Back in the day, I used to run a radio show at my college Middle Tennessee State University’s radio station 88.3 WMTS. I’d mostly play Asian music because that’s what I was heavily into at the time. I have a diverse taste, and attempted to bring every style of Asian music into the show.

I had heard about this game called Electroplankton by my friends who owned a Nintendo DS. It’s essentially a “music toy” with a little over half a dozen functions. You select a different “plankton” and each one has its own sort of musical scenario where you manipulate the way sound is produced by using the stylus. I finally got around to buying a Nintendo DS sometime Summer 2007. I’ve been an avid music maker for a while now, and the concept a neat little toy like that on the Nintendo DS seemed enthralling.

Here’s the a stock photo of the one I bought:

electroplankton

Even though it’s all in Japanese, the only thing I can’t read is the instruction manual. There’s really no Japanese words in the game except for names of the plankton characters on the menu. Oh, and the manual of course! It’s a pretty cool software. I’ve used it for some of my Say No More Tongues releases like AIR and Hand in the Pink. [Hand in the Pink can be found at the end of the post]

So I had the idea one day to use my radio show as an outlet to broadcast a performance of Electroplankton. You don’t really need a “band” for that kind of thing. Just have a few friends with Nintendo DS systems. So that’s what we did. I brought two of my friends into the studio, and they put their systems close to the microphones, and we just jammed. There was a total of three instances of Electroplankton running with each person doing their own thing.

For an idea of what the game actually feels like, take a look at this vid I made.

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Live Electroplankton Performance (Soundwave Tsunami Radio Show) [ 0:01 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (16)
Say No More Tongues - Hand in the Pink Download