan Brawner, and we’re sitting together on the porch of a house in Seattle’s U District where she and her new musical companion, Matt Anderson, are about to practice a new song. Like most houses that also serve as punk venues, there’s a comforting level of dishevelment surrounding us; untrimmed bushes, scuffs in the wood, and plenty of nicotine on hand. The dull skronk of someone practicing saxophone drifts ambiently as we talk.
The saxophonist is apparently set to assist in a cover of Takako Mamiya’s “Love Trip,” one of a handful of “lost” Japanese classics from the city-pop era that many Western Youtube users stumbled upon around the time COVID hit landfall. The cover hasn’t been debuted live yet, but it already seems to represent the worlds that Hurry Up, Snufkin straddle simultaneously: a song brought to our attention via the globalizing power of the Internet, eventually played for a handful of individuals in a small venue somewhere in the northwest corner of America.
“We want to be more online than offline,” she says. “We’re not as live-focused; we’re only playing a show a month. We want it so that the more people who casually listen to the songs will then go and see us as something they’re interested in, rather than seeing us on a bill and going, ‘What the fuck is this shit? Is this Mario?’”
She’s implying that the act might be (and maybe already has been) a hard sell among live show frequenters. Seattle’s proclivity for its underground scenes to stay isolated may keep an act that crosses so many genres – especially chiptune – from finding local bills to support. “We’re a very weird-to-book band,” she acknowledges. “I know people, but most of the people I know are from the U District-type scene. They’re math-rock kids, they’re emo kids, but I don’t know any chiptune people.”
That’s an odd predicament considering that Seattle is essentially, currently, the American nexus for video game music. Nintendo of America’s relationship with the Pacific Northwest started in the early 1980s even the establishment of their Redmond headquarters in 1982 (Mario’s name comes from the owner of the Tukwila-based warehouses that held their shipped arcade cabinets). That, combined with established companies like Microsoft and Bungie, has attracted a fleet of passionate creatives from all aspects of game development that have turned the city’s indie scene into a force of its own, with composers in particular at a devastating surplus. It’s not just particularly powerful original voices either, like Celeste’s Lena Raine or The Binding of Isaac’s Danny Baranowski, or Call of Duty’s Will Roget. Everywhere you look there seems to be a talented individual brimming with an appreciation for all eras of game music and eager to replicate their magic.
Brawner may use video game technology to achieve the emotive high of her recordings, but the bleeps and bloops of the Game Boy are really the paint over the structural canvas of guitar and drums, vestiges of her and Anderson’s continued presence in Seattle’s DIY scenes. Brawner’s previous project, the self-effacing Meanderthals, managed to release one (very good) cassette before dissolving; currently, she plays guitar for the multifaceted punk group Rat Queen. Anderson, meanwhile, plays drums for Supernowhere (formally known as Gestalt) who, along with Black Ends, supported Meanderthals years ago for their tape release show.
If Snufkin’s premise makes it a prickly prospect when it comes to booking local shows, it also gives them a unique edge that feels ripe for discovery, particularly in a city whose twin pillars have yet to intersect in a meaningful way. The tactic, according to Brawner, is inspiring that discovery through the Internet first, and that’s as much a practical decision as an aesthetic one. “The Internet’s right there,” she says, “and if you’ve got an artistic thing that plays maybe more to recorded content than a live experience, you can make people want the live shows more.”
Most of our talk is wrapped up in the processes behind her music, a topic of conversation we indulged in on record two years ago. It’s a familiar joy to experience that zeal bubble up to the surface. “I really like recording,” she says. “I like performing, but I feel like I’m in the zone when I’m recording and releasing stuff.” She talks at length about the methods behind her compositions: the intense switch from one time signature to another, her interpolations of other instruments through the limitations of the Game Boy’s technology, and the hop commands that allow some semblance of tempo.
Performing adds another layer of challenge altogether, and mixing live instruments with the Game Boy’s programmed arpeggiations becomes a highwire act. “The way we have it,” she explains, “the Game Boy has a stereo out, and we pan the music to the left and a click track made with white noise to the right. I have a mixer I bring to shows and we have a monitor out, so the click track goes into our ears while the music’s going out. So we can do it where it’s just guitar, and then the Game Boy comes in and we all come in at the same time. It’s been a really fun combination of puzzle-solving and live performance.”
Now that Anderson is in the picture, that recording process has become more of a collaborative effort. Anderson listens to Brawner’s recordings and supplies drum parts that are not just supplanted but supplementary. The drums you hear on their latest single are of his creation, and it’s easy to hear how much they add to the project: a deep, propulsive thump that sets up scaffolding for Brawner’s soaring trebles.
There’s mutual respect between the two of them that comes through as we chat. Though it was Brawner who first reached out to Anderson about joining the project, he had already harbored excitement for the band ever since the first time he heard “hand dog face cat,” a single Brawner released in May of 2020. When he got to see Brawner live years later at the Mirage Garage years later, his excitement reached a fever pitch. “That was wild,” he says. “That just blew me away. I thought, ‘That’d be sick one day to be in that band, to just play drums along with this.’ Dreams do come true, you know?” Says Brawner in agreement, “I felt like there were good vibes starting off.”
Good vibes buoy the project. Considering the kind of music they release, it must feel necessary to keep everyone involved at a solid level of comfort in their involvement. That also extends to their one other collaborator: artist Isaac Mellow, who made the visualizer for Snufkin’s recent “I’m Gay For My Living Billionaire Jetplane.” Brawner recalls seeing Mellow’s work at a show at the Southgate Roller Rink and eventually contracted them to provide visuals for a video. Mellow, apparently, went above and beyond. “It was just gonna be a looping animation that’s better than an album cover,” she says, “but Isaac went crazy with it. [They] did that, but also did post-processing for the hits of the song, and rainbow 3D glitch type effects. They were like, ‘Yeah, I kinda got into it.’”
The visualizer is as close to a concept for the project as Brawner is willing/able to court, considering not only her and Anderson’s individual obligations but the current size of the act. “I didn’t know if it would be worth investing in [a full video] at this point. Chiptune has connotations with pixel art and cartooniness and that general branch of entertainment, but it would suck to put so much time and effort into something and then feel like not enough people have seen it.”
Her words summon an interesting point about why there aren’t a lot of acts like Hurry Up, Snufkin in DIY. Chiptune’s high-maintenance production is a daunting task even for people who don’t need to work to survive. Think about the time it takes to program songs using modified Game Boys, compose live instrumentation around those sounds, record, mix, master, and then perform those tracks live with the threat of losing the tempo hanging like a guillotine blade the whole time.
It can be done, but the artists who have historically helped proliferate the aural pleasures of chiptune to the masses have had the resources to do so, from acts like Japanese supergroup Yellow Magic Orchestra to producers like Timbaland and popular acts like Ke$ha and Dizzee Rascal. Even a band like Anamanaguchi, one of the most recognizable fusers of chiptune and guitar-based music, had the benefit of college education behind their efforts. With its colorful aesthetic and sense of nostalgia, chiptune captures the imagination as much as any style of music, but it comes at the price of inaccessibility.
If a quick but effective visualizer is all that Brawner and Anderson can manage at the moment, it seems to have worked well enough. The song (and its video) was retweeted by Anthony Fantano a few days after its release, providing Snufkin with a small but significant boost in awareness that also reinforced the necessity to establish some sort of Internet presence. What that might entail is open to the realm of possibility. It might involve TikTok, or it might involve some other form of creativity, but all Brawner and Anderson are concerned about now are keeping the project loose, fun, and free of self-seriousness.
“I never wanted to seek super commitment from Matt as a drummer,” she stresses, in a sense encompassing the spirit of the act. “I was always like, ‘Yo, I won’t get mad if you quit. I still won’t get mad if you quit.’ It’s such a bullshit vibe for people to be in a band if they’re not having fun. It’s not gonna make money. It never breaks money. A very, very, very small amount of bands ever make money. So it was always like, ‘If you’re not fucking feeling this or you’re not getting something yourself out of it, I’m not gonna pressure you.’”