SEARCH
Matthew Rodriguez
My name is Matthew Rodriguez and I’ve been making art since 2008. I started with making electronic music with handheld electronics in 2008 while in college and have been active in writing and performing music. I did my first official performance as my stage name, Star Fighter Dreams, in 2013 in Austin, TX and have been performing regularly since then. I have performed in New York City, Philadelphia and Baltimore at events and festivals celebrating chiptune and I currently aim to head to the west coast to perform as well. In 2021, I decided to experiment with doing live visuals due to the fact that I felt the city was lacking in projections during artist performances. I have been working with Rick Lara and his PLUGG:ED event series since 2021 providing live visuals under the artist name Screen Tears for the events around town.
MORE ABOUT THIS ARTIST
Artist Statement of Work
Tell us about your work (style, approach, philosophy, subject and/or theme):
Star Fighter Dreams is an electronic music project that can typically be categorized as "chiptune" or "chip music". Chiptune is less a genre and more of a methodology, where an artist can make any kind of music they want as long as they use the limited sound pallet of old computers and video game consoles or otherwise use the old computers/video game consoles to create the music itself. I fall into the latter. I started with a Nintendo Gameboy and the music program LSDJ, which was put onto a cartridge and run natively on the console. I have since expanded my setup to include more handhelds and programs, shying away from modern computers to use my imagination to conquer the limitations of each program and each console/platform. While performing, I like to give a lot of energy mostly because of a personal philosophy of being honest about how the music I made effects my emotions. Its something I always felt was missing from electronic music and I was determined to provide that, even if it was only me doing it.
When I decided to do visuals, I chose a computer based approach to have better control of what was being projected while still using some techniques from analog visualists I have met in the past such as using a video mixer and generating video feedback. My philosophy when it come to visuals is for half of it to be generated live with a video synthsizer and the other half to be video clips I've made that are then effected with on board effects and then mix the signals.