Chirp

Chirp is one of the many music discs that can be found in Minecraft. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to obtain. While you can get some discs easily, the majority are hard to find. Cat and 13 can be found in dungeons, while Pigstep can be found in Bastions. The other discs (unless you’re on Bedrock edition) are a pain: they only drop from Creepers killed by skeletons. Getting skeletons to kill Creepers can generally be quite tricky, unless you spend ages setting up a farm.

But who has time for that?

Chirp is probably my favourite music disc.

Out of all the discs, Chirp is… well, the chirpiest. It’s got a really nice beat and stands out from the crowd. The track starts off crackly (a lot of them do, mimicking old vinyl) and vintage, a very bouncy piece of what could be elevator music. However, halfway through, the music transitions into something more in Minecraft’s style. A much more dreamy end to an otherwise rather energetic song.

Some people have considered that Chirp, the first half at least, sounds creepy, but I think that’s the crackling. Crackling can make anything seem old and thus foreign.

The first time I heard it, it wasn’t me playing it.

Funnily enough, I first heard Chirp in a survival server, all the way back in Minecraft 1.1. Someone else had found the disc and was playing it, but I never managed to obtain one myself. It’s random which disc you get, and Skeletons are not exactly good at listening to instructions.

Thankfully, Creative is there for me. The song is also on Spotify and other various platforms as well, so now I can listen to it whenever I want.

But I always felt like I’d heard Chirp somewhere before.

Even back when it was brand new, I swore I’d heard something like Chirp before. For some reason, Chirp always sounded more familiar than other Minecraft music discs. Despite having heard Cat way more often, Chirp felt… ingrained somewhere. It was triggering a memory from somewhere outside of Minecraft. Apparently, that makes sense, because a big part of Chirp is sampled from other music. Specifically, it was sampled from the 1970 MATTEL Optigan Program Disc: Bossa Nova Style [70013].

Someone once pointed me to Little Big Planet as the source. It turns out, there’s a track on Little Big Planet 2 that has the same sampled track. But I’ve never played Little Big Planet or its sequel, so that wasn’t where I discovered this. Turns out, I discovered the answer in the video linked above. Someone had made a list of a handful of songs that had used this same sample. The answer was right there.

Interlude with Ludes.

The first time I’d heard this sample, funnily enough, was on Them Crooked Vultures’ self-titled album of the same name. The track in question is Interlude with Ludes. In it, you can hear the exact same sample that’s heard in Chirp. However, Interlude with Ludes is a completely different song, and is actually somewhat menacing, just like the rest of Them Crooked Vultures’ album.

You know what’s interesting though? Both Interludes with Ludes and Chirp have something else in common. As well as being great songs that use the same sample, people find these songs weirdly creepy. I don’t, but a lot of people do, at least, according to Youtube comments.

I can kinda see why though. That original sample does seem… oddly haunting…

Either way, great songs and great artists. I recommend them both.