Zach - "What is your name & what do you do?"

Shnabubula - "My Name is Samuel Ascher-Weiss and I make electronic music and play the piano in between deleting online profiles."

Zach - "What is it about chiptune music that made you decide you wanted to produce it?"

Shnabubula - "Like a lot of people, I didn't even realize chiptune was a thing to begin with, just being really enamored of video game music, wanted to try making sounds that emulated the classics. In the process I stumbled on to this massive scene of people with a passionate interest in the subject, and it just spiralled out of control from there into a deep life ruining obsession."

Zach - "If you could name some of your favorite video games of all time, what would they be?"

Shnabubula - "I really loved the most recent handheld IGAvania games, I feel like that series was just hitting a new pinacle of design, hopefully we'll see that continued with Bloodstained. As far as all time favorites, Final Fantasy VI is pretty high on the list but there are a lot of contenders, as a kid. Dragon Force probably brought me more sheer joy/entertainment than any other game I played, probably because it was designed with intent to be more addictive than refined opiates.

Zach - "You got to work on the soundtrack for the video game “Americana Dawn”, what was that experience like?"

Shnabubula - "That's been a lot of fun, there's so much material I've written for that which nobody has heard and it's all stuff I'm extremely proud of that's far outside of the prog/jazz style stuff for which I'm mostly known. Very very very much inspired by my deep platonic love of Uematsu's soundtrack work as well as Miyoko Kobayashi and even a bit of Kikuta from time to time."

Zach - "You produce chiptune, but you also make piano compositions, would you say you prefer one over the other? Or you enjoy making them both equally?"

Shnabubula - "Piano Composition is something I love listening to, Chopin was a huge favorite of mine as a teenager and in my early 20s, however actually writing/playing piano composition is something I avoid and dread, I don't at all enjoy the process of learning and playing things note for note, so in all likelyhood, as it's been to this point, any piano recordings I do will be improvised either completely, with zero planning or composition ahead of time [I've done several albums that way] or around very loose skeletal frames of compositions, though rarely my own, usually I'll only do covers that way. Chiptune is a lot of fun, though I'd say for composition, I enjoy having free range to do whatever I want with the soundscape, so while I do love making chiptunes, unrestricted electronic music with anything-goes timbre choices is probably my favorite... though writing with predefined soundsets from Super Nintendo Games... that might just be, as far as just pure fun and excitement, my favorite activity relating to songwriting."

Zach - "Your stage name is Shnabubula. How did you come up with that & what does it mean?"

Shnabubula - "I wish I had a profound answer for this. It's a screen name I made up as a 12 year old for America Online, to instant message with class mates and try to be one of the cool kids. I had a phase where I thought random groupings of syllables were just the most clever hilarious thing. Anyway, that was my e-mail address as well, and my first ever release of music online, being through the website ocremix, required you give an "artist name" so I just used my screen-name/e-mail address and... once you have one thing up under a pseudonym, it becomes easier and easier to just keep using it and somehow it turns into your indentity. That's the whole story in my case."

Zach - "Do you have any passions apart from music? And if so what are they?"

Shnabubula - "There's nothing that really comes close as far as my level of dedication and pursuit, if I had to choose a distant second place, something I've spent a decent amount of time actually practicing and am always very interested in watching/reading about, believe it or not, is card manipulation. Flourishes/sleights, all of it. I think it's a really neat field that's constantly having it's boundaries pushed and most people are only very peripherally aware of it as being this corny kind of kids thing or goofy eye-liner wearing street magicians. Nothing wrong with either of those things though!"

Zach - "Do you have a favorite video game soundtrack of all time?"

Shnabubula - "This is really tough, because depending on the criteria I choose to make that determination, the answer would be different. If i go with the ones that stand out to me most and have had the most significant impact on my understanding and conception of music, there are 2 soundtracks which are dead even, completely deadlocked, far and away out and front of any others, so if you could combine Shining Wisdom OST and Castlevania Harmony of Dissonance, into a 2 CD album. That would be far far far and away, my favorite video game soundtrack of all time."

Zach - "You release your albums for free digitally, do you ever plan on charging for digital releases?"

Shnabubula - "It's not something I plan on.. or specifically NOT plan on. Just not something I've wanted to do thus far. People have been extraordinarily generous in their donations and I can't overstate how much that has meant to me."

Zach - "Music wise, do you have anything planned for the future yet? Or are you just kicking it at the moment?"

Shnabubula - "I have quite a bit planned and in the works, a lot of which I can't talk about because some of it involves the work of others that is not yet public, other things I'd rather not mention because they're too gestational at the moment and I don't want to give any details that are likely to change anyway. Two specific things I do want to mention, on January 1st 2016 I'll be releasing (an album) on the 4 year anniversary of my album Free Play. I'll be releasing "Free Play Unplugged" which contains the same 9 piano recordings, this time completely unaccompanied, as well as the 4 additional non-accompanied songs that were released elsewhere after the album, and for the first time ever, 3 additional piano recordings from the free play sessions that were never released. The album will come with a text file containing tempo information for all 16 tracks for anybody who wants to give a shot at doing their own layering the way I did on the original album.

In addition, in the next couple months I'll be bringing back VGMCAST, which is a regularly recurring stream thing I was doing at (See link Below) where people would come and request songs which I'd then learn and 2 days later perform all the requests in a set as a performance which would also be released as a free album. All 6 of those from the first season of VGMCAST are all up on my bandcamp page. So yeah... that's all coming very soon."

Zach - "Thanks a lot for taking the time out & doing this."

Shnabubula - "No problem Zach, thanks for asking."