Game for a new tune?

It's not hip-hop. It's blip-pop.

That's what the Gameboyzz Orchestra Project calls the, uh, sounds that it squeezes out of a half dozen Game Boy consoles.

The Polish sextet has fashioned the gadgets--better known for child-friendly games featuring Mario and Pokemon--into mini synthesizers in a retro quest spurred by "nostalgia for the games of our youth" and "the aesthetic of 8-bit computers." The group's minimalist and improvisational noisemaking is an irony-laden response, it says, to an electronic music scene in thrall to increasingly advanced digital music processing. A profile Wednesday on the public radio program "The World" described the results this way: "Think of it as Donkey Kong meets Norman Cook...or maybe Tetris takes on Kraftwerk."

Here's what Gameboyzz says about the way it achieves its "intriguing" sounds: "From a musician's point of view, a Game Boy device is a kind of simple analogue synthesizer, with a raw and, at the same time, interesting retro sound. While connected with...suitable software, it can be used as drum machine or groove box. Console's interface is rather poor (few buttons only), so sound structures created by us must be rather simple, too. This is also the reason for having six players." The more players, the group says, the more complex the sound environment.

Gameboyzz is led by Jaroslaw Kujda--aka Microkilla--who has apparently roped several other members of his family into the group. It performs just a handful of concerts a year, so if you want some experimental sounds but can't make it to Wroclaw or Katowice, you'll have to settle for downloads from the Gameboyzz site.

Or form your own Game Boy garage band.