Chiptunes are often so tied to their 8-bit origins that no one ever really tries to separate the two—references to old school video games and MIDI banks run rampant, and pixelated imagery dominates. Japanese trio YMCK are no different; if anything they take the retro-binary aesthetic to an extreme, refashioning their entire identity around pixels.

Thanks to the wonders of the internet, I happened to be watching the live feed from Tokyo FM’s television network one late night at the beginning of the year. Every week or so TFMi airs a countdown of all the upcoming releases in the next couple of months, along with short interviews of the artists. It’s the sort of thing you probably used to be able to watch on MTV or MuchMusic, except that neither of them really bother to pay lip service to anything but the biggest musical acts and thus have no need to maintain anything resembling a complete release calendar, let alone devote half an hour of television a week to one. And even if they did, you’d never, ever, ever see the likes of YMCK on such a program; chiptune music is too cultish and too hard to fit into a prefab mainstream category to bother with. But there it was on Japanese television, complete with quirky 8-bit-esque music video.

My favourite part, though, was the artist interview. In the music video for “Starlight,” each YMCK member (identified by first name only, of course) has a specific duty, one of them being “video.” Having one dude handle all your video duties would be kind of a waste if all you did was produce music videos, so instead YMCK have him concoct the group’s entire public identity. So when it came to the artist interview, Tokyo FM’s audience didn’t see three beautifully-coiffed Japanese popstars; instead they saw three little 8-bit avatars without mouths, just like in the video, only they were talking up their album and acting as though they were real. It was like the Japanese version of Gorillaz, only instead of aggressively disproportional cartoon avatars they had little Super Mario Brothers-esque sprites. YMCK doesn’t actually go as far as to hide themselves at live shows or anything like that, but their virtual manifestations definitely get around.

As for the music, it sounds like what you’d expect—the soundtrack to some imaginary video game. Only in this particular case, it reminds me of a very particular video game: Katamari Damacy. The breathy female vocals, the layered, slightly jazzy music and the relaxed atmosphere sounds like the logical extension of the 8-bit Katamari Damacy theme song someone made a while back. YMCK have only released a single album in the States—debut album Family Music—so tracking down a copy of Family Genesis might be tough for those of us on the wrong side of the Pacific, but if you’re in Washington, D.C. in the next couple of days, the band will be in town to play the Japan! Culture + Hyperculture Festival on the 10th.